E-book devices deliver a special kind of Mobile Services, they usually use electronic ink displays and thus require different kinds of Web-Based Publishing and consequently Web-Based Services than LCD-based devices. Electronic ink has very low power consumption, but also very high latency, which means that usual interface design techniques (such as dynamic interfaces and scrolling for navigation) cannot be applied. Current e-book devices are focused on a very specialized publishing model, where the content is specifically published for such a device, very often in addition with using some kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. We are interested in a more integrated perspective of E-book devices, where they are treated as more or less standard devices with a number of constraints. This perspective of E-book devices as parts of the Web's ecosystem allows new applications, such as personalized newsfeeds which are delivered to e-books. However, current e-books do not even have Web browsers as part of their standard software, so there still is a long way to go until e-books can be seamlessly integrated into Web-Based Publishing scenarios.

We are looking for students and partners who are specifically interested in opening e-books for Web-based content. The two main hurdles on the device side are getting browsers to run on e-book devices, and to work towards the goal of making Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) more aware of the specific constraints of e-book devices. On the back-end side, there is the general challenge to make Web-Based Publishing flexible enough to be able to deal with the specific constraints of e-books, and on a more specific level, to look at the potential of using Atom Publishing and Linkbases to turn e-book devices into annotation devices, a significant step forward from their current role as read-only devices.