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Even if I had been able to fix the open issue, the work would have been of little help to us since both the BookReader and the IIIF standard have evolved too much in the intervening 5 years of development.
Conclusion
Eddie’s Feb 7 2024 remarks, after experimenting with IIIF plugin:
I have to conclude that the BookReader is not worth pursuing as a component of the digital collections. While impressive in its current form, it depends on a complex and ill-documented set of interfaces with the Internet Archive’s image and metadata servers, and relies in particular on a home-grown php image server script that looks difficult to maintain.
I certainly understand the IA’s desire (which can be inferred from their blog post) to move to a more interoperable standard for serving images, to and get out of the business of maintaining an image viewer altogether.
Jonathan has a different read, I think – while the IIIF plugin is definitely janky and unsupported, other parts of the IIIF reader appear more polished and working, and while under-documented, definitely appear to me to be more polished, and support configuration rather than depending on the exact API’s of IA servers. I would not personally make any assumptions about the future of the BookReader from the IA’s interest in IIIF (possibly another team/project, etc)