ELECTRONIC BOOK EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING METHOD USING BURIED REFERENCE MATERIALS AND ALTERNATE LEARNING LEVELS

A method for compiling and presenting educational material on an electronic book is disclosed. A set of information requiring a first level of comprehension is created at a terminal or provided from a pre-existing data base. The set of information is examined for words which require a higher level of comprehension. Different types of explanatory information are created for such words and are tagged to the words so that they can be immediately called up when the word is later presented. The compiled first set of information at a first level of comprehension is a first modality. Additional modalities at different levels of comprehension or simply adjusted for different learning styles are also prepared. Each modality is cross-indexed to the other modality at a conceptual meaning level. The conceptual meaning level can be roughly a paragraph long block. The electronic book uses analog storage on a magnetic tape. A magnetic tape is a tape drive mechanism stores textual material of a book in the form of encoded analog signals. The tape reader provides an analog electrical signal which is fed to an analog-to-digital converter for conversion into a digital data stream. A digital buffer capable of storing an amount of data corresponding to at least several pages of text, but not the entire book, is provided. A display coupled to the digital buffer displays a page of textual data from said buffer at any one time. A controller responsive to user input signals advances the tape and replaces the data stored in the buffer with new data to advance through pages of the book. A speech synthesizer may be used in place of the display for visually impaired users.