DITA has built digital reading platforms since 2015 — for public and national libraries, publishers, universities, NGOs and commercial reading services across the US, Europe, East Africa and South-East Asia. DITA Platform is that same product, opened up so an organisation can set it up without us.
Eleven years of building this for institutions with budgets and procurement cycles, while the libraries who needed it most could never reach any of it.
The protection layer under DITA is Readium LCP — the open DRM standard behind most of Europe's public digital lending. That isn't a library we picked up. Our founder served on the Readium Foundation board, was Lead Mobile Engineer on Readium R2, and has worked as an LCP expert at EDRLab since 2020.
DITA Platform is where that experience is assembled into one product — catalogue, protection, lending, identity and reader apps built together from the standard up, so a library that has no engineering team can still run all of it.
Several things this product could obviously do are absent on purpose, and they are the reason institutions trust it with readers.
The product behaves the same whether it serves fifty readers or a country. Only the arrangements around it change.
One organisation, set up in an afternoon on a card. Hospitals, schools, congregations, community collections, personal libraries.
The content and DRM gateway, in production eight years across several countries — including eKitabu, U Minnesota and Minitex, and the Canadian Electronic Library.
Kosova is the first: publishers, libraries, schools, ministries, authors and readers under one roof, in Albanian.
Libraries with no budget, funded by someone else, running the identical product.
DITA is her practice, and she is who answers when you write. Thirty years of engineering before the libraries work — banking systems in Frankfurt, mobile products in New York — and teaching throughout: adjunct professor at Baruch College and NYU School of Professional Studies, and organizer of NYC Swift, Swift Camp and Library Camp. She works in German, Albanian and English.
The common thread across eleven years: getting protected content to readers who are entitled to it, at institutional scale, without the protection getting in the reader's way.
The platform is one half of the practice. The other is the work we've always done: architecture and engineering for organisations building their own reading systems — an LCP integration, an authentication layer, a migration off a dying DRM stack, a mobile architecture that has to last a decade, an accessibility pass before an audit.
LCP integration, key management, migration between DRM stacks, and getting publishers comfortable enough to license.
Patron authentication, SSO, consortium and multi-institution access models, and the proxies that hold them together.
iOS, Android and web reading clients — including Readium-based ones — built to be maintained for years rather than rewritten.
WCAG and EPUB accessibility work on existing platforms, ahead of procurement requirements or an audit.
That was the whole point of building the self-serve version. Free up to fifty readers, no card, no call.