E-book Standards

I’d fallen a little behind in reading my PWDaily e-newsletter, but I spent today catching up.

Back in September the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) officially standardized Open Publication Structure 2.0 and it’s “.epub” format.

In October, Hachette Book Group USA became the first trade publisher to officially adopt the e-book format for all of its e-book content. Since then Overdrive, a digital distributor of e-books and other media, has announced its support for the ‘.epub’ format. Also on the bandwagon is LibreDigital and VitalSource Technologies.

According to the IDPF website, “allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability (meaning they work with mulitple systems including Adobe, Sony, Amazon/MobiPocket, ViatalSource and others) between software/hardware for unencrypted reflowable digital books and other publications.”

Is this the way of the future? The epub-s allow reflowable text, they work with several of the most common e-readers, and allow publishers who adopt the standard to publish one file-format instead of many.

I haven’t tried to read an e-book downloaded in .epub format yet, but I will be interested in seeing how well it works.

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