What were our priorities in 2021

EDRLab reached 65 professional members this year. Although the association could not organize a Digital Publishing Summit in 2021 due to the pandemic, its members were able to cooperate in working groups dedicated to accessibility and digital libraries. EDRLab also continues to develop various projects, including:

THORIUM READER: this free reading application for Windows, Mac and Linux computers now supports all versions of the DAISY format. It is localized in 16 languages and is becoming the Windows reference for EPUB 3 authors. There are now five other applications that have been developed from its open source code, including the MLOL Reader application, MLOL being the leading Italian library lending solution.

READIUM: The Readium Mobile open-source development kit continued to improve throughout the year, especially in terms of its ability to search through ebook content, its highlighting capabilities, its performance and its programming interface, which is becoming increasingly simple for developers using this open-source software.

LCP: this simple, reliable and non-proprietary digital lock has exceeded 40 integrations worldwide, some of them on a large scale, e.g. the German national online lending solution Die Onleihe which exceeds 25,000 licenses per day. Pocketbook and Vivlio e-readers have been made LCP compatible in 2021.

LIS MON LIVRE: EDRLab has launched the development of an open solution for voice access to online libraries of audio books, through Google and Amazon smart speakers. The first partners of this solution are the Association Valentin Haüy in France and CELA in Canada. The prototypes start being tested in April 2022.

TDM RESERVATION PROTOCOL: online content publishers needed a standard that would allow them to choose whether Text & Data Mining (TDM) actors can freely process their content or not, the option to say ‘no’ being offered by the new European DSM Act. EDRLab led a W3C working group in 2021 that finalized a very simple to implement the Article 4 of the Directive. The year 2022 will be dedicated to the communication around this new standard.

SIGNALING ACCESSIBLE TITLES ON WEBSITES: with the arrival of the European Accessibility Act, the question of displaying accessibility information of digital books on the websites of booksellers and public libraries arises. EDRLab has seized the problem and is working to find a consensual method of display for the managers of booksellers’ websites, the regular users of these sites and users with different types of disabilities. This is still an active project in 2022.