Digital Publishing

The AZARDI Interactive Engine goes FREE

This is a courtesy pre-release announcement for our blog and Twitter followers.

The AZARDI Interactive Engine is about to be launched for free use in any ePub 3 or publisher static website. You may have seen it's capabilities with EPUB3 UNLEASHED, and other demonstration books. We have created hundreds of ePub3 books in the past few months for commercial delivery for international learning publishers like OUP. That includes fixed layout, font embedded, interactive, audio books with high levels of interactive components.

Below is a link to the announcement page. It is still in draft format, so don't criticize the documentation (yet), but we are working hard and furious to address the interactive requirements and capabilities of ePub3 for publishers and to make it as "easy" as advanced interactive content should be.

The good news is it works in AZARDI (of course), iBooks and Readium. It also works with more proprietary and locked-off readers such as Vital Source.

Take a peek at what we are planning here. AZARDI Interactive Engine goes public.

Expect the full kitset to be available by the end of the month. It's exciting times in the world of digital publishing.

Private Search With Digital Content

As we evaluate the development priorities for new AZARDI features we always get caught between ePub3 spec features and useful user features. Except for Fixed Layout which is on the anvil at the moment, there are not a lot of compelling market driven reasons at present to pursue ePub3 obscurities and specialities such as CFI.

What we have been asked for is full-text search. So search floated to the top of the development tree.

We have search in our ECMS products, but we needed to start from scratch for this job. Enter DASE - Direct Access Search Engine. It had to be clippy, and work online and offline anywhere.

Best Sellers and XHTML

OK. So we are (happily) "out of a closet". HBG's David Cramer gave a presentation at BEA 2012 in which IGP:Digital Publisher was mentioned. IGP:Digital Publisher has been used for the comprehensive production of a wide range of best sellers by HBG over the last few years; in multiple print formats and e-book deliverables.

Dave is the HBG digital content guru, and a significant contributor in the IDPF ePub3 spec. He co-authored the fixed layout spec.

HBG is not the only one, but we have to respect NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) when they apply.  Others users include Faber in the UK and Oxford University Press for Online interactive content and audio readers. There are also a number of other quality publishers around the globe who understand the difference map between digital content and format outputs.

SMIL. It's AZARDI 11

AZARDI 11 has been released. This is a major feature upgrade. It can be downloaded from azardi.infogridpacific.com.

AZARDI 11 has significant changes in the reading interface and now matches AZARDI Cloud Reader (aka AZARDI Online). It supports SMIL Audio overlays in ePub3. There is a demonstration SMIL audio ePub3 on the resources page. This is the full  A Christmas Carol  by Charles Dickens, with some interesting highlighting patterns including single word, phrase, sentence and paragraph.

Digital Content at APEX@IGP

One thing I have noticed on my various blogs is that  people looking for digital content answers in 2012 get articles from 2010 and earlier in their search result. These are often dated information.

Blogs are wonderful and a rich source of information. The reason I bother to blog is primarily to address technical issues related to the production of digital content in a way that brings value to anyone who bothers to read it.

It's probably a personality disorder, but I find it relatively hard to maintain serious technical content as a blog entry. By maintain, I mean keep it relevant, updated, corrected and free from irrelevant (opinion) content.

Content of "technical value" will now be maintained and available at apex.infogridpacific.com - APEX@IGP.  Be warned, it is all technical. Don't go there for a laugh. There are none.

The blog remains an opinion and announcement vehicle.

APEX@IGP REQUIRES A HIGHLY STANDARDS COMPLIANT BROWSER. Read the requirements on the home page. Be afraid IE anything users.

The relevant digital content blogs from the past are being moved and updated. They will then be maintained to reflect the state of the digital content game. It is also easier to apply and maintain More advanced CSS and Javascript to better illustrated topics such as interactivity. It will take sometime for the search engines to find all this digital content goodness, but we wait.

I have started with a short set of articles on creating our ePub 3 format packager and the various issues that had to be thought-through and addressed. There are some stubs on other formats and the Information Wing IGP:FoundationXHTML is almost ready to go live.

EPUB3 UNLEASHED - AZARDI Online

EPUB3 UNLEASHED is now available for viewing in AZARDI Online. This release includes MathJax to make MathML available on all browsers and platforms.

Fixed layout becomes platform neutral when delivered from AZARDI Online. All of the interactive goodness in EPUB3 UNLEASHED is easily accessed directly from your favourite standards-compatible browser. Remember if you are using IE 6-9 you will need the Google Frame plug-in to make it work. Tablets are targeted for the Beta release.

To view EPUB3 UNLEASHED in AZARDI Online, go to azardi.infogridpacific.com/azardi-online.html. Scroll down to the section Infogrid Pacific Demonstration Specials.

Apple iText Books

There is a lot of excited and analytic commentary floating around about  the Apple iBook Author thing.

My friend and argument partner Mark from Axis 12 in London said we should have a press release:  "When asked if he thought the recent release of ibook author threatened the viability of his flagship product, Mr Pipe, CEO of Infogrid Pacific and the company behind IGP:Digital Publisher replied, "It's very pretty."

After digesting the crazy license and serious limitations for any type of education content and the serious blog statements about IP, I am reasonably sure it is going to be highly successful in the Apple controlled content ecosystem. It's difficult to beat frenzy, greed and myopia!

AZARDI 8.1 Released

An update has been released for AZARDI. This is a small feature upgrade and bugfix release. The full version is available from the AZARDI site. If you have AZARDI 7 or 8 installed this will update automatically next time you open the reader.

We have also included a 64bit deb package version for Linux in this release.

The new features are:

ePub 2, ePub 3+2, ePub 3 Test Books

We have posted some ePub samples on the AZARDI resource page to enable publishers to possibly understand and evaluate the various transition issues when making decisions about when to move to ePub 3, and how.

The samples include four Gutenberg books processed as ePub2, ePub3+2 (transitional) and ePub3 directly out of IGP:Digital Publisher. I could have added a KF8 mobi as well but that would have been showing off, and AZARDI doesn't like them.

The most interesting issue with these ePub variants is how they work on various readers - the reason for this evaluation set. It helps to set a baseline of understanding the issues.

Cover treatment is probably the biggest issue, but ePub 3  also has a cute little landmarks section that will only be seen in AZARDI right now.

AZARDI 8 Released

AZARDI 8 is now available at azardi.infogridpacific.com. This is the first release with auto updating. Mac and Linux will silently update. For those with AZARDI 7, Windows 7 may ask for permission and show an unsigned/unknown publisher box.

This is a relatively low-key upgrade. We have a lot more features planned for the next release based on requests and recommendations from users, and to address the demands of digital content.