Vital Source Technologies, Inc., an Ingram Content Group company, and Metrodigi®, a cloud-based content creation software company, have announced a collaboration at the EDUCAUSE 2014. This collaboration provides educational publishers with a powerful end-to-end solution for the production and distribution of customisable, interactive digital products. As a result, publishers will be able to develop robust interactive content more efficiently and affordably, and students will be able to access highly interactive and visual course materials across a wide range of devices through the VitalSource Bookshelf® eReader and distribution platform.
Metrodigi’s cloud-based content creation platform, Chaucer®, empowers publishers to efficiently create, manage, and publish highly interactive digital content. Traditionally, the high cost of development has deterred many publishers from producing interactive learning materials. However, with intuitive prototyping tools, interactive widget wizards, and smart book structuring algorithms as well as support for a wide variety of e-book formats, including the industry standard EPUB 3.0, Chaucer dramatically reduces the time, cost and complexity of creating enhanced educational content.
The work between Vital Source and Metrodigi will enable immediate, simple EPUB 3.0 production through integration with specific VitalSource Bookshelf features inside Metrodigi’s Chaucer, including ‘Publish to Bookshelf’ and ‘Bookshelf MetaData.’ As such, publishers will easily produce interactive elements using standard templates or fully customised and branded widgets through Chaucer and an integration of Vital Source FLOE® with Chaucer.
This interactive content will add to VitalSource’s growing catalogue of eTextbooks and digital course materials, which currently includes more than 500,000 titles from 750 educational publishers, in use at more than 6,000 campuses worldwide.
