Press Releases
Celartem Brings 50 Years of Playboy and Rolling Stone Magazine Back to Life
Celartem Technology Inc.’s DjVu® Document Format Provides Solution for Converting Back Issues of Magazines into Electronic Format
SEATTLE, Wash. – November 28, 2007 - Celartem Technology Inc., a leading provider of software solutions for managing and distributing digital content, today announced that its DjVu technology has been chosen by Bondi Digital Publishing of New York to capture and compress exact page-by-page reproductions of the entire Playboy Magazine and Rolling Stone archives.
On November 2nd Bondi released the first two products in its Cover to Cover series. Playboy Cover To Cover: The 50s a DVD-ROM set of the inaugural decade of Playboy Magazine andRolling Stone Cover To Cover: The First Forty Years which includes each of the 1024 issues published from Nov. 1967 through May 2007. Future products will include Playboy by decade as well as other magazine archives to be announced.
After creating hi-resolution scans of the magazine pages, Bondi compressed each image using Celartem’s DjVu technology, resulting in dramatically smaller electronic page images that have far better image quality than JPEG. Furthermore, DjVu digital replicas preserve the stunning visual quality of the print edition necessary to uphold such iconic brand names.
Creating a fully searchable digital archive of 98,000 pages of Rolling Stone and over 115,000 pages of Playboy required a file format which best preserved the original image quality while delivering the smallest possible file size. In addition, Bondi needed a file format with the fastest decode speed.
Bondi was first introduced to DjVu while developing the software interface used by The New Yorker Magazine for the highly successful The Complete New Yorker. President Murat Aktar explains, “Compressing scans of magazine pages tests the limits of any format. Text quality, image resolution, file size and decode speed are all critical. The team at The New Yorker evaluated every possible solution and selected DjVu. We conducted our own equally exhaustive evaluations for the Playboy and Rolling Stone projects and reached the same conclusion. Celartem’s DjVu technology best preserved the brilliance and experience of the original glossies.”
“We’re very excited that Bondi Digital Publishing saw our DjVu technology as the best solution for efficiently delivering more than 50 years of captivating stories and stunning images, immortalizing some of the most popular cultural events of our time,” said Dr. Hyung Lim, Celartem’s General Manager of Document Imaging. “Articles by the finest writers of the 20th century such as Hemingway, Kerouac and Steinbeck in addition to photography contributed by legends such as Annie Leibovitz have been preserved for future generations to enjoy.”
The Playboy and Rolling Stone DVD-ROM sets retail for $100 and $125 respectively. Learn more about Document Express with DjVu here. Download the free DjVu Browser Plug-in here.
About Bondi Digital Publishing
Founded in 2004, Bondi designs, creates and publishes a product line of complete print magazine archive box sets in digital editions. Under the leadership of David Anthony and Murat Aktar-two of today’s top experts in digital user experience design and the migration of music, print, film and games to digital platforms-Bondi has quickly built a reputation within the magazine industry as innovators in the creation and development of consumer friendly, searchable digital magazine archives. Consumers were first introduced to its software platform as part of the landmark offering, The Complete New Yorker (released in September 2005). Bondi has since landed major licensing deals with key international media corporations, including Playboy Enterprises and Wenner Media, the owner of Rolling Stone magazine.
About Document Express with DjVu
Document Express with DjVu products combine advanced compression algorithms with sophisticated image segmentation technologies, enabling the rapid exchange and efficient archiving of complex color documents and optical character recognition (OCR) in more than a hundred languages, all without compromise to image quality or text legibility. The core technology underlying DjVu, developed in AT&T Research Labs, is in open source. The Document Express Software Development Kit (SDK) enables developers to integrate DjVu encoding and decoding functionality into their applications and enables organizations to integrate the DjVu technology directly into their document management workflow.
About LizardTech
Since 1992, LizardTech has delivered state-of-the-art software products for managing and distributing massive, high-resolution geospatial data such as aerial and satellite imagery and LiDAR data. LizardTech pioneered the MrSID technology, a powerful wavelet-based image encoder, viewer, and file format. LizardTech has offices in Seattle, Denver, London and Tokyo. For more information about LizardTech, visit www.lizardtech.com.
About Celartem
Celartem Technology Inc. http://www.celartem.com develops and sells innovative technologies for storage, access and distribution of rich media content. Celartem has developed technology in the areas of digital image compression, scalable image viewing and secure content distribution and management. Celartem is listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange, JASDAQ: 4330. Established in 1996, Celartem is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and has a wholly owned subsidiary, Celartem Inc. d.b.a. LizardTech with headquarters in Portland, OR.
