A person reading a book needs to build an understanding based on the available textual materials. As a result of a survey of users' reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that most of these interfaces provide poor support for the actual processes of reading and comprehension. In particular, there is generally minimal support for understanding the overall structure (or contextual structure) and the narrative structure of a book. We propose adapting topic tracking and detection techniques to discover the narrative threads within a book, and hence its narrative structure. The contextual and narrative structures will be presented to the user through purpose-designed visualisations, which will be integrated and linked within a newly developed e-Book browser. We have chosen to use the Bible as our test corpus, as it has a rich narrative structure, and relatively complex contextual structure. Evaluation of the interface, and its components, will be done through field studies involving actual readers of the Bible, to assess the effectiveness of the user interface in enhancing a user's experience.

Current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the organization, narrative structure, and themes, of large complex books. In order to build an understanding of such books, readers should be provided with user interfaces that present, and relate, the organizational, narrative and thematic structures. We propose adapting information retrieval techniques for the purpose of discovering these structures, and sketch three distinctive visualizations for presenting these structures to the e-Book reader. These visualizations are presented within an initial design for an e-Book browser.