AZARDI 30 is Released with Subscriptions

31 August 2014

AZARDI, Subscription, SMIL, Fixed Layout, ePub, ePub3

We are pleased to announce the AZARDI 30 ePub Reader has been released. AZARDI Desktop for Windows, Linux and Mac now supports subscription content.

We are pleased to announce AZARDI 30 has been released. AZARDI is a free ePub2 and ePub3 reader.

AZARDI Desktop for Windows, Linux and Mac now supports subscription content delivered from AZARDI:Content Fulfilment. If you already have AZARDI the update will occur automatically next time you open AZARDI. You can download AZARDI here.

We have also made a number of very interesting bug fixes for some very special ePub3 content.

Subscription Reading

The AZARDI subscription feature is primarily targeted at education content suppliers who need to get term/semester based content to students in the right volume at the right time. It can control a subscription from one day to any length of time.

We announced the full set of subscription features in AZARDI:Content Fulfilment in this post here. This explains the Calendar Period and Duration based subscription options.

And Other Detail ePub3 Things

As we deal with more and more complex ePub3 content being produced it is inevitable that a few bugs appear. Also there are some features that are new concepts. We have to thank all those publishers, production people and authors who have sent in ePub3 books highlighting various bugs. Many of them are beyond any test book concept scope.

SVG With SMIL

A publisher of fine sheet music products submitted an amazing SVG sheet music with SMIL interactivity highlighting. This was not highlighting correctly with SMIL references embedded in SVG. We had not handled SMIL ID's inside SVG. Silly us! While that was fixed, the problem of Firefox not playing MP3/4 audio in iOS remains. Include embedded WebM as a fallback and all is well. We have been asked not to say more as they are still perfecting the details. However it is such an awesome, stunning, amazing use of SVG, SMIL and Javascript power.

More on SVG

Next we discovered that JQuery doesn't support class methods on SVG elements. As wonderful as JQuery is, for these mixed XHTML, SVG and MathML environments you still have to do the Javascript code the hard way.

General SMIL Behaviours

We started getting strange javascript exception messages and behaviours on exercise books with multiple SMIL blocks. This was where a reflowable page had perhaps 10-15 separate read-aloud with highlighting blocks. We had never had a test case with as many audio read-aloud SMIL passages per chapter as these live to market books. SMIL, or audio overlays works with reflowable and fixed layout in AZARDI. Because it has both paginated and scrolling page modes education publishers like to take advantage of this content presentation flexibility to significantly enhance digital interpretations ofprint books.

Fixed Layout Presentation

Changes in Firefox version CSS gave us inconsistent handling of fixed layout ePub3 viewports. That problem was fixed as well.

Mobile AZARDI

AZARDI Desktop, Android and iOS versions are now virtually 100% feature syncronized. This means they can all provide consistent interactive content engagement experiences across all platforms, aspect ratios and screen sizes.

However maintaining an ePub3 reading system across all platforms is a battle that doesn't look like it will stop in the forseeable future.

There are enough all-sorts of ePub reading systems out there for mobile devices so we offer AZARDI Android and AZARDI iOS as part of the secure AZARDI:Content Fulfilment delivery system only.

Moving Forward

On the development map for the next release of AZARDI Desktop is a shift from the inner ePub presentation workings, to book/document engagement.

A new MAJOR desktop AZARDI feature is full text indexed search across multiple books. This is a significant step forward from the serial scanning search tools on ADE and iBooks.

Indexed search is targeted primarily at academic users, but may be useful for many other types of content. It works with any mix of ePub2 and ePub3 books. You can individually or bulk index and de-index books at any time.

This will make AZARDI the first freely available ePub reading system with full text indexed search across multiple books. If your engagement with content requires you to search or discover information across a wide range of publications, this will be a powerful and useful tool. Based on user feedback we will look at increasing search precision with additional tool and across multiple languages.

Full text search is not being released in the AZARDI mobile readers until we have done sufficient testing on performance. considering the significantly lower processing power available. Our current target test dimension is fully responsive behaviour with 1,000 indexed books on an average performance laptop or workstation in the first instance. However the mobile readers are on the Indexed Search drawing board.

The Search Tools

An interesting thing about index search across books on similar subject matter is the density and similarity of search results. It is not the same as searching on the Internet! It acts like a dynamic index of sorts. This means using complex search queries is very valuable whereas simple searches deliver a lot of result noise.

To address this the search tools include:

Token or token prefix queries: Eg: riv*;

Phrase queries: Eg: "rainy season". You can also use phrase queries with prefix queries.

Near queries: Eg: "world NEAR river" will match "The Indus river valley, site of one of the world's earliest...." (default NEAR is 10 words). This can be modified with distance specifed. Eg: "price NEAR/4 london" matches documents where no more than 4 terms separate 'price' and 'london'

Boolean operators: AND - The AND operator is implicit. Searching for two terms is an AND search by default. NOT - Use the unary "-" operator with the basic term and term-prefix queries. Example: "river -boat" will match all documents containing river and no boat. OR - Two terms separated by the OR operator will be searched inside the documents.

The Search Results

A search result is a book or document section/chapter. The AZARDI search results are listed by book.

Select a book from the search results list and AZARDI Search returns the result count list per section for that book (or chapter if you prefer that term but it does include front and backmatter).

You can now go directly to a section and navigate through the highlighted results.

Later if the IDPF ever settles down with the epub:type semantic definitions and gets them precise enough we will able to add targeted section searching based on the section semantics. Unfortunately the IDPF vocabulary represents a backward 50 year view of print publishing hasn't addressed any new digital content production realities and is apparently subject to arbitrary change.

And in Conclusion

AZARDI continues to move forward with new innovations that make digital content engagement more powerful and useful. Our focus remains on deliver education content securely and reliably. We have a focus on education content for the developing world in every language.

There are a number of exciting new features on the AZARDI and IGP:Digital Publisher roadmap that continue to move ePub3 digital content forward and out of the trade book and iBooks fixed layout lockdowns.

If you have any ideas on what you think should be in an ePub3 reading system, or would like to see in an ePub3 reading system, don't hesitate to ask.

Posted by Richard Pipe