Currently we are developing the next major Sophie version - 2.1. The new version contains a lot of stability improvements as well as the HTML 5 export that was started this spring. This will allow Sophie users to create interactive books and put them on the Internet right away. Readers will no longer need to even have Sophie installed. Early pre-alpha is expected at the end of August this year.

At its March board meeting, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation approved the release of funding for the Reading Sophie Books on iPad and Android project. The proposal for this project had been submitted by Astea and the University of Southern California to the Mellon Foundation's Scholarly Communications Program. As part of this project, Astea is developing an HTML 5 reader for rich interactive multimedia books. A format is being developed with advanced support for the declarative representation of books. Sophie will export full featured books in this new format, which will make such books accessible via a Web browser on PC, iOS, and Android devices.Some fixes

If you are attending the 2010 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting, January 19-21, in Austin, Texas, come find out more about Sophie 2.0 as Susan Metros and Holly Willis present a talk and demonstration titled "Reimagining the Book: A Multimedia Authoring Tool Named Sophie" on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California is seeking project proposals for exemplary Sophie 2.0 projects to be produced in collaborations between scholars and IML staff. If you have a project that would benefit from the unique compositional affordances of Sophie, and you wouldn’t mind having these become showcase projects on the Sophie 2.0 Web site, please contact Holly Willis. Include a project description and explain why Sophie 2.0 would enhance the project. hwillis@…