Intelligent Books: Combining Reactive Learning Exercises with Extensible and Adaptive Content in an Open-Access Web Application

"Intelligent Books" are Web-based textbooks that combine computer-supported exercises with content that is both adaptive and extensible. They impose very few restrictions on the kind of exercise that can be placed within the book, and they allow students to contribute material that they have written, and to incorporate material from the Web into the book. In this chapter, the authors describe the influences that affect the design of intelligent books. These come from looking at the roles that textbooks and course notes play in education, and economic factors that affect the sustainability of intelligent books - competing for the attention of users, and ensuring that network externalities do not prevent a sufficient quantity of material from being usable within the book.