The eBook Solution

The eBook solution is an advanced online publishing system.  It takes advantages of the fact that most publishers already have their contents in PDF format (for those contents that are not already in PDF format, there are many approaches to convert them into PDF).  By parsing a PDF document and extracting contents resources from the document, the system is able to publishing the document online with user friendly and feature rich online reader.  The whole process can be made fully automatic so the cost and time it takes to publish online can be kept to the very minimum.

The detailed process can be illustrated below:




The input of the system is a PDF document.  For example, the PDF document of a paper book.   If only paper books are available, there are commercial solutions available to convert them into PDF documents (additional OCR module is required if online search is needed).
The system parses the input PDF document and extracts the contents, figures and metadata from the document as well as generating an image file for each page.  Those resources are then stored while the original PDF document is discarded.

An end user can now read the book online using the online reader provided by the system.  There is no additional software for an end user to download and install and it supports all three major browsers: IE, Firefox and Safari.