South African digital publishing company Snapplify has launched its foreign language content template ePub to cater for the digital publishing market in foreign languages.
Snapplify believe the market for digital publishing in foreign language is “far from saturated”, highlighting under representation in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America.
HumanIPO reported in January Snapplify were among the new developer partners of BlackBerry as they searched for apps for their new BB10 platform.
“Digital publishing service providers are few and far between that truly understand the complexity of the language and the obstacles that face foreign language publishers struggle with to get their content in the digital sphere to tap into the global market,” the company said.
According to the Cape Town-based company, its lack of general availability is due to the complication of developing such an interface.
Challenges exist such as multi-character lingo as well as reading order of Arabic and Hebrew languages, which differs being from right to left, other than most Western languages.
Benefits from ePub include foreign language publisher access to sell digital content to global readership in a niche market via mobile stores.
Active since last month, ePub functions on Apple, Android and BlackBerry platforms, as well as through the web.
African-based Kotobarabia, the largest collection of Arabic eBooks in the world, is using ePub through its iPad app for sales.
