EPUB3 Still Not Ready for the Prime Time

Every year, as a precursor to Book Expo America, the IDPF holds its annual two day conference. It brings all of the movers and shakers of the digital world to hold panels and talk about the current state of affairs of digital ebooks and future formats. The Daisy Consortium, IDPF, and W3C all talked extensively about how EPUB 3 was doing and the speakers were all trying hard to convince publishers to gravitate towards this format. Although progress has been made, the format is not ready to be deployed in earnest. Almost every publisher we talked to expressed reservations about getting involved in the next generation of the EPUB3 ebook format. If you are unfamiliar with this format, it borrows heavy elements from HTML5, and allows for audio, video, and the ability to change the language on the fly. It is certainly appealing on a fundamental level for anyone wanting to do interactive content, kids books, cook books, and other media-centric activities. The main problem is none of the best features are standardized yet and the format is likely to never be fully completed. For example, dictionaries are still being developed and are not fully integrated. This means if you want to have patrons look up words in English, French, or a myriad of other languages, they have to code it themselves. We heard that dictionaries won’t even be functional until the end of the year. Also, you currently can’t share your notes, highlights, or annotations with other users. An independent body within the W3c is working on this issue, but there is no estimated delivery date. If you want to restrict your users to only access your content in a specific market, geolocation is also not currently available. The BBC, Microsoft, Google, and many other companies are currently lobbying for this structure to protect their content and make sure domestic publishing rights are maintained. Any publishing company experimenting with EPUB3 is likely familiar with the Readium open sourced software. This is a tool that people can use to test their enhanced ebooks and get a sense on how they look on Kobo and Sony. Currently, the entire Readium project is undergoing a huge enhancement that is due out in August. It will include a public SDK, that companies can use to develop their own e-reading apps for Android and iOS. It will include features like fixed page layout, dynamic pagination, embedded fonts, and more! When this new version of Readium comes out, the old Chrome plugin will be discontinued and be officially depreciated. As much as the new EPUB3 format is tossed around, the majority of the industry still uses EPUB2. We talked to Dark Horse after one of the sessions and the comics publishing company was surprised to learn that the new format is backwards compatible with the old format. Many companies still think that if they implement the EPUB3 framework, they will have to edit all of their old files, books, comics, and so forth. This is not the case, as it is all backwards compatible. If you want to learn more about EPUB3, HTML5, and dedicated apps, and how they would fit into your publishing pipeline, we wrote an epic three part series that talked to some of the leading publishers, companies, and the bodies actually trying to standardize the format. You can read PART 1, PART 2, and PART 3, to get a sense on the perception people have on the various formats. EPUB3 Still Not Ready for the Prime Time is a post from: E-Reader News

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