The prevalence of video content consumption prompted book publishers to adopt this medium as a way to advertise books, through so called book trailers. Beyond advertising, a book’s video presentation may provide information to potential future readers so they can make an informed choice on whether consider reading it or not. StoryBook is a software tool that, through a process of knowledge extraction and media collection, supports the semi-automatic creation of multimedia trailers of books. A proof-of-concept of the tool and its user interface has been built and is available online.

In this demo paper, we present ARCA, a visual-search based system that allows the semantic exploration of a bookstore. Navigating a domain-specific knowledge graph, students and researchers alike can start from any specific concept and reach any other related concept, discovering associated books and information. To achieve this paradigm of interaction we built a prototype system, flexible and adaptable to multiple contexts of use, that extracts semantic information from the contents of a books' corpus, building a dedicated knowledge graph that is linked to external knowledge bases.

We describe an ongoing co-design project for a collaborative distributed space, based on multi-touch technologies, through which older adults can explore self-produced and on-line multimedia resources for the production of short video clips. The project's main goal is to foster the active participation of older people, already experiencing collaboration in daily activities in care centres, as producers of content related to their experience and know-how and to the activities carried out in the centres, to be shared in a community context. An interface, based on an interactive table, some tablets and a television set, is sketched.