What is interactive reading?

Interactive reading means reading a text with explanations attached to its exact words. You read a book, a manual or a handbook as normal. Where a passage has something more, the words are marked. Tap them and you watch or hear someone explain that passage.

What makes a text interactive

An interactive edition keeps the text as the main thing. It adds three things to it:

• Links on the exact words. A short clip sits on a section, a range of lines or a single phrase, not just on the chapter.
• Voices. The clips come from people: an author, a teacher, a trainer, a speaker. One passage can carry more than one voice.
• A way back. When the clip ends, the reader is still on the same page, at the same words.

How it differs from an ebook or a PDF with video

An ebook or PDF can hold a video on a page. That is one video for a page, placed by hand. Interactive reading links many short clips to the words they explain, and the clips come from the long recordings an organisation already has.

How it differs from a video library

In a video library you browse by title and watch from the start. In an interactive edition you find the video by reading. You never have to scrub through a forty-minute recording to find the two minutes about the line in front of you.

Who uses it

• Churches and ministries, with their own teaching on the verses it explains.
• Authors who also make video, with their talks on the passages they discuss.
• Tuition and revision companies, with explainers on key quotes in set texts.
• Publishers, training teams and anyone with a manual, with a short video next to each section.

How RoamBook does it

RoamBook is an interactive reading platform. An organisation uploads its text and its video or audio. RoamBook's AI makes captions, cuts the recordings into short clips and suggests which words each clip explains. The organisation's editors approve every clip before readers see it. Readers use a reader with the organisation's own name, on its own web address, in the browser on any phone.

Questions

Do readers need an app?

No. An interactive edition made with RoamBook opens in the browser.

Does the AI publish anything by itself?

No. It suggests clips and links. People approve each one.

What kinds of text work?

Any text with a structure: books, scripture, set texts, handbooks, manuals and course workbooks.