Web Applications

Introduction

Every publisher wants their content available on tablets. They also want DRM. Education publishers want subscription period control and course/semester content only to be available. 

Of course none of this works with the current e-retailer models from Amazon and Apple.

Definition of a WebApp

There is the general WebApp. An application that is delivered from the Internet and can be stored and then accessed offline.

There is the publisher WebApp. This is an application with highly valuable publisher content that is delivered from the Internet (or a network) and can be stored and accessed offline under the rights agreement rules set by the publisher and user/user organization.

A WebApp is not mobile specific, but that is the most useful target. It can work with any browser that supports offline storage.

A WebApp is also not an App. An App is everything wound into a single downloadable program designed for a specific device, and delivered and installed on that target device.

Infogrid Pacific does not do Apps for publisher content. While there is some content for which an App is suitable, for most education content the cost of production vs. the return on sales, minus App Store fees is not a tenable business model.

Education publishers do offline deals with institutions for the content. The requirement is then the additional need to manage individual students within an institution to access their active curriculum contents.

All of this has to be affordable and yield a useful, and ideally improved learning experience for students.

Targeting platforms

The problem with both Apps and WebApps is that different platforms/devices/etc. have different rules on how content can be stored and which content can be stored.

This series of articles will be specifically about creating cross platform WebApps for iPad Safari, Android Chrome, Android Fennec, and what can reasonably be achieved at present.

We have a number of education publishing customers in developing countries who are considerably more interested in Android that iPad for the obvious reasons: price, accessibility and control. This makes this an important development area.

Our approach is to use the AZARDI framework and bring all the interactive richness and goodness of the AZARDI Interactive Engine to Web Apps. This considerably lowers the cost of ownership and ensures the deliver of ePub 3 content gives the same outcome on the desktop, online and on mobile devices.

An ePub 3 reader application with DRM control, and downloaded ePubs is a very yesterday and security fraught approach to getting valuable content to kids reading devices.

Summary

This is currently a stub article. Future articles will give packaging information related to getting the core ePub content into delivery condition as a WebApp for all main devices.