Bookalope: News

7 October 2024

After several months of hard (and often meticulously tedious) labor we are proud to receive the Benetech Approved Publishing Tool certification; Bookalope is the first tool ever to pass! Together with Benetech we’ve demonstrated that born-accessible, single-source, highly automated publishing tools can be built! You can read the original Benetech announcement on LinkedIn here.

☞ We will update our servers with the Benetech changes soon, so stay tuned and check back here…

April to September 2024.

It’s been a busy few months, and the best is yet to come… soon… at #fbm24. But we did update our Bookalope Extension for InDesign a few months ago, and Bookalope was mentioned as remediation tool by the EU’s Accessible Backlist Ebooks Lab! In preparation for the big news soon, we continue to release minor new features and bug fixes to our servers; most notably Bookalope can now automatically generate an Index from simple text annotations in a Word file. And lastly, with great help from Paula at Dendra Studio we finished the first round of Bookalope’s How To and Recipe videos, so check out our Youtube channel!

April Fools’ Day, 1. April 2024.

Much has happened and we’ve not kept our Newsreel here updated. Today we released a new version of the Bookalope tools and server, which add oodles of fixes and a bunch of new and interesting features — most notably improved language support and richer markup for accessible ebooks. We also started adding “recipe videos” to our Youtube channel which, in just a few minutes, dive deeper into specific Bookalope features that address this or that problem.

January to June 2023.

We released our new tutorial videos on Youtube in this playlist, where throughout five videos we dive into all aspects of using Bookalope. We also released a new blog post The Book and Bookalope where we talk about our AI and what it does exactly. And as we continue to engage with our user community and with select publishers, our backend software evolves new and exciting features.

June to December 2022.

During the second half of this year we’re focused on marketing, and working with existing and new customers on the new Bookalope tools. The video tutorials are coming along, and our social media campaigns show their first results. We’ll continue to receive feedback from our users, and we will respond to suggestions and bug reports to improve our software.

March, April, May 2022.

With Bookalope v2 published and available, we’re now working on a set of new video tutorials (our Youtube channel is somewhat dated) and blog posts; in concert with these efforts we also started a more organized marketing campaign. On the technology side, we’ve started testing a new feature that automatically adjusts and migrates the original document styling for the structured and accessible book… hang on for that one!

Twosday 22. 2. 2022.

It’s been many months in the making, and twoday we release Bookalope v2, the first major feature release since we shipped Bookalope a few years ago! Much user feedback has made its way into this release, and amongst heaps of goodness two features stand out: a completely rewritten-from-scratch EPUB and HTML import, and a simplified and consolidated workflow. Take a look at our updated online User Manual for all the juicy details. Happy Twosday!

October, November, December 2021.

In preparation of our next big Bookalope release, we’ve rebuilt parts our infrastructure for better scale and easy update & deploy cycles. Our redesigned workflow is now available for Beta testing and so is the new ebook import. We’ll spend the remaining weeks until our release in February with intensive testing, updating our documentation, and catching up our open-source repositories with all these changes…

July, August, September 2021.

This year’s third quarter was all about ramping up for the next one, with a couple of big features on our roadmap: a completely redesigned workflow and a brand-new ebook import! In addition we’re polishing our open-source Bookalope extension for InDesign to integrate our tools more tightly into existing workflows. Stay tuned for more news in the next quarter…

April, May, June 2021.

Our most notable improvements were fixes and additions to our design styles for EPUB and PDF export. However, we’re currently working on a few major feature improvements! So, while we continue to ship fixes and minor feature updates, all good things take time which is why we have little else to announce for now… Exciting news are to come!

January, February, March 2021.

Amongst heaps of minor fixes and improvements, we’ve added external link tracking (to enrich your marketing campaigns) and proper right-to-left script support to ebooks, and all generated files can now be accessed through a shared, public link. Long overdue: you can now upload new images to replace existing ones when you import your document!

December 2020.

We took the month of December off, to tend to our families and treat ourselves to a well-deserved break.

October, November 2020.

The end of November brought heaps of fixes and improvements across Bookalope’s core and server — happy Thanksgiving! Most notable is probably the new toolbar for our paragraph editor which makes managing issues, typos, and markup so much more comfortable! We also improved page-break import and we continue our focus on books containing multiple languages. And other little things, too many to mention…

July, August, September 2020.

We were so busy preparing a new release of Bookalope for this year’s Frankfurt Buchmesse! That release included this great new website and a detailed user manual; we expanded our content classification AI and improved the InDesign support; rebuilt and extended the metadata management; and we made great strides with building better accessible ebooks including automatic support for glossary, index, page-numbers, flattening tables, footnotes & endnotes, content generation from metadata, and multiple languages. Phew!

June 2020.

At this year’s Digital Publishing Summit we presented a talk/tutorial “Towards automating accessible ebooks” (Youtube), and we updated the Bookalope server with all the brand-new features we demoed!

April and May 2020.

We added support for accessible PDF and for ONIX3 metadata, although the most significant changes were internal improvements to how Bookalope’s AI classifies paragraphs. We’re getting ready for the big June release!

February and March 2020.

We shipped a wealth of new features, improvements, and fixes with a major version update in early March. One of the first to notice is a much flexible account signup. And: the Bookalope extension for InDesign is now available through Adobe Exchange!

January 2020.

After a well-deserved hiatus at the end of last year, we’re back in full swing. We will release a major update to the server core tools in early February, which contains heaps of improvements to the document structuring, as well as a completely overhauled design for ebooks and print.

October 2019.

We’ve published another blog post The need for intelligent tools, and are currently busy improving the document import to be more versatile around identifying the semantic structure components of a book.

September 2019.

After the whirlwind that was Digital Book World we updated the server’s billing model, and alongside heaps of improvements the extension for InDesign.

August 2019.

We have shipped the Bookalope extension for InDesign, and it’s available through Adobe Exchange. In its wake we improved some of the document import, particulalry for images.

July 2019.

More niftification of the webapp’s Structure page, and fixes and improvements to document ingestion on the server side. We also started publishing How-To posts that show how to solve various conversion problems using the Bookalope tools.

June 2019.

Our new extension for Adobe InDesign is nearly finished! Meanwhile, the latest beta version is available here as a free download.

May 2019.

Revamped the Structure page for the webapp (oh it’s so much more productive now) and further improved and expanded the generated A11y support for ebooks. And these are only two big-ticket items…

March and April 2019.

A busy couple of months: I joined a panel discussion at Ebookcraft about AI and publishing flows; added improvements to Bookalope’s cascading AI-assisted structure analysis; and Accessibility of generated ebooks is now more accurate and detailed.

February 2019.

We have deployed our new cascading AI classifiers on Beta to enable a more flexible semantic structure analysis. Watch out for more announcements!

January 2019.

Heaps of minor fixes to the server, and added our old and new Blog page again, so enjoy the reads!

December 2018.

Enabled our new Cloud Functionality to automate upgrading and fixing of invalid Ebooks. Contact us for details!

November 2018.

Joined PubU to speak about AI and publishing, and made some exciting connections.

September 2018.

We’re beta-testing importing EPUB ebooks, where Bookalope now supports automatic upgrading of ebooks in obsoleted EPUB formats.

August 2018.

Bookalope now flattens hand-drawn figures and graphics in a Word manuscript into bitmap images for final export.

May 2018.

Today we’re launching our awesomely stylish new website, including a much polished set of Bookalope tools!

April 2018.

We’re testing WYSIWYG conversion of your book: Bookalope maintains the original styling and does not structure your book’s content. It’s a simple way to convert your book, but as a result no semantic structure and Accessibility features are available.