Proceedings of the fifth ACM workshop on Research advances in large digital book repositories and complementary media

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the BooksOnline 2012 Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories and Complementary Media. This year, the fifth edition of the workshop series focuses on the readers, their experiences and their specific needs and preferences in terms of content selection, presentation and adjunct comprehension support technologies. In many domains, such as Web search, content recommendation, and online social networks, personalized services have been able to greatly benefit users. The domain of digital reading is no exception in this trend. When browsing online book stores, reading group discussions or book recommendations shared among friends, the strong personal aspects that apply to book selection become obvious. This becomes especially relevant in the case of user groups with specific or special needs, such as young readers or people with disabilities. The central role of the reader is reflected in the range of accepted contributions to this year's workshop. The accepted contributions naturally showed three salient themes: (1) "Search and Discovery", encompassing work addressing serendipitous content discovery, customizable information filtering as well as faceted topic exploration; (2) "Personalization and Recommendation", introducing reader-centric means of content selection based on comprehensibility and entertainment; and (3) "Reading Experiences beyond Text", proposing novel content presentation paradigms addressing accessibility concerns. We are honoured to welcome as our keynote speakers two industry leaders and visionaries, Maribeth Back (FX Labs Palo Alto) who will share her work on the "Future of Digital Reading" and Natasa Milic-Frayling (Microsoft Research) who will talk about her research on techniques to facilitate long-term access to digital content. We hope that you will find the workshop's program interesting and thought-provoking and that the workshop will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.