A decade dedicated to the development of open digital reading

EDRLab completed 2025 on a solid note and is stepping into 2026 with a clear mission: to develop and maintain a robust, interoperable infrastructure for digital reading worldwide. Through reading apps, standards crafting, and knowledge fostering, the non-profit organisation is quietly influencing how readers will discover and enjoy books in the future.

Created as an industry-funded laboratory aiming for public benefit, EDRLab develops open, non-proprietary technologies that help publishers, libraries, and readers move away from closed ecosystems. The organisation focuses on open standards, accessible reading tools, and shared infrastructure rather than standalone products.

Its flagship developments include the Readium toolkits, a software development kit that facilitates the creation of reading applications, and Thorium Reader, a free, highly accessible reading app used by hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide.

The Lab also maintains LCP (Licensed Content Protection), a modern, efficient DRM designed to support lending, sales, and subscriptions without locking users into a single platform.

2025: Growth, milestones, and global presence

In 2025, EDRLab strengthened its financial base and accelerated its technical roadmap. A growing share of revenues came from LCP, allowing the team to expand while keeping its technologies open and widely available.

• Thorium Reader passed one million downloads, consolidating its position as a leading accessible ebook application for libraries and readers.
• The Lab contributed to key accessibility and EPUB standards at W3C, helping to improve support for annotations, mangas, webtoons, and accessible fixed-layout ebooks.
• EDRLab’s experts spoke at major events, including the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs and the Digital Publishing Summit in Dublin, reinforcing its international role.

Making reading more accessible and intelligent

A major part of EDRLab’s work is about making digital books usable for everyone, including readers with disabilities. In 2025 and early 2026, that mission began to intersect with advances in artificial intelligence.

• The Radiance project, launched with partners Isako and Fenixx, explores how AI can automatically generate or improve image descriptions in scholarly publications, easing the work of accessibility experts.
• Thorium Reader and Readium Speech continued to evolve with better text-to-speech, media overlays, and tools that help readers personalise their experience.

Thorium everywhere: desktop, mobile, and web

Thorium is no longer a desktop app only; it is becoming a suite that covers computers, phones, and browsers, aiming consistent, high-quality reading experience in all situations.

• On desktop, the 2026 roadmap includes improved navigation in book catalogs (using the OPDS protocol), EPUB printing, built-in dictionaries, and translation tools.
• Thorium Mobile, currently in private beta on iOS, is meant to be a fully multimodal, voice-controllable reading app that supports ebooks, audiobooks, and LCP-protected publications, with strong accessibility features.
• Thorium Web reached version 1.0 and focuses on reflowable and fixed-layout EPUBs, with upcoming priorities including audio support, reading-position sync, and the WCP content protection for commercial deployments.

Training, data, and the future of the book

Beyond software, EDRLab positions itself as a knowledge hub for digital publishing. Through European projects and new observatories, we want to help the sector make better decisions, faster.

• The ThinkPub programme, co-funded by Creative Europe, is organising conferences and training sessions in cities such as Prague, Bordeaux, and Brussels. This initiative aims to equip small- and medium-sized publishers with the tools to navigate the challenges of digital disruption effectively.
• In partnership with the SNE, we successfully finalised a set of best practices in the first quarter of 2025. These guidelines will steer publishers toward creating accessible, high-quality EPUB ebooks. This initiative also paves the way for a potential European expansion planned for 2026.
• On the standards front, EDRLab continues to actively participate in discussions on EPUB 3.4, OPDS 2, and the international dialogue on TDMRep, the protocol that allows publishers to express their preferences for text and data mining applied to their publications.

For publishers, libraries, developers, and accessibility professionals, the message is simple: EDRLab aims to provide the shared infrastructure behind a more open, inclusive, and resilient digital book ecosystem. Readers may never see its code, but they will feel its impact every time they borrow an ebook, stream an audiobook, or discover an accessible title online.​