Digital Audiobook: From Passive to Active Pursuit

The digital home entertainment market is growing at an exceptional speed and, although limited to passive listeners, audiobook applications are growing at an annual rate of nearly 20% and hence are playing an important role inside this market. In this paper we propose an architecture to produce interactive audiobooks, so as to transform a passive listener into a story director. Our approach allows interacting with the storyline and the story develops according to the user choices. To ensure transparency the approach uses AAC/MP3 format for the audio stream encoding, theMPEG7 MDS for the audio description and the ISO BaseMedia File Format for the audiobook file format. A security mechanism protects contents from piracy and malicious alterations. The simplicity of our approach, along with the growing usage of portable devices, may increase the attractiveness and the popularity of audiobooks.