Content Delivery Methods with AZARDI

Other Articles in the AZARDI:Content Fulfilment series:

Digital Content Business Models with AZARDI

What Real Digital Rights Management Can Deliver

In addition to the wide range of business models a Publisher can exploit with AZARDI:Content Fulfilment (ACF), there is a  powerful set of content delivery options also available. These have been implemented out of necessity for publishers in various markets around the world. 

Digital Readers for Multiple Platforms and Packages

Challenge No1 of getting ePub3 or other digital content delivered to anyone anywhere, is to be able to deliver valuable publisher content to all the various platforms and devices available in the market now. The AZARDI Reading Systems are available for:

• All Desktop computers (Linux, Windows, MacIntosh)
• Common mobile platforms (Android and iOS)
• Online in a standards compliant browser (Firefox, Edge, Chrome and Safari)

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment and the AZARDI Readers handle the delivery of

• ePub2 books
• ePub3 books (including high interactivity and rich media)
• the experimental E0 (eBook Zero) package
• Our own navigatable HTML packages (We call it a CDP-Content Document Package; containing ACOs-Advanced Content Objects because we like acronyms!).

AZARDI specifically doesn't support PDF reading as their is no point moving forward. Replica's of print books have little future with digital content.

Content Transfer Options

AZARDI has a number of content transfer mechanisms. This has been primarily implemented to address content delivery in education with a focus on multi-language content in developing country environments. Many of the transfer options reflect the very special delivery requirements of digital content users in these settings. No matter how remote or isolated we can deliver digital content to the end-user. This is as important an issue as the actual package.  

Standard Book Transfer

This is the delivery model used for standard books just like everyone does... Amazon, Kobo, Apple and many others. After the purchase offer has been turned into an agreement the entire content is transferred from the Fulfilment system to the users reading system. Once on the system the content remains on the users device(s) in accordance with the business model and agreed rights (Purchase, subscription, loan, etc.).

Progressive Delivery

Progressive delivery allows content to be delivered in parts over time independent of the business model. For example with a textbook or collection of textbooks the content can be progressively updated with the content required for each term (semester). When content is particularly complex this has a lot of advantages.

Dynamic Updates

There is a lot of content in the word that needs to be updated and/or modified for a number of reasons. The AZARDI infrastructure allows the sale and delivery of content AND updates to that content on a ad-hoc/as required basis.

IP Address Delivery

A major publisher distributes English Language Teaching material to training institutions and universities around the world. Content can be accessible only from a user who is logging on from a website with approved IP address.

Local Deliver Options

There are a number of cases where an institution has a large collection of books that need to be delivered to a large number of users. They may be in a region where Internet access is limited, slow or expensive or the users don't have Internet access. To address this we provide a local server model.

Local Account ACF Server

An institution can have an account remote server and deliver books to the users reading devices by network transfer or local wireless. Students, teachers and parents are bulk registered with a CSV upload.This is used in a number of schools where up to 10,000 students each download up to six books. That's 60,000 transfers that have to be done on the first day of term! That's a lot of data and is normally done by year and class.

In Conclusion

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment  gives publishers the options to get their content to their users no matter the real-world hurdles they may face.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment also has extensive and flexible rights agreements models that move way forward and well past the intensely disliked DRM model pushed by major e-Retailers and the Adobe ADE model. We will cover that in another post in the near future.

Posted by: Richard Pipe