March 25 marked an important step forward in the evolution of digital publishing: the introduction of the Readium Foundation, a membership-based nonprofit formed to develop commercial-grade, open source e-reading software. The components developed by the foundation will accelerate adoption of ePub 3 by the publishing industry.
There are more than 25 initial members of the new Readium Foundation—which includes publishers, retailers, distributors and technology companies worldwide (among them: Baker & Taylor, Kobo, Firebrand Technologies, IDPF, Eden Livre, Hachette Libre, and Sony). The founding members are collectively contributing significant financial and development resources to the organization’s first two key projects: Readium Web and Readium SDK. Both of these efforts are focused on helping the digital publishing industry as a whole realize the full potential of the ePub 3 e-book file format.
ePub 3 is the latest version of the ePub 2 standard that was initially standardized in 2007 as a successor format to the Open eBook Publication Structure or “OEB,” which was originally developed in 1999. The new standard embodies the industry’s hopes for rich, interactive books of all kinds that can be easily read on a broad range of desktop computers and mobile devices. ePub 3 incorporates the evolving HTML 5 standard and adds support for important core elements, such as the inclusion of embedded audio and video, page numbering, mathematical equations, improved accessibility, and many other enhancements to the ePub format.
Readium.org was originally launched in 2012 by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to support the development of an open source ePub 3 reading system that runs in Web browsers. This project matured into a popular Chrome browser extension (available on the Chrome Web Store) that enables users to read ePub 3 e-books in their browser. The project will now fall under the wing of the Readium Foundation as “Readium Web,” which is being extended to work with all modern Web browsers.
Readium SDK is a new open source project focused on the development of a Software Development Kit (“SDK”) that can be used by developers to create native code desktop and mobile reading applications that support the full ePub 3 file format. It’s important to note that you’re not likely to see a “Readium” app in the future—instead, you’ll see a number of different apps that were created by a variety of companies that all utilize the open source Readium SDK code libraries. Think of the Readium SDK as an ePub 3 reading application engine. It will purr under the hood.
Why Open Source?
As my company, Bluefire Productions, dove deeper into adding more robust ePub 3 support to our e-reader applications, we found that the spec is open to a considerable amount of interpretation. We also recognized that publishers will need to know that the books they publish will look great and function as intended no matter which reading application is being used. So we started talking to other like-minded industry players. What evolved was a collaborative effort to build a robust, open source ePub 3 application engine that each of us (and others in the industry) could use to build commercial-grade applications. This group now has a name: The Readium Foundation.
The founding members recognize that coming together to jointly create a single open source ePub 3 application engine will be more efficient than each company separately developing proprietary solutions, and will create the momentum necessary to expand the digital publishing market. The goal is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format. Open markets require this kind of standardization. Publishers cannot be expected to develop unique files for multiple proprietary reading systems.
The Readium Foundation will be separate from IDPF which focuses on developing and promoting standards. Development of commercialized technology is optimized when the adopters are the drivers. The IDPF will continue to oversee several open source projects related to promoting the ePub standard, including “ePubcheck” for validating ePub files and the “EPUB Reading System Test Suite.”
The Readium SDK will support file-level DRM extensions, but will be DRM agnostic and can be deployed with or without DRM. Bluefire plans to create an Adobe Content Server (ACS4) enabled solution that will allow retailers and publishers to distribute protected ePub 3 e-books on tablets, smart phones and desktop computers.
We don’t expect the Readium SDK to be a silver bullet, and it is unrealistic to think that every e-book platform in the world will utilize this engine. However, we do believe that the use of common, shared code components across a wide spectrum of large and small companies will be an important step forward for us, our customers, and their customers.
