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Abstract

Attention! This abstract refers to a work that has not been completed yet. Estimated completion date: June 2020. Contant author after that date to obtain complete text

Content

Introduction

Currently, over 60% of the information presented on the Web is textual. Even before the global transition to information technology (until the 60s of the XX century), book publishing was the only source of textual information. In the course of the development of computer technology, new electronic formats appeared, which began to complement printed editions of books. So, a printed edition can be supplemented with an e-book, or an audiobook. Thanks to new formats, information can be perceived not only through sight, but also through hearing.

According to experts, the number of e-book users is increasing by 80% every year [1]. Along with this, audiobooks have become very popular. In 2018 alone, the number of copies of audiobooks sold increased by 27.3% [2].

The advantages of e-books include their lower cost relative to printed editions, because they are much cheaper. Modern pocket personal computers have a memory capacity that allows you to store entire libraries of both electronic and audio books. Such libraries are always located on the user's device. The possibilities of modern Internet technologies allow users to replenish the library at any time, anywhere in the world [3].

A large number of companies are developing applications for mobile devices capable of working with various e-book formats. Smartphone apps are capable of playing one of the most popular audiobook formats - mp3.

1. Review of e-book software

There are a large number of ready-made solutions that provide the ability to view the content of e-books. Some of the apps also let you create notes, bookmarks, save quotes, and more.

The most popular applications for reading e-books on mobile applications are programs - Moon + Reader, Google Play Books, eBook, DjVuViwer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, ReadEra.

The capabilities of the Moon + Reader mobile application allow you to view the content of the most popular formats - ePub, FB2 and PDF. Also, it allows you to read e-books archived in RAR and ZIP formats. There are different ways to display a catalog of books - a list, a table, or a "bookshelf". It is also possible to change the theme and color palette of the interface. You can display statistics on the main menu: the number of books in the read list, the number of books read, the number of hours spent reading, the number of pages scrolled. There is a 3D page turning function. The text display parameters are all customizable: a large number of fonts, background and text color, margin width, spacing between paragraphs, lines and letters. Marks and highlights are contained in a separate section.

The advantages of this application are - design, flexible settings, work with notes, statistics, imitation of page turning.

Google Play Books is a pre-installed application of the Android operating system. Supports two formats ePub and PDF. The advantage is the ability to synchronize via Google services. The list of books is divided into three sections: not started, started and read. There is additional functionality - a built-in e-book store. The application is simple and convenient due to limited settings: you can select several fonts, specify the font size and line spacing. There are also functions for changing themes, night mode, creating notes and footnotes.

The Google Play Books app is simple and limited in functionality.

DjVuViwer, DjVu. There are several groups of e-book formats - graphic and raster formats [4]. DjVuViwer is an application for reading highly specialized bitmap graphics format DjVu. This format is perfect for storing manuscripts, texts with handwritten notes, etc. The advantage of the DjVu format over PDF is due to a more efficient method of information compression [5]. The list of books can be sorted by genre, date or alphabet. It is also possible to create notes.

The popularity of using this application on modern mobile phones is due to the popularity of using the DjVu format.

Ebook Reader. Application capable of displaying text information in the following formats: FB2, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, CBR, CBZ and TXT. The disadvantage is the lack of ability to edit a text file, create file annotations, and copy text.

ReadEra read files in FB2, EPUB, PDF, DOC, TXT, DJVU formats, from archives with .rar and .zip extensions. The creation of automatic titles for e-books is an advantage. Reading settings allow you to change the parameters of fonts, background and text colors, margins, spacing between characters and line spacing. On the main menu of the application, you can sort by creation time and reading time. The catalog has sections: I want to read, read, favorites. In general, the application has a large amount of functionality, therefore it is very popular, more than 700 thousand official downloads.

Adobe has developed a program for mobile applications - Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF. The PDF format is a universal cross-platform format developed by Adobe [6]. Therefore, the program is a reliable document editor and PDF converter. The app allows you to view a PDF file, add comments, edit the file, and share storage options such as Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive.

The applications considered above try to provide the user market with a user-friendly design (UX design [7]) and a large number of functionality.

A distinctive feature of most of these applications is the reading of a variety of e-book formats, from the most popular to highly specialized formats.

A separate group of applications provide animation of interaction with the pages of e-books, for example, 3D page turning.

The difference between mobile applications is their difference in additional functionality besides reading.

It can be noted that the methods of synchronizing text and audio information will provide users in such applications with an additional opportunity - switching between methods of perception: reading text information and listening to audio information.

2. Popular e-book formats

All e-book formats can be roughly divided into two groups - vector and raster. Raster formats represent an object as a set of points, vector formats - as simple geometric shapes [3] .

There are the following raster formats for e-books - DjVu, TIFF, JPEG.

Vector eBook formats include FB2, PDF, ePUB, RTF, OPF FlipBook, CHM, LIT, ExeBook, RBS.

The most popular e-book formats are DjVu, FB2, PDF, ePUB.

DjVu - A highly specialized raster graphic format designed to transmit text exactly in the form in which it was prepared. Great for storing manuscripts, handwritten notes, etc. [3]

PDF - An electronic document format created by Adobe Systems using a number of PostScript language features. Typically used for books with illustrations. [3]

The above formats of e-books are heavy for mobile applications to handle. Today, only some reading devices with a screen diagonal of 6 inches or more, for example, PocketBook, have more or less learned to cope with this format. [4]

The FB2 and ePub eBook formats are based on the XML markup language. The use of XML at the heart of these formats allows for maximum cross-platform and scalability.

For example, programs working with these formats only need to parse all predefined tags and display information.

Despite the fact that ePub is a universal international format, it has certain drawbacks - it is being developed for specialized e-book readers and computers, therefore it is not convenient to read such formats on pocket personal computers due to the small screen resolution.

The advantage of the Fb2 format is its small file size, literally tens and hundreds of kilobytes. It should also be noted that this standard is the result of a Russian development.

So let's take a look at some of the tags in an FB2 eBook:

The FictionBook tag is the root element, contains nested elements: description, body and binary.

The description tag is a description of the book, contains nested tags: title-info (information about the book), document-info (information about the FB2 file), publish-info (information about the publication of the book).

The body tag is a tag that is the content of the entire FB2 document. May include the following tags: section (section or chapter of a book), title (title), epigraph (epigraph), p (paragraph), cite (quote), table (table, same as in HTML), a ( link).

Tag binary - contains binary objects, has the following attributes: id (binary object identifier), content-type (object MIME type). Thus, support for images in JPG and PNG formats is realized. [5]

3. Suggested Synchronization Methods

Versions of an audio and e-book can be considered the same when the voiced text in the audio file completely and unambiguously corresponds to the text of the e-book, then the information received by a person is perceived in the same way [8]. In this case, we can assume that the difference lies only in the method of obtaining information: through hearing or through sight. You can only sync the same versions of books.

The sync position in the text file is the specific word at which reading ended. A similar position in audio, this is the second after which the audio has finished playing. Positions can be considered synchronized when the information following these positions is perceived by a person in the same way.

The position in the textual information can be measured by the number of words from the beginning of the e-book text file. The audio position is the number of seconds elapsed from the start of the audio file.

Thus, the following synchronization methods take place:

  1. The method of percentage synchronization, which consists in finding the percentage of the current position to the entire text and audio file.
  2. A method of searching for unique sets, which consists in finding the desired position in an e-book by repeatedly converting an audio stream (audio file of an e-book) into a text format.
  3. Method of sampling. Analysis of the audio stream in order to identify (highlight) text elements (chapter, paragraph, sentence, etc.) with subsequent synchronization with a text file of the same e-book.

Conclusion

In the course of the work, mobile applications were analyzed that can work with different formats of e-books.

An additional functionality has been identified that can increase popularity for such applications.

Three methods of synchronization of text and audio information are proposed. One of the methods of synchronization is considered - the method of percentage synchronization.

As a result (according to the analysis of the data obtained), the method of percentage synchronization is quite accurate; on average, the error has an indicator of less than one percent. When reducing the calculated position for an audio file by 18 seconds, this method can be used in custom applications for reading and listening to e-books with the ability to switch modes (reading, listening) at an arbitrary place in audio and text files.

References

  1. Евгениий Милица: Новая эра развития электронных книг началась. [Электронный ресурс]
  2. Электронные книги по продажам обгоняют книги в мягких обложках. 2011-2013 [Электронный ресурс]
  3. Форматы электронных книг – беспредел разнообразия. 2008-2013 [Электронный ресурс]
  4. Самбулов, Д. В. Сравнительный анализ форматов файлов электронных книг. // 2016 URL: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/sravnitelnyy-analiz-formatov-faylov-elektronnyh-knig.
  5. Куликова, Е. В. Преобразование форматов графических файлов // Вестник Сибирского института бизнеса и информационных технологий. 2014. № 4 (12). URL: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/preobrazovanie-formatov-graficheskih-faylov
  6. Суханов М.Б. Создание электронных книг и применение их в обучении // М.Б. Суханов, В.А. Холоднов, Создание электронных книг и применение их в обучении URL:https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/sozdanie-elektronnyh-knig-i-primenenie-ih-v-obuchenii
  7. Суханов М.Б. Создание электронных учебников в программе eBook Maestro Free // М.: Журнал «Информатика и образование», 2008 № 2 С. 114-116.
  8. FictionBook Editor V 2.66 Руководство [Электронный ресурс]