Origami turns EPUB from a portable document into a portable, addressable knowledge object that authors can create in many tools, publishers can distribute normally, readers can interact with deeply, and software and AI can understand without first reverse-engineering it.
Overview
- Authors / Writers: Origami lets authors use the writing tool they prefer while publishing work whose concepts, citations, passages, equations, figures, tables and spatial structures remain explicitly addressable and machine-readable.
- Editors: Origami lets editors review and comment on stable intellectual elements rather than page positions, making revisions, references, definitions and structural inconsistencies easier to track and verify.
- Publishers: Origami lets publishers distribute a standard EPUB that works in ordinary readers while also supporting richer semantics, interaction, AI, validation, preservation and deep linking.
- Readers: Origami lets readers actively explore a publication through precise citations, definitions, folding, live tables, 3D objects, spatial views, annotations and AI without losing connection to the authoritative source.
- LLMs / AI systems: Origami gives AI structured, addressable source material so answers can be grounded in exact passages, concepts, citations and relationships instead of arbitrary text chunks.
- Researchers / Scholars: Origami lets researchers cite, compare and trace exact claims, passages, concepts, equations and sources across publications and editions.
- Peer Reviewers: Origami lets reviewers attach comments to durable elements and see precisely what changed between manuscript versions.
- Students: Origami lets students move directly between explanations, definitions, references, equations, figures and AI assistance while always being able to return to the original source.
- Teachers / Lecturers: Origami lets teachers create precise reading paths, teaching overlays and concept-based activities without modifying the underlying publication.
- Librarians: Origami lets libraries index and connect works by concepts, citations, editions and individual passages rather than only by document-level metadata.
- Archivists: Origami preserves rich scholarly structure inside an open EPUB while keeping reader annotations and application-specific state separate from the publication.
- Repositories: Origami lets repositories expose stable links to exact scholarly elements and ingest structured metadata without replacing the deposited publication.
- Citation Services: Origami makes it possible to know not only that one work cites another, but exactly where and potentially what passage is being cited.
- Knowledge-Graph Systems: Origami provides explicit concepts, identities and relationships that can be turned into knowledge graphs without having to infer everything from prose.
- Search Engines: Origami allows search to return exact passages, definitions, figures or equations rather than only whole documents.
- Developers / Reader Makers: Origami gives developers an open, documented publication structure on which they can build new reading, analytical, spatial and accessibility tools without reverse-engineering the originating software.
- Reference-Manager Developers: Origami enables citations that can resolve to exact source elements while carrying canonical bibliographic data with the publication.
- Accessibility Tools: Origami lets accessibility systems radically change presentation while preserving the identity, structure and meaning of the underlying scholarly content.
- Translators: Origami allows translations to be aligned to stable source elements so citations, figures, revisions and provenance can remain connected across languages.
- Copy Editors / Production Teams: Origami separates semantic structure from presentation, allowing styling and production changes without destabilizing references or document identity.
- Data and Reproducibility Specialists: Origami can preserve both published results and the formulas, figures and relationships needed to inspect how those results were produced.
- Scientists, Engineers and Medical Researchers: Origami allows structured mathematics, computational tables and real 3D research objects to become integral parts of the publication rather than detached supplements.
- Museums / Cultural Heritage: Origami can combine readable scholarship with inspectable digital objects, spatial presentations and provenance in the same publication.
- Journalists / Fact-Checkers: Origami makes evidence trails more precise by connecting claims and quotations to exact source passages.
- Lawyers / Policy Analysts / Standards Authors: Origami enables durable citation and comparison of exact clauses, definitions and revisions independently of page layout.
- Institutional Knowledge Workers: Origami lets reports and policies become reusable knowledge objects whose summaries, maps and dashboards remain linked to authoritative source passages.
- Rights Holders: Origami’s stable element and resource identities can support finer-grained attribution, licensing and reuse tracking.
- Funders / Research Institutions: Origami makes funded research more inspectable, reusable and preservable by exposing its internal scholarly structure rather than only its final appearance.
- Standards Bodies: Origami lets standards be published as readable documents whose clauses, definitions and relationships can also be addressed and processed by software.
- Conference Organisers / Programme Committees: Origami can turn proceedings into a connected, queryable corpus instead of a collection of isolated papers.
- Bibliometrics / Digital Humanities: Origami enables analysis of how concepts, citations and arguments move through literature at passage level rather than only document level.
- General Readers: Origami provides richer navigation, explanation and interaction while still remaining an ordinary EPUB when no advanced software is available.
- Future Software Agents: Origami gives agents a predictable way to discover a document’s structure, authority, relationships and exact source elements without depending on proprietary application APIs.
In Detail
Authors / Writers
Origami EPUB lets an author publish not only formatted text but the structure of the thinking itself: addressable passages, explicit concepts, citations, equations, tables, spatial objects, relationships, and authored views. Crucially, Origami can be treated as a publication target rather than an authoring-application format, so the author does not have to adopt a particular editor in order to create a rich Origami publication. more…
Editors
Origami turns the manuscript from a sequence of pages into a collection of stable, inspectable intellectual objects. Editorial work can therefore attach to meaning and structure rather than to brittle page coordinates, and many integrity checks can be performed automatically before publication. more…
Publishers
Origami gives publishers a way to ship a richer scholarly product while remaining EPUB. The same file can degrade to ordinary reading in a plain EPUB reader while exposing much richer semantics, interaction, citation, AI, spatial, validation, and preservation capabilities in aware systems. more…
Readers
For readers, Origami changes the publication from something that is merely displayed into something that can be acted on while remaining tied to the authoritative source. Different views, annotations, AI assistance, spatial arrangements, and computational exploration can all preserve the identity of the exact passage, figure, equation, definition, or reference involved. more…
AI / LLM Systems
For an LLM, Origami changes the document from something that must largely be reverse-engineered from reflowed prose into arbitrary chunks into something that can be interrogated as a structured, addressable knowledge object. The central benefit is not simply that an AI can read the text; it is that the AI can ground its interpretation and output in source-defined structure and return evidence that a person can inspect. more…
Archivists / Digital Preservation Specialists
Knowledge-Graph Builders / Knowledge-Management Systems
Reference-Manager and Tool Makers
Conference Organisers / Programme Committees
Digital Humanities / History of Science
Accessibility-Tool Developers and Readers with Disabilities
Copy Editors / Production Teams
Data and Reproducibility Specialists
Scientists, Engineers, Architects, and Medical Researchers
Museums / Cultural-Heritage Institutions
Lawyers / Policy Analysts / Standards Authors
Institutional Knowledge Workers
Funders / Research Institutions
Advanced Interactions Enabled by the Architecture
These are not necessarily all implemented today. They are interactions that become realistically possible because Origami supplies stable elements, semantics, relationships, provenance, and authored interaction data. more…
The Broader Benefit
A further consequence is that Origami can become a common publication target across many authoring environments. The converter can normalize structured HTML/XHTML, Markdown/Pandoc, JATS/XML, DOCX/ODT, LaTeX, notebook formats, and other sufficiently structured sources into the same addressable Origami publication model. This separates where an author thinks and writes from how the scholarly work is finally published.
The deepest advantage is not any single interaction.
Plain EPUB is primarily a very good portable publication. Origami EPUB aims to make that publication a portable knowledge object.
Its paragraphs, concepts, citations, equations, tables, figures, relationships, authored layouts, versions, and bibliographic identity can participate in richer interactions without first being extracted into somebody else’s proprietary database.
The publication remains the authoritative object, while richer interfaces and external reader-created layers can evolve around it.