The Processed Book Project is a prototype website and service with customized software tools, launched in November 2005, to explore the evolving nature of books, journals, and other authored content published electronically as digital data, and accessible on a widely connected, often global, network.
Supported by funding from the Hewlett Foundation, the Project grew out of an essay entitled "The Processed Book", published online in the open-access journal FirstMonday in March 2003, by Joseph J. Esposito,[1] former CEO of Encyclopædia Britannica, who in 1994 launched Britannica Online, the first Internet encyclopedia.
Annotations are one of the main tools of the Processed Book Operating System (PBOS), which allows users to connect "anything that adds lexical, semantic, or procedural value" to a specific segment of a document.
In addition, the Project has several document-global tools, including dissect text that "provides extraction, annotation and statistical reporting for both user supplied words/phrases, and for associated words/phrases found via an interface to the WordNet software's extensive catalog of connections among words/phrases."
As an operating system and not simply a vehicle for Web publication, PBOS also provides the ability to add new features or bolt on new computer processes that can be brought to bear on any text stored in the Project library.