Book and magazine app development. For publishers who want to keep the reading experience in-house.

For book and magazine publishers, this has been felt for years: the relationship with the reader runs largely outside their own brands. Readers download e-books via Kobo or Bookchoice, listen to audiobooks via Storytel or Audible, and read magazines through large app aggregators. The publisher receives royalties and revenue reports, but does not know which reader finishes which chapter, where the drop-off points are, or what the reader opens next. The data, the retention and the rhythm of reading sit in the platform's app, not the publisher's.

A publisher's own app reverses that dependency. Readers download your imprint's or magazine's app, receive a notification for a new edition or a new book by a favourite author, and read offline on the train or on holiday. That reader sits in your subscriber database, you know which chapters are finished and which are not, and you can tailor the offering to actual reading behaviour rather than a platform algorithm. Many publishers started on a white-label e-reader platform (Bluefire Reader, OEM Kobo, a vendor licence that no longer exists) and now have an app without source code, which must be re-ordered from the supplier with every OS update. A custom app does not carry that dependency: code that is yours, reading design from your own list, and a maintenance contract you can exit yourself.

For magazine publishers, the same discussion applies as with magazine apps, with a twist of its own: subscription management for periodicals, where each issue is linked to a paying reader, with automatic renewal, cancellation within the statutory period, and a recovery flow for failed direct debits. For the magazine side we have a separate approach on the magazine app building page; this page focuses on the books side and the periodicals flow for magazines, whether weekly, monthly or quarterly, with archives and cross-title bundles. The payment and subscription layer itself often sits in a different system from the reading experience; annual subscriptions, quarterly packages, audiobook credits, single e-books or freemium trials we connect to a payment and subscription layer with iDEAL, Apple Pay, Google Pay and SEPA. For educational publishers with school licences and industry bodies with member subscriptions, variants of these apply.

Alongside commercial book and magazine publishers, we work with three related groups: educational publishers with reading programmes and learning-material apps, self-publishing platforms in the tradition of Brave New Books, and library organisations offering digital lending. The architecture (EPUB3 reader, DRM layer, metadata integration, subscription layer) fits all three, with different emphases.

For educational publishers, this means reading programme apps: a teacher assigns a reading pack to a class or pupil, reading progress is tracked per chapter, reading questions and interaction are built in, and the school licence controls access. We integrate with Entree Federatie or Kennisnet for SSO, with a school administration system, and with the publisher's back-office. In primary education there is a large overlap with children's book apps, so the same child-protection flow applies and advertising is excluded. For the full picture on education, see our education app page.

For self-publishing platforms, we build apps that cover the entire chain: manuscript upload, conversion to EPUB3, ISBN application, registration in CB Online, distribution and direct sales within the app itself. Royalty administration and payout flows are included, with real-time visibility for the author. For library organisations, we build apps for digital lending of e-books, audiobooks and periodicals. This is where the LCP DRM choice really comes into its own: lending runs on a time-limited licence (lend, return, holds) that Readium LCP supports cleanly. For all three, you get your own codebase, documented handover and no dependence on Appfront.