Looking Back at 2012 and Ahead to 2013

by Cliff | Jan 3, 2013 | News, The Bluefire Team

Happy New Year! We’re back at work and are looking forward to a great 2013. This post recaps our 2012 product enhancements and provides some insight into our plans for 2013.

2012 In The Rearview Mirror

It’s been a good year for Bluefire and a good year for our industry. The eBook business is growing worldwide. Over sixty percent of our customers are located outside of the US. We’ve also seen our customer base expand to include businesses and associations who distribute high value content including ebooks, industry briefs and other professional publications.

We released major updates to our iOS and Android white label apps in 2012 with exciting new features as well as performance and user experience enhancements.

The 2012 feature updates included:

• Support for the new iPad Retina display
• Support for the new iPhone 5 screen size
• Support for iOS6
• Support for multiple concurrent user accounts (Adobe ID’s and Vendor ID’s)
• Single Sign-on option for Vendor ID customers
• Improved PDF performance and reading experience
• Support for system fonts, a feature that enables more reading settings and enhanced rendering of ePUB formatting
• Online dictionary look-up
• Support for external hyperlinks in ePUB and PDF titles
• Streamlined highlighting
• Sharing via Facebook, Twitter and email
• Contextual ebook text search results
• Collections (iOS only)
• Swipe for brightness control (iOS only)
• Enhanced side-loading (iOS only)
• Annotation export
• Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean text, including vertical writing and right-to-left page order
• Enhanced first-run user experience

The Asian language features noted above required implementation for support of specific elements of the ePUB3 spec. We will be adding more robust ePUB3 file format support to the platform moving forward.

Looking Ahead to 2013

In 2013 we will be focused on four primary areas of development:

1. Improvements to our iOS and Android White Label apps – This includes new features, user experience enhancements and performance improvements. Here are a few examples of our current high-priority new features:

• Zoom and pan on images in ePUB books (particularly useful for maps and diagrams,)
• Read aloud (when DRM permissions allow) – This is an important part of our ongoing effort to improve content accessibility
• A Back button, so that readers can easily return to their last reading position after following search result, anchor link, and so forth…
• Improved user management of loaned/rented items
• Improved user settings interface and workflows
• Major revamp of the Android user interface to reflect the recent and rapid evolution of common Android user experience paradigms, and to improve usability on new Android devices

2. Development of a new ePUB3 rendering engine with ACS4 DRM support.

3. Development of new web based services that are tightly integrated with our white label applications, with enhancements such as synchronization of reading location across multiple devices, analytics reporting of aggregate application usage statistics, and in-app notifications.

4. Development of white label reading applications for the Windows platform.

As our plans solidify we will provide regular roadmap updates with more granular details. We will also be demoing our work-in-progress at industry events and private meetings in the coming year.

We look forward to sharing a great 2013 with you!

– The Bluefire Team