Helicon books markets the first fully compliant EPUB3 reader for the Andorid operating system.
The reader developed by Helicon books development partner Creatve studios, is the first reader to fully support all EPUB3 features and more.

People today expect more and more Multimedia in the Internet and in Digital books.
The IDPF has responded to this with the EPUB3 standard published in 2011.

However, although the new standard is a year old, most readers applications are are still EPUB2 compatible, some of them with some extensions to support the new capabilities of the new standard.

Some people claim there is no need for all these advanced features. We think the world is advancing to reacher content and readers expect their digital books to also contain reach content.

We can parallel this to the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) the first versions of web sites contained only texts and images (many still do) but new W3C standards have enabled web designers to deliver reacher content and today users expect web sites to contain rich contents with animation, videos, sometimes sound etc.

The EPUB3 standard by the IDPF has added and standardized the following features:

Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) – a vectorized graphic format that enables resizing of images without loss of quality
Interactive SVG – Similar to SVG but interactive that enables the user to click part of the image and see it moves or zoom
MathML – A markup language (based on XML) for rendering mathematical formulas
JavaScript – A programming language that enables developers add interactivity to websites or digital book pages
Support for Complex text layout languages – Language such as Hebrew or Arabic that are written from right to left. (the previous standard had partial support for these languages, the new standard fully support these languages including page progression direction)
Support for top to bottom languages – Languages such as Chinese or Japanese written from top to bottom are now fully supported
Fixed layout pages (mainly for children books and/or comic books)
Media Overlay (speak aloud as it is called by Apple) – A features adding a layer of audio on top of text or images, that the reader hightlights the words (or images) the audio is talking about, uses a special markup language (SMIL)
Support for video inside pages
The new standard uses HTML5 and CSS3 for pages and thus includes many design features such as round corners opacity, CSS animation etc.

Non of the EPUB readers we know of today, supports all these features. Helicon books reader supports all the above features and more. It also supports more advanced features such as interactive 3d images that can be rotated in order to view the object from different directions.

The reader is available for white labels licensing and customer specific customization.

White label licensing means that you get the reader with your own logo and no mention of Helicon books.

Customer specific customization means that you can hire us to modify the reader to your specific needs. We will seat with you to define your specific requirements, then issue a quotation for your specific customization so you get an application that fully suites your needs.

The reader currently support Android platform only but will soon support also iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod etc.)

ebrary®, a ProQuest business, today announced that it is forging ahead with its efforts to support non-English language programs for customers around the world. The company is launching a new e-book subscription database, ebrary Nordic Collection™, as well as recently acquired content from renowned German publishers including Verlag C.H. Beck, W. Bertelsmann Verlag (WBV), and Frank & Timme.

ebrary’s new subscription database, the Nordic Collection, includes more than 1,300 titles from over 30 publishers at launch but will grow to offer over 2,000 e-books. It contains content from, and about, the Nordic Region in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.Contributing publishers include Aarhus University Press, Copenhagen Business School Press, Folkuniversitetets Akademiska Press, Nordic Academic Press, Nordic Council of Ministers’ Publishing House, Roskilde Universitetsforlag, Stockholms universitets förlag, and University of Wisconsin Press. Libraries may combine this collection with ebrary’s flagship subscription database, Academic Complete™, to provide full academic coverage, and then strategically apply budget in other models such as patron driven acquisition, short-term loan, and perpetual archive.

“We strive to serve both our librarian and end-user customers in the most effective ways possible. This not only entails aggregating vast amounts of content but also packaging it in a way that is digestible and makes sense for the researcher,” said Leslie Lees, ebrary’s Vice President of Content Development. “The Nordic Collection is another step forward in opening more avenues to learning; we will continue to extend our local language programs to provide the most appropriate content to our customers worldwide.”

Additionally, to add another layer of support for strategic e-book acquisition in libraries worldwide, the new German publishers’ scholarly monographs, including those from distinguished publisher Frank & Timme, are all available under a perpetual archive model and through YBP. Frank & Timme provides researchers with a breadth and depth of Germanlanguage content with a focus on humanities and social sciences.

“We are delighted to make our e-books available to libraries through ebrary in order to meet the research needs of our end-users,” said Dr. Karin Timme, Publisher at Frank & Timme. “By partnering with ebrary, we are able to grow our business by leveraging the various business models and their other partnerships, which enable both companies to ultimately provide greater accessibility to libraries around the world.”

HighWire Press is pleased to announce it has entered into a strategic collaboration with ImpactStory, a researcher led, non-profit organization with a drive to help redefine the impact of research articles.

Article level metrics monitor the conversations around an article, as a complement to citation reports which measure a journal’s overall impact. ImpactStory aggregates impact data – the number of times an article is accessed and mentioned in editorials, news, tweets and blogs, as well as bookmarked, favorited, and recommended, in addition to those cited by another research paper, from sources such as CrossRef, Mendeley, and PubMed.

“People bookmark and download research articles for a reason,” says Jason Priem, PhD student and co-founder of ImpactStory, who coined the term altmetrics. “Articles that provoke interesting discussions amongst fellow scientists may or may not get cited a lot, but they are still providing important feedback and quality indicators. Additionally, activity in venues like Wikipedia, Twitter, and Delicious provide evidence of broader impact of articles that are increasingly important to research funders.”

“As a publisher we believe our role on the open web is to help authors increase the surface area of their research and to uncover interesting interactions with that research,” said Ian Mulvany, Head of Technology, eLife. “Being able to provide article-level metrics and indicators of these interactions is a critical piece, and we are delighted to be working with HighWire and ImpactStory to do that.”

As part of the collaboration with ImpactStory, HighWire will manage the relationship on behalf of the participating publishers on the HighWire Open Platform, registering articles and displaying these metrics on their online journal and book sites.

According to Tom Rump, Managing Director at HighWire, “Our strategy is to continually embrace the future of electronic publishing by supporting technology that provides insight into furthering the research communication process.”

To spur innovation in the UK and beyond, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is now making accessible a trove of its information spanning the past 170 years.

The RSC has announced that it is working with MarkLogic Corporation, provider of MarkLogic® Server, the Enterprise NoSQL database, to unlock scientific data dating back to the RSC’s 1841 origins.

This will help to ensure Britain’s place in world science as articles and educational material – much of which has never been available before – becomes accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers and educators around the world.

Before working with MarkLogic, the RSC had information stored in many formats which were housed across multiple locations and systems. With the huge growth of data and formats, it had become almost impossible to effectively manage all of its content which includes over one million images, hundreds of thousands of articles from over 200,000 authors and millions of science data files.

MarkLogic and the RSC have brought all of this data into one integrated repository, easily accessible to anyone online.

This data model lets MarkLogic easily ingest all types of content, embracing spreadsheet-based or unstructured material such as editorial, comments, pictures, social content and videos.

Each piece of content is automatically tagged, which allows users to discover content quickly and understand the context around it, connecting the dots between different pieces of research, video, journal articles or images.

The RSC has also introduced a host of new applications for children, journals for researchers and made mobile and social an integral part of its platform, all based on MarkLogic’s Enterprise NoSQL database.

Dr Robert Parker, RSC chief executive, said today: “The RSC began the process of making its data more open, social and mobile in 2010 and chose MarkLogic to bring all of its data into one database capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure. The project has already resulted in a 30% increase in the number of visitors accessing its 500,000 journal articles, a 70% increase in volume of searches on its educational websites, and an expanded international profile, with significant growth in visits from researchers in India, China and Brazil.”

The new big data platform has also allowed the RSC to publish three times as many journals and four times as many articles as it did in 2006, as well as introducing a variety of new applications aimed at expanding its educational offering and making chemistry more accessible to a wider audience.

Dr Parker added: “For example, the RSC developed a ‘Chemistry in the Olympics’ website where users could access hundreds of free, high-quality chemistry resources for teaching and learning, which proved extremely popular in the run-up to the Olympics. Using MarkLogic’s big data platform has allowed us to open uptake the world of chemistry to a much wider audience whilst increasing the volume and quality of the research that we publish. We are also making RSC resources available on mobile and integrating social elements where appropriate.”

Gary Bloom, MarkLogic CEO and president, said, “The RSC is very forward-looking in moving from a printed environment to an online environment, and delivering information in whatever way the end user wants to receive it. We are delighted to work with the RSC to open their rich archive of information, and make their invaluable resources even more accessible to innovators and educators around the world.”

More information: Brian Emsley, Royal Society of Chemistry, 0207 440 3317; 07966 939257

Publishing Technology, marked the end of a highly successful year by announcing a major go live for its customer, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

Developed on Publishing Technology’s pub2web platform, the IET’s Digital Library has become the organization’s central access point for all of its online content, dating as far back as 1872 and integrating over 185,000 articles and 3,500 videos.

The go-live crowns a year in which Publishing Technology announced a major international deal with HarperCollins to implement one of the world’s largest global publishing systems on its advance platform. The company also signed 15 new publishers to its scholarly research portal, ingentaconnect, including the Institute for Noise Control Engineering, SUNY Research Foundation and the New Zealand Law Review.

Earlier in the year, the company successfully launched Brill Online and teamed up with CNPIEC in China to launch the Digital Gateway, the most significant digital publishing platform to be launched for Chinese libraries. The company’s industry consultancy arm, PCG (Publishers Communication Group), also enjoyed considerable success, signing a global deal with Bloomsbury Publishing to sell and market the Churchill Archive and Drama Online. It also brokered an agreement with consortia groups to make the Churchill Archive available at a discount to over 500 libraries in the UK, US and Canada.

Publishing Technology continued to report strong financial growth, posting a six per cent increase in revenues in its unaudited interim results for the first half of 2012. The company also redefined its suite of products and services to strengthen messaging to the market and express the breadth and quality of its commercial portfolio in a cohesive way, solidifying its position as the leading provider content solutions that transform business. Publishing Technology unveiled its new look, refined offering and new website at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

As a testament to the company’s sustained growth and influence in the publishing industry, Publishing Technology CEO, George Lossius, was appointed onto the London Book Fair advisory board and was one of very few technology providers who made The Bookseller 100, a list of the most influential people in publishing. He commented: “Across the board the company has performed extremely well this year. We’ve made major inroads into new markets, signed high profile deals with some of the world’s largest publishers and solidified our position as the market leading content solutions provider in both trade and academic publishing.”

He continued: “We’ve worked extremely hard to build up our market position and brand, grow and improve our products and services and seek out new opportunities and partnerships across the globe. As the digitization of publishing marches on apace, we find ourselves in a fantastic position to capitalize on these developments and build on this momentum.”