Buyer's Guide: The State of Ebooks in 2014
The W3C itself has launched a "Digital Publishing Interest Group" to explore how the Open Web Platform can be improved to meet the needs of publishers. And EPUB 3 itself continues to evolve. The EPUB 3.0.1 update is in the final stages of approval, as is the new spec for EPUB Indexes. Work on EPUB dictionaries and glossaries is moving ahead. The Advanced Hybrid Layout (AHL) Working Group is developing specifications for enabling books like comics, manga, and graphic novels (as well as magazines) to be optimized as EPUB. As mentioned above, the EDUPUB profile for EPUB will be a huge enabler for e-textbooks. And the IDPF is working with the W3C on the issue of Open Annotations, which will enable things like highlighting and comments to be done in an open, non-proprietary way so they can be exchanged between systems.