Clive Izard and Michael Stocking present interactive activities at the British Library. it's not like this:

they built on the success of their Turning the Pages applications, that let you page through treasures from the BL (presented in Shockwave) each of which was is separately created and individually animated. they partnered with microsoft to demonstrate vista, and created Turning the Pages 2.0 that takes advantage of its 3D capabilities. it includes animations of 'book dynamics' [turning pages] based on curators actually turning the pages, so the pages wrinkle and curl. a light source reflects off the gold leaf. browsing is enhanced by navigation, englargement, transcription, and comparison of multiple volumes in the same workspace (with relative size). functionality was defined in conjunction with curators (based on tasks like comparing multiple editions, sketches and published works...)

adding interpretation makes the volumes more interesting and accessible to visitors to the library. They are exploring ways to enable public contributions (like tags), and to enable the personal keeping of notes, and/or the public sharing of those notes. public notes are rated (by contributors, notes may be categorized by they type of authors (e.g. academics, general enthusiasts).

scale is critical; they have to be able to manage large numbers of volumes, so they have built a content management system that facilitates knitting scanned images into the volume presented in the application.

note: underpinning assets exist in open formats, interface is proprietary.

this kind of intense interactive environment may not be appropriate for all materials, but it works as an interpretive, interactive environment for books as artefacts.