Readium

Readium
Basic information
Founded	2013-01-29
Legal Structure	Non-profit
Industry	Software
Also known as	Readium Foundation
Official website	https://readium.org/

Readium Foundation is a non profit that produces "reading system toolkits" that can be deployed across multiple platforms and digital publishing formats. According to its certificate of incorporation, it was incorporated in Delaware, USA in 2013. It has multiple members including: The European Digital Reading Lab (EDRLab), Bibliovault (University of Chicago Press), Columbia University Library, eKitabu, New York Public Library, New York University Library and DRM Inside Co., Ltd.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Background

"The Readium project was started by the IDPF in 2012 because the EPUB 3.0 specification had been released late in 2011, but no implementation yet existed (or, at least, had been publicly released). So IDPF provided some funding and encouragement and two firms, Evident Point and Bluefire, took the lead in developing a JavaScript implementation of a significant part of the EPUB 3 spec."

The JavaScript implementation lacked features and was written as a Google Chrome extension. It also didn't provide native implementations for devices and "it couldn’t support DRM securely." After additional development, they released the open source Readium SDK Core.

"The SDK was designed from the beginning to support DRM ( Digital Rights Management ), a mandatory feature for digital library lending, and also required by many publisher for anti-piracy matters. It was moreover designed to be DRM-agnostic, able to support multiple DRM implementations. However, while that capability existed in the SDK, there was also an increasing perception over time that the existing DRM implementations (Adobe, Kobo, Sony) were too heavyweight and proprietary and there existed a need for a new open-source DRM specification and implementation. The result was the Readium LCP (Licensed Content Protection) specification and implementation, which is rolling out in 2017."

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Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

User freedom
User privacy
Business model
Market control

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Incidents

Add one-paragraph summaries of incidents below in sub-sections, which link to each incident's main article while linking to the main article and including a short summary. It is acceptable to create an incident summary before the main page for an incident has been created. To link to the page use the "Hatnote" or "Main" templates.

If the company has numerous incidents then format them in a table (see Amazon for an example).

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Readium category.

Example incident one (date)

Main article: link to the main CR Wiki article

Short summary of the incident (could be the same as the summary preceding the article).

Example incident two (date)

...

Products

Readium LCP
Readium Mobile
Readium Desktop
Readium Web
Readium Web Publication Manifest

References

↑ "Membership Overview". readium.org. Archived from the original on 23 Jun 2026.
↑ "READIUM FOUNDATION CERTIFICATE OF INCORPORATION" (PDF). readium.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 Aug 2024. Retrieved 23 Jun 2026.
↑ "Readium Project Goals". readium.org. Archived from the original on 11 Mar 2026. Retrieved 23 Jun 2026.
↑ "A Bit of History". readium.org. Archived from the original on 23 Jun 2026.

[1] "Membership Overview". readium.org. Archived from the original on 23 Jun 2026.

[2] "READIUM FOUNDATION CERTIFICATE OF INCORPORATION" (PDF). readium.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 Aug 2024. Retrieved 23 Jun 2026.

[3] "Readium Project Goals". readium.org. Archived from the original on 11 Mar 2026. Retrieved 23 Jun 2026.

[4] "A Bit of History". readium.org. Archived from the original on 23 Jun 2026.

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