Helicon Books

Press release

Helicon books reader, the first andorid reader to fully support all EPUB3 features and more.

Helicon books markets the first fully compliant EPUB3 reader for the Andorid operating system. 
The reader developed by Helicon books development partner Creatve studios, is the first reader to fully support all EPUB3 features and more. 

People today expect more and more Multimedia in the Internet and in Digital books.
The IDPF has responded to this with the EPUB3 standard published in 2011.

However, although the new standard is a year old, most readers applications are are still EPUB2 compatible, some of them with some extensions to support the new capabilities of the new standard.

Some people claim there is no need for all these advanced features. We think the world is advancing to reacher content and readers expect their digital books to also contain reach content.

We can parallel this to the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) the first versions of web sites contained only texts and images (many still do) but new W3C standards have enabled web designers to deliver reacher content and today users expect web sites to contain rich contents with animation, videos, sometimes sound etc.

The EPUB3 standard by the IDPF has added and standardized the following features:

• Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) - a vectorized graphic format that enables resizing of images without loss of quality
• Interactive SVG - Similar to SVG but interactive that enables the user to click part of the image and see it moves or zoom
• MathML - A markup language (based on XML) for rendering mathematical formulas
• JavaScript - A programming language that enables developers add interactivity to websites or digital book pages
• Support for Complex text layout languages - Language such as Hebrew or Arabic that are written from right to left. (the previous standard had partial support for these languages, the new standard fully support these languages including page progression direction)
• Support for top to bottom languages - Languages such as Chinese or Japanese written from top to bottom are now fully supported
• Fixed layout pages (mainly for children books and/or comic books)
• Media Overlay (speak aloud as it is called by Apple) - A features adding a layer of audio on top of text or images, that the reader hightlights the words (or images) the audio is talking about, uses a special markup language (SMIL)
• Support for video inside pages

The new standard uses HTML5 and CSS3 for pages and thus includes many design features such as round corners opacity, CSS animation etc.

Non of the EPUB readers we know of today, supports all these features. Helicon books reader supports all the above features and more. It also supports more advanced features such as interactive 3d images that can be rotated in order to view the object from different directions.

The reader is available for white labels licensing and customer specific customization.

White label licensing means that you get the reader with your own logo and no mention of Helicon books.

Customer specific customization means that you can hire us to modify the reader to your specific needs. We will seat with you to define your specific requirements, then issue a quotation for your specific customization so you get an application that fully suites your needs.

The reader currently support Android platform only but will soon support also iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod etc.)

About Helicon books

Helicon books was established by Ori Idan as a subsidiary of Helicon Technologies LTD. Helicon books is developing and marketing software for the digital book market and works to advance the EPUB digital book standard. Helicon books is a member of the IDPF (industry consortium responsible for the EPUB standard)
Helicon books also creates EPUB books of all kinds, especially books using the advanced features of EPUB3