• Eben English, eenglish [at] bpl.org, Boston Public Library

Another day, another library reinventing the book-viewer wheel. When will the madness end? This talk will explore the current landscape of book-viewer/page-turner applications for digital library systems with an eye towards helping you make the right decision for your project. We’ll look at some the major players on the market (such as Internet Archive BookReader, Wellcome Player, Mirador, and WDL-Viewer to name a few) and compare them based on a number of criteria: feature sets, mobile/tablet friendliness, ease of integration, code health, test coverage, “market share” (number of implementers), and other important factors. We’ll look at the results of ACTUAL USABILITY TESTS to see what features users REALLY want in a book-viewer, and how each app measures up.

We’ll also discuss important recent trends (such as the IIIF Presentation API, ReadersFirst, and NYPL’s Library Simplified initiative) that have the potential to shape the book-viewer development landscape in the immediate future. Which page-turner applications are best poised to adopt/integrate/leverage these emerging standards? Which will become obsolete? This talk has the answers you need.

Slides