AZARDI. The International ePub3 Reader

An interesting little fact is that over 70% of free AZARDI Desktop downloads are from countries where the language is not English. (This does not include the channel delivered AZARDI:Content Fulfilment versions which are nearly all to non-English users.)

Nearly 40% of all downloads have been made from Spanish speaking countries; both Spain and Mid/South American countries. Interestingly Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world by human count after Chinese. In this digital content age something as simple as a file download gives a very interesting view

EPub3 Demo Books in Many Languages

To celebrate the world-wide acceptance of AZARDI and to show our appreciation we are creating free download ePub3 demonstration books in multiple languages.

Don Quijote

First we have taken one of the greatest pieces of literature, Don Quijote (Don Quixote in English) and made it as an ePub3 downloadable book in Spanish.

Download Don Quijote here. In Spanish ►

This is probably more familiar to many today in the abbreviated "Man from La Mancha" musical which gave us the standard song "To Dream the Impossible Dream" which does in its own way capture the spirit of the novel.

Spanish Tales for Beginners

Don Quijote was done choice but "No hablamos o leemos español" (that's a Google Translate of "we don't speak or read Spanish") made it hard for us to select appropriate books. While looking through the Spanish titles on Guttenberg we came across Spanish Tales for Beginners. It seemed approriate.

Download Spanish Tales for beginners here. In Spanish  ►

This is a simplified version.The original text of this book has a glossary and a large number of reading guidance notes in the backmatter. We left those out of this first version but will work on a fully interactive version as time permits. This is a good example of a book that should have pop-up notes and glossary terms. Fortunately the AZARDI Interactive Engine widgets ►let us do just that.

Analects of Confucius

Switching from Spanish to Chinese, the Analects of Confucius is a parallel Traditional Chinese/English manifestation of the work.

Download Analects of Confucius here. In Chinese and English ►

We went a bit overboard on the presentation here with a parchment background. This demonstrates that with AZARDI you can set a texture or image on the background from edge to edge of the viewport. In iBooks it is cropped down the middle galley in all reading modes.

AZARDI Internationalization

We have recently internationalized the AZARDI interface to Chinese and Hindi for specific projects. We have the kitset together and will shortly be announcing an internationalization project. We will now try and make AZARDI available in your language.

We have German, Polish, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Chinese and Spanish lined up. If you would like to see the AZARDI interface available in your language, and have the time and skills to translate just a few dozen interface text strings please let us know.

If anyone has recommendations for books in their language, and the source content is free of copyright, or copyright can be assigned,  please let us know and we will put it on our international demonstration production list.

Maths. THE International Language!

Currently we are working with The Sayahna Foundation ► from Kerala, India, to produce the 14 MathML Online books ► their volunteers have wonderfully converted,into HTML5 with MathML, into ePub3 editions with multiple manifestations.

The Sayahna Foundation work is being done in memory of and to honour the amazing life-work of the inventor of eBooks and founder of the Gutenberg Project, the late Michael Hart ►.

These books will be excellent MathML exemplars and test books for various reading systems. They are relatively dense in MathML with a wide variety of math forms. They will be a benchmark for ePub3 and E0 reading systems, but more importantly these great works will be accessible to all.