As a consequence of the huge technological development that we face today, wich has provided various ways of interacting with information, the book industry faces great challenges in the communications area.

 Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that enables visualization and interaction with virtual information overlaid with the real world environment. In recent years, this technology has been heavily explored in various contexts, due to its wide range of applications.

 AR books techniques consist of adding interactive and immersive properties to books, transforming the reading activity into a unique experience. Augmented books can help the book industry as they can be designed to improve the experience given by the physical books. These artifacts are also currently the main application of AR in education, helping students to understand more complex subjects and providing them with immersive interactive learning activities, resulting in increased motivation and participation.

 Over the last two decades, multiple authors have presented different ways of adding AR to books, which vary in terms of technologies, devices and features adopted.

 This dissertation aims to explore various strategies for providing additional content to physical books, with focus on augmented books approaches that retain the book's characteristics and the benefits of the paper. At the end, a generic AR application will be presented, capable of downloading and running different AR experiments for any existing book.

 An AR experiences specification model has been defined to create AR experiences. In this specification, all the elements that compose an AR experience are identified, such as markers, contents, user interactions and other events, as well as all the logic between them.

 The proposed application has the ability to recognize a book, download an AR experience specification file associated with it from a server, and build and run the AR experiences accordingly with this specification. This approach allows to transform books them into dynamic sources of information, increasing their value.

 An example demo was built to evaluate the capabilities and the functionality of the system, with emphasis on the visualizations (3D objects, video, sounds) and user interactions.

 This thesis had an evaluation of 19 on a scale from 0 to 20.