Bill Kasdorf

new standards being developed and established standards being updated are increasingly produced in a spirit of collaboration, or at least with the goal in mind to avoid conflict with widely used standards. We're seeing real convergence occurring.

What is most striking is that folks who used to be firmly committed to doing things in proprietary ways (often for the perfectly reasonable goal of differentiating and competing in the marketplace) are coming to realize the benefit of conforming to standards

While it may be a bit soon to say the ebook business has matured, it's definitely true to say it's finally outgrowing its awkward adolescence. Today, ebooks as we have come to know them are taken for granted. But the more important news is how many of our assumptions about them are being challenged. Here are a few of the highlights.

Despite the popular [mis]conception that digital textbooks haven't taken off, the educational ecosystem-particularly in higher ed-is where some of the most active digital developments are happening. Most college textbooks have associated online resources and are often available as ebooks or online.

When EPUB 3.0 was officially unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, 2011, it was taken by many as the spec to end all specs.

At last, we could really get to work creating ebooks with all the things we’d always wished for — basic things like the sophisticated typography and layout we can do in print, and beyond-print features like video and interactivity — as well as some things we hadn’t thought to want, like global language support and rich metadata. Not to mention something we knew we should do but that was “too hard” before: real accessibility. Best of all, we could make just one file that would work the same everywhere…

The euphoria didn’t last long. Sure, EPUB 3 told us how to do all those things; but did they all actually work anywhere?

That was 18 months ago. Guess what? Progress happens.

In the early days of the digital revolution, vendors were often the only ones who knew how to do that work. As they struggled to make the transition from print to digital, publishers had to rely on that. It worked then and it still does. It's how the vast majority of digital publications are made.

The importance of metadata goes beyond books and magazines. It's increasingly essential to all media: print, ebooks, images, videos--it's what makes it all work together.