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Reviewer: Bayard Kohlhepp

How do you measure an experience, or its quality, if you can't define what “quality” and “experience” mean__?__ Like many engineering professionals, I substitute quantity for quality and measure attributes such as bandwidth and error rate and noise. While these objective attributes are easy to measure, they only influence an observer's perception of quality; they are not direct measures of quality itself. This book brings together 28 quality of experience (QoE) papers to advance an ontology and taxonomy for QoE. Moreover, since each included paper cites dozens of other papers, this book serves as a de facto survey of the entire QoE field. The first 11 papers in Part 1 can be classified as a “horizontal” layer, spanning the entire field and presenting concepts without dwelling on domain specifics. The remaining 17 papers in Part 2 are the “vertical” component, taking the high-level concepts and applying them to specific sectors, such as text-to-speech, videoconferencing, and many more. These papers are useful not only for their analyses of particular (and popular) application domains, but also for their role as guidelines or templates for readers to apply QoE analysis to their own specialties. The book is over 400 pages, and is dense with information. It is well written with excellent typesetting; the presentation does not get in the way of the information. It could serve as a foundation text for QoE courseware, although it does assume some familiarity and might require other introductory material. As stated previously, it's also a great survey work for existing QoE practitioners. Finally, because of the application chapters, the text also makes a great how-to reference for any computing professional to measure QoE for their particular applications. Online Computing Reviews Service