The Integration Project To Bring Open Source Annotation Support to EPUBs Has Been Completed

Evident Point, together with our esteemed partners, Hypothesis, NYU Press, Readium Foundation, and EPUBjs, is pleased to announce the successful completion of Hypothesis and Readium integration to bring open source annotation support to EPUBs through Readium.

Readium is a free, open source, cross-platform reading system engine that provides the best way to read EPUB, the fastest-growing eBook format, and Hypothes.is is the leading online open platform for annotating the web. In this integration project, Evident Point has developed the ability for the Hypothes.is annotation framework to anchor and synchronize annotations with a generalized approach that allows readers and authors to view annotation sets in different copies of the same book, no matter where it’s hosted or if read in different viewers. Evident Point’s experience in the underlying application of web technologies for implementing cloud based EPUB reading applications assisted in making this possible.

As the primary developers behind Readium, Evident Point is also holding the responsibility to oversee and develop the next Readium release, version 0.28. This new version will provide readers and authors the ability to use Hypothes.is annotation services, such as reading, adding, and sharing annotations in EPUB3, using them for navigation, holding discussions, taking personal notes, etc.

This integration is a big step towards collaborative annotations of digital books. In the words of Laurent Le Meur of EDRLab, “Combined with the recent work that the W3C has done to standardize annotation, this represents an essential next step in bringing a high quality open annotation implementation to books everywhere”.