Comparative Analysis of the Development of Mobile Applications for Electronic Textbooks: Criteria, Case Study and Challenges

In electronic textbooks (or e-Textbooks) the traditional paper-based textbooks are enriched with multimedia contents and new features such as interactive multimedia-based simulation, interactive quizzes, and content sharing. It has been envisioned that e-Textbooks will gradually replace the traditional paper-based textbooks in classrooms in the near future. HTML5 is an emerging and promising standard that enables web applications (or apps) to incorporate rich multimedia contents such as video clips, flash movies and simulation-based demonstration, as well as to provide cross-platform functionality which allows the apps to run on a diverse range of platforms. To support rich multimedia contents and cross-platform functionality, with respect to HTML5, this paper presents the new features, compares the current trend of mobile apps (e.g., native, web-based and hybrid apps) for e-Textbook development. In order to investigate the suitability of these three development approaches for e-Textbooks, we present a case study on our recent work in developing e-Textbooks using HTML5 and JavaScript, as well as analyses the challenges associated with HTML5 features (e.g, compatibility with web browsers) for developing e-Textbooks.