News & Trends: IDPF's Digital Book 2010 - More Standards Than Woodstock
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- Peter Brantley, director of BookServer Project, Internet Archive: With devices like the iPad emerging, it's time "to rethink how we reach, inform and educate people …," using formats that are not strictly text. These principles guided recent revisions to the EPUB standard, an IDPF-established open e-book standard to simplify e-book distribution to accurately display content on multiple devices.
- Garth Conboy, president, eBook Technologies, Inc., and EPUB 2.1 Working Group vice chairman: EPUB 2.1 will feature enhanced support for rich media (e.g., video and interactivity—quizzes, games). It also will establish standards for enhanced global language support (and with support for reading beyond left to right). Annotation support and native support for mathematics (MathML) are also in the works. A draft of EPUB 2.1 will be made publicly available in December 2010, and plans to ready the standard for adoption are set for May 2011.
- Liza Daly, president, Threepress Consulting: The current version of EPUB does support interactivity and animation (though it's debated whether EPUB is best left for text-based books); one method is by using javascript via the script element. "The specification says that while the script element is valid, and can be included in EPUB books, reading systems 'should not' execute it." In other words, they can, but are discouraged from doing so. "The specific language here may change in the next revision of EPUB to make script support less frowned upon, but that will have to be determined by the working group in the coming months."
Find out more about the forthcoming EPUB 2.1 in an upcoming issue of the Book Business Extra e-newsletter. (If you are not currently a subscriber, you can sign up for a free subscription at BookBusinessMag.com, and click on "Subscribe to Book Business Extra," along the right-hand side of the site.)
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Noelle Skodzinski
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