DITAPlatform · run your own library
Consulting & engineering

We still take the hard problems.

The platform is one half of the practice. The other is the work we have done since 2015: architecture and engineering for organisations building their own reading systems. An LCP integration. An authentication layer. A migration off a DRM stack that is being retired. A mobile architecture that has to survive a decade. An accessibility pass before an audit.

Talk about a project About the practice
Why we do both

The self-serve platform exists because the same requirements kept arriving from organisations too small to commission any of it. The consulting exists because the large ones still need work no product can do for them.

Where we go deep

Four areas, eleven years.

These are the problems we are called for by name. Each one is production work we have shipped and maintained, not a capability slide.

Protection & DRM

Readium LCP integration, key and licence management, migration between DRM stacks, and the technical answers that make a publisher comfortable enough to license to you.

Identity & entitlement

Patron authentication, SSO, consortium and multi-institution access models, and the proxies and entitlement rules that hold them together at scale.

Reading apps

iOS, Android and web reading clients, including Readium-based ones, built to be maintained for years rather than rewritten at the next platform change.

Accessibility

WCAG and EPUB accessibility work on platforms that already exist, ahead of a procurement requirement, a legal deadline or an audit.

How it usually starts

Three shapes of engagement.

One

A review

A few weeks. We read the system, talk to the people running it, and hand back what we found and what we would do about it. Often this is all a team needs before a decision.

Two

A build

A defined piece delivered end to end — the DRM layer, the entitlement service, the reading client — specified, built, documented and handed over to your team.

Three

Embedded

We sit inside your engineering team for a period, on your standups and in your repository, while the architecture is being set. Used most where the shape of the system is still open.

Always

Yours at the end

Open standards, your repository, your keys, your infrastructure. No engagement here ends with you dependent on us to keep it running.

Track record

Who this work has been for.

Vendors, national and public libraries, publishers, universities and international bodies. Sometimes the whole platform, sometimes the single layer nobody else could get right.

Ask about a similar project
Start a conversation

Tell us the problem.

A paragraph is enough to know whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will usually know who is.