A Market-Ready Ecosystem for Publishing and Reading Augmented Books.

Many studies show the possibilities and benefits of combining physical and digital information through augmented paper. Furthermore, the rise of Augmented Reality hardware and software for annotating the physical world with information is becoming more commonplace as a new computing paradigm. But so far, this has not been commercially applied to paper in a way that publishers can control. In fact, there is currently no standard way for book publishers to augment their printed products with digital media, short of using QR codes or creating custom AR apps. In this paper we outline a new publishing ecosystem for the creation and consumption of augmented books, and report the lab and field evaluation of a first commercial travel guide to use this. This is based simply on the use of the standard EPUB3 format for interactive e-books that forms the basis of a new ‘a-book’ file format and app.