9 Things You Need to Know About ePub3
Without doubt, e-books have (finally) arrived. Market share is in double-digits and rocketing upwards, and dedicated devices, tablets and smartphones are proliferating. Ignoring your digital readership potential is not an option; and treating e-books as an afterthought by offering up a recycled printer's PDF is not a digital strategy. For some types of highly formatted content, a PDF version may be useful, but if that's all you do, you'll be leaving significant distribution and enhancement options (aka revenue) on the table. Since your readers expect to be able to consume your premium content on devices of all shapes and sizes, mere paper-replica PDFs just won't cut it.
The ePub file format has rapidly emerged as the open standard format for next-generation digital publications. ePub is supported by B&N Nook, Kobo readers, Sony Reader, Adobe Digital Editions, Google Books, Ibis Reader, Bluefire Reader, Safari Books Online, VitalSource and many more. While Amazon Kindle is known for using a proprietary delivery format, most Kindle sales are of content that started life as ePub files, i.e., Amazon already utilizes ePub as its key interchange format.
Based on HTML and related Web standards, ePub enables e-books that "reflow," adapting gracefully to different devices. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF, a trade association set up by the digital publishing industry to oversee and implement e-book standards) has recently finalized a major upgrade, ePub 3. When Book Business asked me to offer its readers some key things they need to know about the impact of ePub 3 on their digital business, I simply couldn't refuse:
1. ePub 3 is enhanced, interactive e-books
ePub 3 is based on HTML5. That brings many benefits (more of which below), but foremost among them is HTML5's capabilities for rich media (audio and video) and interactivity (via JavaScript). Open standard HTML5 is already supported by all modern browsers and is rapidly displacing proprietary alternatives such as Flash Player, Microsoft Silverlight/XAML and forms/scripting within PDFs (which were never widely supported beyond Adobe's own Reader software). And by adopting ePub 3 (and thereby HTML5), you will automatically get the benefits of further improvements in the pipeline of browser technology's rapid-pace evolution. That beats being stuck with expensive native-app codebases, or worse, sole-source proprietary technology neglected—or abandoned—by its vendor.
