This is one of Astea Solutions’s internal projects, built entirely from scratch, and co-owned by Astea Solutions with multimedia and publishing industry visionary, Bob Stein. Astea Solutions and Bob share a longstanding interest in the future of books and how people’s reading habits are evolving.

As a cloud-based publishing system, SocialBook enables users to create, distribute, consume, and share multimedia enhanced EPUB books. This includes not only text but video and audio. Uploaded SocialBooks are available for reading in a robust, efficient, and elegant Web-based reader. Readers can create groups with friends, classmates, or reading club members, and engage in closed or open context-driven conversations.

SocialBook is currently in public beta and is being used in university and K-12 settings, including The Dalton School of New York City where it has been adopted with remarkable results for the study of language, literature, and video-based history courses.

SocialBook’s Media Conversion Service (MCS) is a custom, highly efficient, distributed media processing framework developed by Astea Solutions. MCS handles asynchronous backend pre-processing of uploaded content, including the conversion of media files to a wide array of formats supporting all browsers and the ingestion of various e-book formats.