The purpose of this thesis is to survey the successfulness of electronic book sale in the Czech environment. The thesis is intended to provide an evaluation of the present situation, identify the main issues regarding e-book market competitiveness and determine critical factors which must be considered in order for the e-book sale to be profitable.

Aufbau und Arbeitsweise von E-Book-Lesegeräten. Erstellen eigener E-Books im EPUB-Format. Tools zur Anzeige und Konvertierung

In this degree project we present a way to construct a synchronization system that is able to create a timings file, which is the file the system uses to know how to sync the eBook and audiobook, using speech recognition and estimation algorithms. This file is then used by the system to let the user select a sentence and have the audiobook start reading from that sentence, or vice versa. This system can create these files with a mean offset from a manu-ally timed file which is within our expectations for the system. We use estimation algorithms to fill in the blanks where the speech recognition falls short. Speech recognition accuracy is typically between 40-60%, sometimes dipping lower, so there are blanks to fill in. Using basic algebraic principles of calculating velocity we can ex-trapolate the speed of a reader, using the duration of the audiobook as the time and the amount of characters written as the distance. For increased accuracy we derive this value on a per-chapter basis. Using this method we are able to create accurate files, which the user can use to freely sync any location in the book. Our system is designed to work for any book in the world that does not have an audiobook which cuts off between sentences in the audio files. We manually create timings files for four different books with widely varying publishing dates, author styles, reader style and gender to create as wide and representative a testing pool as possible for the project

Aufbau und Arbeitsweise von E-Book-Lesegeräten. Erstellen eigener E-Books im EPUB-Format. Tools zur Anzeige und Konvertierung

Nous présentons une solution pour la création d'un corpus numérisé en utilisant une approche crowdsourcing pour annoter des bandes dessinées (BD). Les encodages XML qui en résultent aident également les chercheurs, les éditeurs, les bibliothécaires et les conservateurs de collections BDs. Pour atteindre notre objectif de recueil de données, nous développons un moteur de crowdsourcing en ligne pour annoter les BDs. Les tâches sont conçues pour reproduire l'expérience de lecture des pages des BDs, en demandant aux participants d'identifier et d'annoter les éléments structurels (cases, splash-pages) et de contenu (personnages, lieux, événements, onomatopées, objets, lignes de mouvement) des BDs. Notre approche fournit aux chercheurs en humanités numériques (digital humanities) la possibilité de bâtir un corpus structuré et annoté, aujourd’hui manquant. Cela permet d’accélérer la recherche liée à la BD et à la théorie de l'art séquentiel. Les bibliothécaires et les conservateurs de collections des BDs disposeront d'un contenu structuré qui pourrait permettre la création d'artefacts spécifiques, tels que des dictionnaires de BDs, des indices de recherche ou des dictionnaires d'onomatopée. Du point de vue de l'édition, les standards actuels pour les BDs numériques se chargent exclusivement de la couche de présentation (c'est-à-dire, rendre tout simplement une publication sur l'écran d'un dispositif numérique). Mais la nature artistique de la BD et le grand potentiel des BDs numériques nous permettent d'aller au-delà de la simple présentation du contenu. À cet égard, nous contribuons avec des améliorations aux standards sémantiques (CBML) et de présentation (EPUB). / We address the difficulty of creating a digitised corpus by using a crowdsourced approach for annotating comic books. The resulting XML-based encodings assist researchers, publishers and collection curators equally. To achieve our data collection goal, we develop an online crowdsourcing engine for annotating comics. The tasks are designed to mirror the page reading experience, with participants asked to identify and annotate structural (panel layout, splash pages, meta-panels) and content (characters, places, events, onomatopoeia) elements of comic books. Our approach provides Digital Humanities (DH) scholars with a (currently missing) structured, annotated corpus; this enables and accelerates research related to comics and sequential art theory. Curators and collectors of physical or online comics collections are provided with a structured content which could enable the creation of artefacts such as comic books dictionaries, search indices and dictionaries of onomatopoeia. From a publishing perspective, current standards for digital comics are taking care exclusively of the presentation layer (i.e. rendering a publication on the screen of a device). But the artistic nature of comics and the great potential digital comics have already showcased allow us to go beyond simple content presentation. To this respect we present our contributions with enhancements to current semantic (CBML) and presentation (EPUB) open standards that will allow publishers and digital comics authors to create an improved reading experience.

Die in MEDIBUS organisierten Blindenbüchereien sehen sich als Partner der kommerziellen Verlagswelt und nicht als deren Konkurrenten. Die sehr geringen Auflagenhöhen und die speziellen Anforderungen bei der Aufbereitung von Literatur in Brailleschrift und Großdruck wecken in aller Regel nur wenig verlegerisches Interesse. Die wachsende Auswahl an mobilen Endgeräten, Medienkonvergenz und Diversifikation von Angeboten sind Chancen der digitalen Revolution, die es ermöglichen, auch Menschen mit speziellen Bedürfnissen zeitnah und in adäquater Qualität Wissen zugänglich zu machen. libreka! und die DZB kooperieren im Projekt „Leibniz – Sach- und Fachbuchaufbereitung für Blinde und Sehbehinderte“, um PDF- und Satzdaten zu verarbeiten und deren digitale Verbreitung sowohl für sehende als auch für nichtsehende Leserinnen und Leser zu forcieren. DAISY-Standards und -Technologien sind dabei der Schlüssel zum Erfolg.

In this presentation, various projects at DZB will be described, concerning various collaborations with publishing houses and Libreka! – an online platform of the German association of publishers “Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels”, to improve the workflow of transformation of typesetting data into the DAISY 3 format. By developing adaptive content processing facilities, this data can be used to increase the availability of publications in Braille, DAISY and large Print.

Die in MEDIBUS organisierten Blindenbüchereien sehen sich als Partner der kommerziellen Verlagswelt und nicht als deren Konkurrenten. Die sehr geringen Auflagenhöhen und die speziellen Anforderungen bei der Aufbereitung von Literatur in Brailleschrift und Großdruck wecken in aller Regel nur wenig verlegerisches Interesse. Die wachsende Auswahl an mobilen Endgeräten, Medienkonvergenz und Diversifikation von Angeboten sind Chancen der digitalen Revolution, die es ermöglichen, auch Menschen mit speziellen Bedürfnissen zeitnah und in adäquater Qualität Wissen zugänglich zu machen. libreka! und die DZB kooperieren im Projekt „Leibniz – Sach- und Fachbuchaufbereitung für Blinde und Sehbehinderte“, um PDF- und Satzdaten zu verarbeiten und deren digitale Verbreitung sowohl für sehende als auch für nichtsehende Leserinnen und Leser zu forcieren. DAISY-Standards und -Technologien sind dabei der Schlüssel zum Erfolg.

In this presentation, various projects at DZB will be described, concerning various collaborations with publishing houses and Libreka! – an online platform of the German association of publishers “Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels”, to improve the workflow of transformation of typesetting data into the DAISY 3 format. By developing adaptive content processing facilities, this data can be used to increase the availability of publications in Braille, DAISY and large Print.

This master dissertation "Czech Electronic Book Market -- Obstacles and Opportunities" analyzes Czech market with e-books. The aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current situation on the market in terms of technologies, distribution models and legal issues. It describes commercial, free and illegal sources in the market, including a description of digitisation projects in Czech libraries. The thesis also includes a theoretical introduction to e-books and their development in the past. Details are discussed, focusing on technology, modern electronic readers with electronic ink. For comparison, the thesis also analyzes the U.S. market with e-books. In analytical part the individual portals with e-books on the market, their supply and user interfaces are compared. The real example analyzes the costs of an e-book and its comparison to costs of a printed book. At the end of the thesis, alternative models of distribution requirements for establishment of a new portal with e-books are characterised, the Creative Commons licenses are described and the current trend of e-journals is mentioned. Finally, I suggest recommendations especially for sellers on the Czech market describe the advantages and disadvantages of e-books in terms of individual roles in the distribution model and estimate the future market development. More detailed information related to the comparison of different types of electronic ink, a list of electronic readers that are available on the Czech e-book market at this time and specific examples of various users' interfaces that are being used on Czech e-books portals can be found in Appendix.