The Digital Restyling of Audiobooks

Portable devices and wireless connections are creating a new scenario where digital information are massively entering our life. Such a scenario is craving for new applications and, in the meanwhile, several applications are simply re-written for the mobile scenario (we can check e–mail, browse the web, play games, etc.). In this paper we propose a mechanism to adapt a classical digital audiobook application to the new mobile scenario. Our proposal introduces, into a digital audiobook, multimedia objects (images and text) synchronized with the audio. The proposed mechanism does not modify the digital file structure and can be protected against piracy. With our mechanism, an audiobook is no longer a simple audio representation of a written book, but a different, complete multimedia product. The mechanism is shown to be effective through a modified audiobook player.