IDPF Working Group Improving on EPUB Format for E-books
Vice Chairman of the EPUB 2.1 Working Group Garth Conboy discusses how the new version will benefit book publishers.
July 16, 2010 By Joe Keenan
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With the steady increase in e-books sales and the growing demand from consumers for this format, many publishers have had to adjust their business models and production processes to provide their books as e-books. According to May sales figures released this week by the Association of American Publishers and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), e-book sales increased nearly 163 percent for the month, and year-to-date e-book sales increased 207.4 percent over the same period last year.
In September 2007, the IDPF adopted the Open Publication Structure 2.0 e-book specification, which includes the EPUB format, as an official industry standard. Now, a working group comprised of IDPF members is busy updating the industry's existing EPUB 2.0.1 file format to expand its applicability as a delivery format, and as a cross-reading system interchange and production format. Currently adopted as the standard format for trade e-books in North America and Europe, the IDPF hopes its newest version of EPUB (2.1) will be adopted globally for textbooks, digital magazines, news delivery and more, as well as facilitate increased interoperability across reading systems.
Garth Conboy, vice chairman of the IDPF's EPUB 2.1 Working Group (and president of eBook Technologies, an e-book product and services provider), spoke with Book Business Extra on what the revised format will mean for book publishers and e-book readers when it goes live early next year.
Book Business Extra: What can publishers expect from the new EPUB 2.1 file format?
Garth Conboy: We've just completed a maintenance version 2.01 that resolves some minor errors in the specs and provides clarification. The 2.1 or 3.0 effort is still somewhat unnamed, but to be finished early next year. There's really 14 areas that we're focusing [on] for technical development. Probably some [are] more interesting to the magazine and richer content space, some more interesting to books, newspapers. ...
One area of significance is increasing the level of print fidelity you can get to with EPUB publications--so increasing the amount of control you have over styling and layout and being able to process publications such that they look good on multiple-size screens and multiple aspect ratios without having to code specifically to particular devices ... .
Another important area is rich media and interactivity. There's always been ways to extend EPUB to embed videos, audio, Flash or HTML5, but if you're doing that in the current standard, you tend to know that a particular reading system does its extensions one way and you code to that particular reading system, which doesn't serve the broad swath of content consumers very well. So we want to come up with standard cross-reading systems and mechanisms to bake in rich media and interactivity. That will likely be focused around HTML5, looking at enhanced metadata, particularly magazine and newspaper prism feeds, and also looking at how we might do closer integration with ONYX and the metadata space.
In September 2007, the IDPF adopted the Open Publication Structure 2.0 e-book specification, which includes the EPUB format, as an official industry standard. Now, a working group comprised of IDPF members is busy updating the industry's existing EPUB 2.0.1 file format to expand its applicability as a delivery format, and as a cross-reading system interchange and production format. Currently adopted as the standard format for trade e-books in North America and Europe, the IDPF hopes its newest version of EPUB (2.1) will be adopted globally for textbooks, digital magazines, news delivery and more, as well as facilitate increased interoperability across reading systems.
Garth Conboy, vice chairman of the IDPF's EPUB 2.1 Working Group (and president of eBook Technologies, an e-book product and services provider), spoke with Book Business Extra on what the revised format will mean for book publishers and e-book readers when it goes live early next year.
Book Business Extra: What can publishers expect from the new EPUB 2.1 file format?
Garth Conboy: We've just completed a maintenance version 2.01 that resolves some minor errors in the specs and provides clarification. The 2.1 or 3.0 effort is still somewhat unnamed, but to be finished early next year. There's really 14 areas that we're focusing [on] for technical development. Probably some [are] more interesting to the magazine and richer content space, some more interesting to books, newspapers. ...
One area of significance is increasing the level of print fidelity you can get to with EPUB publications--so increasing the amount of control you have over styling and layout and being able to process publications such that they look good on multiple-size screens and multiple aspect ratios without having to code specifically to particular devices ... .
Another important area is rich media and interactivity. There's always been ways to extend EPUB to embed videos, audio, Flash or HTML5, but if you're doing that in the current standard, you tend to know that a particular reading system does its extensions one way and you code to that particular reading system, which doesn't serve the broad swath of content consumers very well. So we want to come up with standard cross-reading systems and mechanisms to bake in rich media and interactivity. That will likely be focused around HTML5, looking at enhanced metadata, particularly magazine and newspaper prism feeds, and also looking at how we might do closer integration with ONYX and the metadata space.
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