Book Business Extra Q&A—Nick Bogaty, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum

Book Business Extra: From what you saw at November’s meeting at the AAP, how are book publishers catching on to the standardization of eBooks?
Nick Bogaty: Publishers, especially trade publishers, have long created their XML eBooks in Open e-book (OEB) format. OEB was first released by the IDPF (then Open eBook Forum) in 1999. That latest version 1.2 was released in 2002. There are tens of thousand of eBooks in OEB now, and production of this XML format is pretty ingrained in the workflows of trade publishers and some academic publishers. OEB is largely used now as an interchange format to export to end consumer proprietary formats. Publishers basically hold their XML OEB files in a database and convert as necessary to final delivery formats.