Products and Solutions


Swoon Reads

We worked with The Lab to create a new site for Macmillan Publishers' Swoon Reads, a site for crowdsourced YA romance novels.

We moved the site from WordPress to Django and Wagtail. We used Django REST Framework to allow for AJAX-driven features.

One of our most prominent tasks was to build a new e-reader on top of epub.js, an open-source JavaScript library that reads EPUB files and displays them in the browser. We added features like bookmarks, comments, and customizable style controls. Along with the reader, we worked out a conversion process whereby users can upload a .docx file and convert it to an .epub that will format nicely in the reader.

On the open source front, this project gave birth to wagtail_blog, A WordPress-like blog app implemented in Wagtail.

A sample .docx file converted to epub, displayed in the e-reader

We implemented a commenting system; comments are attached to a paragraph in the text

Change styles: color schemes, typeface, and font size.