Hypothes.is Partners with NYU Libraries, NYU Press, Others to Bring Open Annotations to eBooks

From a Hypothes.is Blog Post:

Today we are announcing a partnership to bring open, collaborative, cross-platform annotation to eBooks. Together with NYU Libraries, NYU Press, Evident Point, the Readium Foundation and the EPUBjs project, Hypothesis will be working to bring annotation to EPUB, the standard format for digital books.
Digital books represent an enormous class of content which at present cannot be collaboratively annotated with others. 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.
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….we were thrilled when last fall the NYU team approached Hypothesis with an interest in accelerating the availability of annotation within the ReadiumJS framework in order to enable annotation for their catalog of open-access digital titles. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under their Enhanced Networked Monographs project, NYU is providing financial support and end-user guidance. Evident Point Software, which counts several core Readium contributors among its staff, has been contracted to complete the remaining tasks within the Readium codebase to support the proper anchoring of annotations within EPUB’s reflowable text. With direction from Hypothesis, they will also focus on the several technical requirements needed within the open annotation framework.
“This integration is strategic for us,” said David Millman, Assistant Dean for Digital Library Technology Services at NYU, “and we hope it will be helpful to many more and wider communities too. This effort could have a huge impact on the way people continue working with books, and with each other.”
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Together, our goal is to complete a working integration of Hypothesis with both EPUB frameworks by Summer 2017. NYU plans to deploy the ReadiumJS implementation in the NYU Press Enhanced Networked Monographs site as a first use case. Based on lessons learned in the NYU deployment, we expect to see wider integration of annotation capabilities in eBooks as EPUB uptake continues to grow.

Read the Complete Blog Post (777 words)

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