Sophie

Sophie is an advanced authoring application designed to help you create electronic/multimedia books that may include text, images, songs, videos, and animations.

You can take advantage of the fact that Sophie comes in a portable package and run it on your system by simply opening the executable file. It doesn’t store entries in your Windows registry. You can also copy it on portable media devices such as USB flash drives.

This is a Java-based utility so you need to deploy the working environment on your computer in order to make it work.

The program employs a multi-tabbed environment for helping you work on different projects at the same time. The well-structured suite of features provides access to several tools which are needed for customizing the pages, creating new connections to the server, and revising the info comprised in a book.

You can preview the books in full screen or presentation mode and upload data to a server via FTP connections or Sophie’s server.

Sophie gives you the possibility to create a new book by providing details about the title, page width and height, and adding as many pages as you want. An audio file (e.g. WAV, MP3, OGG) can be added in the background, and you may activate the loop mode and sync the audio streams with the pages.

The books can be saved to a file on your computer so you can easily import data in the future for making further adjustments. You can print the information, save the book on a server, and export data to HTML or PDF file format.

When it comes to editing the book content, you are allowed to add custom text messages, pictures (e.g. BMP, PNG, JPEG), songs (e.g. WAV, MP3, OGG), videos (e.g. AVI, MOV, MPEG), as well as PDF, TXT, and RTF files.

Plus, you can append an external book to the current one, record audio streams, use a spell checker, include comment frames for discussions inside of the books, as well as embed browser frames for adding fully functional web browsers in book pages. On the downside, the utility eats up a lot of CPU and memory so the overall performance of your computer may be hampered.

In conclusion, Sophie comes with a powerful set of features for defining books with rich media content, reader feedback and conversation within a networked environment.