IDPF Conference Reveals Consumer Habits, Platform Strategies, New Standards

We take tablets to bed, outdoors, and "fear losing them" the way we would a beloved novel, he said. "We did not do that with laptops."

New Standards

The newest iteration of the global IDPF e-book standard, EPUB 3, offers expanded applicability for global language support and is designed to work with "complex, interactive, media rich titles" like textbooks, STM books and magazines, the IDPF's Bill McCoy said. The new format also improves accessibility for readers with disabilities, offers styling and layout enhancements, improved metadata capabilities and is specifically designed to work with HTML5.

McCoy announced that, after a year-long development process, the updated standards have been approved and passed by all stakeholders in the IDPF working group, a key step towards its adoption.

Masaaki Hagino and Daihei Shiohama of e-book developer Voyager Japan demonstrated EPUB 3's advantages for rendering Japanese text on digital devices in a separate session on the business of digital publishing.

In a powerpoint presentation, they also took attendees on a trip back in time to one of the earliest e-books: a English-language floppy disk version of "Jurassic Park" developed in Japan in 1991, which offered familiar features such as full-text search. "All the fundamental elements [of today's e-books] are included here," they noted.