Bloom Reader integration into the Kolibri Ecosystem

[rtibbles]

Overview

The Bloom Reader and associated BloomPub file format is a rich multimedia format for creating engaging reading experiences for early readers, with affordances such as integrated sign language 'read aloud' and verbal read aloud functionality.

The Bloom Library contains many books in the BloomPub format, translated into a huge range of languages, meaning that integrating this file format into our ecosystem would immediately unlock many resources for learners in many languages.

Contributors

• Technical lead: @rtibbles
• Individual contributors:
• Other relevant LE team members: @jredrejo

Goals

• Allow Kolibri to render BloomPub format books
• Allow Kolibri Studio to import BloomPub format books in the user interface and via ricecooker
• Create language specific channels of books from the Bloom Library

### High level tasks
- [ ] https://github.com/learningequality/le-utils/issues/124
- [ ] https://github.com/learningequality/kolibri/issues/12237
- [ ] https://github.com/learningequality/ricecooker/issues/501
- [ ] https://github.com/learningequality/studio/issues/4583
- [ ] https://github.com/learningequality/kolibri-library/issues/18
- [ ] https://github.com/learningequality/kolibri-library/issues/19

[nikkuAg]

Will start with the task of Uploading BloomPub files to the studio, which will also require working add bloom pub in format presets in le-utils

[hatton]

Hi from the Bloom Team! It's great to see this work happening.

Here's a couple of notes as you embark on this.

1. When it comes to reading BloomPUB from other apps, the task is one of Bloom Player integration, rather than Bloom Reader, which is just one of the existing apps that can play BloomPUBs.

2. BloomPUBs are ever-evolving; they aren't like ePUBs or PDFs where there is a long expensive process for proposing/accepting new features. Instead, we simply make the change and ship a new Bloom Player that supports it. Until Kolibri, all app-based consumers of Bloom Player have been either supported by the Bloom Team or another team within our organization, SIL. To support external use we need to up our game and make it easier to know what's coming so that you can ship new Bloom Players versions at the time that works well for you. For example we publish to npm, but there aren't github releases and the changelog.md has been ignored. We are currently heads-down releasing Bloom 5.6 and Bloom 6.0 beta, but we will schedule some maintenance on the library production side of this soon.

3. Another implication of our lightweight definition of the BloomPUB format as "whatever Bloom Player can handle", you'll want to avoid relying on anything in the format so that we don't accidentally break you. If you find a need to read something from the format, please let us know.

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss anything.

[rtibbles]

With the release of our first BloomPub channels from the Bloom Library, this is now complete!