International Journal of Enhanced Research in Science Technology & Engineering, ISSN: 2319-7463 Vol. 3 Issue 3, March-2014, pp: (97-103), Impact Factor: 1.252, Available online at: www.erpublications.com Page | 97 eBook Authoring System concept design and development Mohamed Menacer, Amar Arbaoui NOOR Research Centre, College Computer Science & Engineering, Taibah University, Madinah Saudi Arabia Abstract— This paper presents the design and development of an authoring system for creating and building an application program for an eBook package, or an eBook portfolio, that would include metadata, meta-content, and other related materials and resources that are stored in a dedicated database. This system is basically a digitization process of the different phases of eBook authoring and development, as well as a structure collection of various types of content and information in a form of hypertext documents, multimedia, and presentations. Although the open eBook format standard has been developed in the late 1990s, it has been mainly driven by commercial and marketing issues in mind rather than academic or/and technical focus. The standard is to some extent limited, in the opinion of the authors, in some technical aspects, i.e. advanced search and indexations, as well as in the subject matter areas such as education where content requires more and diverse representations of the academic content. The authoring system, being proposed, has been designed with academic books in mind, it is still very much suitable for any type of documentation or eContent such as articles, papers, reports, and presentations. This approach of eBook and eContent authoring and development is very useful for online search, manipulation, indexing, distribution and even marketing purposes. Based on the proposed content structured content, web content can be easily and reliably accessible for search and information retrieval. Furthermore, Natural Language Processing techniques such as text mining, indexing, tagging, information retrieval for online content document processing would be implemented more reliable and efficiently. Overall design concepts and development of the authoring system approach is presented in this paper with the different phases involved. Keywords: Authoring system, eBook, eContent, Meta-content, Digital content creation, Multimedia, eContent distribution, eLearning. Introduction Digital reading provides new opportunities for readers, publishers, and authors to discover, consume, and connect in different electronic book formats. An electronic book, or eBook, is a digital version of a printed book that contains different type of contents such as text, figures, schematics, tables, and images readable on computers-like devices, eReaders, Tablets, and Smartphone [1]. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s largest providers of business consulting services, and based on surveys of experts in the field, the book market is in a transition phase where readers are making the leap from paper books to eBooks and eReaders, which is poised to make significant changes and revolutionize the book industry forever [2]. Although there are a number of eBook software and tools available in the market [3], there are a limited number of eBook authoring systems that would allow users to create eBooks and related multimedia application capable of manipulating multimedia objects and resources [4]. Furthermore, not all eBooks are well structured for accurate search and efficient delivery and marketing through the web or/and to be used by third party applications or educational information systems such as eLearning and Virtual Learning Environment. By providing better digital book structure and more content details, and especially meta-content, would allow for better search and indexing as well as further improvement and integration with third party authoring applications and systems [5,6]. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic approach for authoring eBooks by collecting and digitizing the most relevant content and information in a structured manner of academic as well as general purpose books, or similar documents, for online and offline efficient usage, delivery and dissemination. The above work is being implemented under a research project, which is at its initial stages. Digital book concepts Due to the lack of a standard for packaging and selling eBooks, a consortium was formed in the late 1990s that developed the Open eBook standard (OEB), currently Open Publication Structure (EPUB), of a single source-document that can be handled by many book-reading software and hardware platforms [7]. The standard defined subsets of XHTML and CSS as a set of multimedia formats, and an XML schema for a "manifest" in order to list the components of a given eBook that identify a table of contents, front cover, and so on [8].