Booksonline'12: 5th workshop on online books, complementary social media and their impact

BooksOnline'12, the fifth workshop in the series, aims to offer a forum for bringing together expertise from academia, industry and libraries to facilitate the exchange of research results and technology in the field of digital libraries with specific focus on online books and complementary social media. The focus of this year's workshop is "engaging reading experiences", starting from the act of deciding what to read, through the exploration and interpretation of a book's content, to sharing the overall experience. Within this overall umbrella theme, the accepted papers naturally showed three salient themes: (1) Search and Discovery, (2) Personalization and Recommendation, and Reading Experiences beyond Text. The contributions demonstrate a range of technologies, including a collaborative tabletop visual approach to support the searching and discovery of books, co-citation methods to enhance document retrieval; exploring open issues in audio-book production to support non-text based reading and improving e-book accessibility; new approaches to recommendation that take into account writing style as well as looking specifically to young readers and their needs in order to develop recommendation tools that consider both content and reading level and match these against the readers' specific interests and reading ability. Following in the theme of the reader playing a central role in the future of our digital era, we are honored to welcome Maribeth Back from FX Palo Alto and Natasa Milic-Frayling from Microsoft Research as our keynote speakers.