The presence of embedded resources in electronic books has tremendous potential for improving students' comprehension and promoting in-depth learning. Whether this potential is realized, of course, depends on what resources are embedded in or attached to the text and whether these are the types of resources needed to meet teachers' instructional goals or students' instructional needs. Over the past several years we have designed, developed, and tested various types of electronic books with various types of learners (e.g., Anderson-Inman & Horney, 1998; Anderson-Inman, Horney, Chen, & Lewin, 1994; Horney & Anderson-Inman, 1994, 1995, in press). From this work has emerged a growing understanding of the types of embedded resources that prove useful to students. We categorize these types of resources by the function they perform in assisting readers to comprehend and learn from text. Each is listed below, accompanied by a brief description and an illustration from materials we created for the purposes of researching the impact of embedded resources on student learning.

Translational resources translate a word, phrase, or paragraph into something more comprehensible to the reader. Definitions, for example, translate unfamiliar words into familiar ones. Paraphrases translate complex sentences into simple ones. Digitized speech translates printed words into spoken words. Translational resources can also shift the text from its original language to another--from French, say, to Spanish, Japanese, or even American Sign Language.

Illustrative resources help readers understand the text by providing examples, comparisons, illustrations, and visuals. They are often, but not exclusively, multimedia objects such as pictures, drawings, charts, or digitized video and sound. A biology text, for example, might illustrate the process of mitosis with an animation, and a music history text might illustrate composers' work with digitized samples from selected performances.

Summarizing resources provide an overview of the text without any encumbering or complicating detail. Examples include graphic overviews, outlines, concept maps, timelines, geographic maps, etc. Even a table of contents is a summarizing resource as it provides an overview of the topics and subtopics that appear in the text. To be useful, summarizing resources should be available to readers from anywhere in the electronic book. Many summarizing resources also serve as navigational aids, helping students move around the document in nonlinear ways.

Instructional resources promote active processing of the text by suggesting activities for manipulating concepts and remembering information. Examples include minitutorials, self-monitoring comprehension questions, and features designed to prompt in-depth thinking about what is being read. Some electronic books allow teachers to insert their own instructional resources for students, allowing them to draw attention to aspects of the text that meet their instructional goals (e.g., an author's use of figurative language) or ask students to use the text to complete an assignment (e.g., “Find evidence for the economic causes underlying the American Civil War”).

Enrichment resources provide information directly related to, but not strictly necessary for, comprehension of the text. They might include sidebars with additional information, historical background information, biographies of important people, links to original source materials, and comprehensive explanations. For example, a reference to Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech in an electronic history book might be enriched by providing the full text of the speech; audio or video clips of King delivering the speech, links to a brief biography of King, summaries of additional materials on the history of the U.S. civil rights movement, a rhetorical analysis of the speech, and a discussion of the speech's impact on black pride.

Notational resources are designed to enable interaction with an electronic book while supporting students' need to reinforce their learning by such actions as taking notes, outlining, diagramming, calculating, categorizing, summarizing, and collecting examples. For example, notational resources provide readers with the tools they need to record observations in an electronic notebook, add commentary in electronic margins, or draw examples on an electronic sketch pad.

Collaborative resources enable students to read and study collaboratively. For example, by linking students' computers to a local or wide area network, resources that support file sharing enable readers to communicate with one another while reading the same electronic book. This can be used for group assignments or more generalized reader support. Using collaborative communication tools, readers are able to work with other students anywhere in the world—asking questions, giving and receiving help, participating in discussions and debates, and collaborating on projects.

General purpose resources are those that can be linked to an electronic book but were not developed to support the text in that specific document. They include large-scale information sources such as databases, encyclopedias, and dictionaries as well as smaller scale resources such as reference lists, other books, and web sites. These resources enable students to augment the information contained in their electronic books, thus encouraging them to pursue other lines of investigation, look up distantly related questions, or just make intuitive leaps.

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