New York, NY, May 23, 2011 (PRESS RELEASE) - The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced that EPUB® 3 is now a Proposed Specification for final member and public review. EPUB, an XML and Web Standards based format developed by the IDPF, has become a key global standard in the rapidly developing digital publishing industry, enabling digital books and publications to be portable across devices and reading systems. EPUB 3 is a major revision of the standard that aligns EPUB with HTML5 and adds support for key emerging requirements including video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements.
"EPUB 3 is by far the most significant advance in the over ten year history of the IDPF," said George Kerscher, President, IDPF and Secretary-General, DAISY Consortium. "In just one year, IDPF member organizations and invited experts, from around the world, have significantly enhanced all aspects of this standard. I’m particularly delighted that EPUB 3 marks the mainstreaming of accessibility capabilities within the universal commercial digital publication format standard –now every eBook can be a fully accessible eBook."
"EPUB 3 is a remarkable accomplishment" said Bill McCoy, Executive Director of the IDPF. "But much work remains to fulfill the promise of EPUB as the universal digital publication interchange and delivery format, and as we finalize EPUB 3 in the coming months the IDPF will deliver validation tools, samples, and best practices guidelines, and build on our momentum by continuing to advance the standard."
EPUB 3 has been in active development since May, 2010. This IDPF Proposed Specification, available at http://idpf.org/epub/30, is intended for member and public review and deployment by early implementers. It is anticipated that EPUB 3 will become a final IDPF Recommended Specification later this summer.
Publishing industry stakeholders are already enthusiastic about the new capabilities that EPUB 3 will deliver (see attached quote sheet). At the IDPF Digital Book 2011 conference today and tomorrow at BookExpo America, several sessions will showcase new EPUB 3 capabilities and discuss the EPUB 3 and the future of the EPUB standard.
yes i know. But not to the Mac (because there's no iBooks app for the Mac!) so there's no continuity in reading. Apple does a great job with user-experience but they've dropped the ball on that one.
The Mac doesn't need an iBooks application. The Mac needs Preview.app to be updated/extended to fully support the ePub 3.0 format, along with the ISO changes to PDF 2.0.
Then one could test all their ePub/PDF docs before publishing to the iBook Store without the need to test on the iPad or iPhone directly. They just need to add a Debug Mode for Document processing inside Preview which would be a big win on their part.
Yeah, such as when or if they are ever going to support something as basic as custom fonts. It is a real pain to make eBooks for the iPad when they don't follow the standards.
I checked one on my wife's Nook (something about Elephants) and it looks like a nice feature for the little ones.
I just spent some time looking, but I can't find a way to tell if a book is a speaking book. I tried to type several different phrases and words, but in checking the results, none of the books, as far as I could tell, were speaking books. It would be nice if there was a category for them, as there are supposed to be books that will do this.
Right now, it seems that unless you already know of a title like this, you're going to be frustrated.
My daughter grew up with the Mac, and we bought her many talking books that ran on it when she was very young, such as "Grandma and Me". I'm convinced that this was one of the reasons why she started reading regular books shortly after her third birthday. We had also bought her the D&K dictionary, which she memorized in one day.
Of course, the fact that she saw us reading much of the time was an influence as well.
Most of these come in both ePub (iBook) and Kindle format.
Also, if you run across some text that you want "publish" into iBook format, the Mac Pages app can export in ePub format -- including images, etc.
My 15-year-old granddaughter "wrote," and had us group read, an iBook to try to sell the family on spending $500 to attend NASCAR this summer at Infineon... Nice effort, but the jury's still out.
Yes, it's great. Been using it for years.
There's also the Google project of scanned books. I've got a lot of those as well. Google goes it differently. Where the Gutenberg project relies on people to OCR, edit and format the books, Google just scans the pages, including the covers, and every single blank page. The book is a PDF. But it's a scanned PDF, and runs tens of MB's in size. I've got lots of microscope and machinery books from the early 20th century, going all the way back to the early 18th century.
In addition, there are fantastic books about past times written in the actual time, that are now history books. I've gotten a much better idea of how people felt back in earlier times by people writing about them when history was being made. We'd be surprised at how they thought.
Comments
That list would be more interesting to me.
http://idpf.org/epub3_proposed_spec_released
EPUB 3 Proposed Specification Released
MAY 23, 2011
New York, NY, May 23, 2011 (PRESS RELEASE) - The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced that EPUB® 3 is now a Proposed Specification for final member and public review. EPUB, an XML and Web Standards based format developed by the IDPF, has become a key global standard in the rapidly developing digital publishing industry, enabling digital books and publications to be portable across devices and reading systems. EPUB 3 is a major revision of the standard that aligns EPUB with HTML5 and adds support for key emerging requirements including video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements.
"EPUB 3 is by far the most significant advance in the over ten year history of the IDPF," said George Kerscher, President, IDPF and Secretary-General, DAISY Consortium. "In just one year, IDPF member organizations and invited experts, from around the world, have significantly enhanced all aspects of this standard. I’m particularly delighted that EPUB 3 marks the mainstreaming of accessibility capabilities within the universal commercial digital publication format standard –now every eBook can be a fully accessible eBook."
"EPUB 3 is a remarkable accomplishment" said Bill McCoy, Executive Director of the IDPF. "But much work remains to fulfill the promise of EPUB as the universal digital publication interchange and delivery format, and as we finalize EPUB 3 in the coming months the IDPF will deliver validation tools, samples, and best practices guidelines, and build on our momentum by continuing to advance the standard."
EPUB 3 has been in active development since May, 2010. This IDPF Proposed Specification, available at http://idpf.org/epub/30, is intended for member and public review and deployment by early implementers. It is anticipated that EPUB 3 will become a final IDPF Recommended Specification later this summer.
Publishing industry stakeholders are already enthusiastic about the new capabilities that EPUB 3 will deliver (see attached quote sheet). At the IDPF Digital Book 2011 conference today and tomorrow at BookExpo America, several sessions will showcase new EPUB 3 capabilities and discuss the EPUB 3 and the future of the EPUB standard.
yes i know. But not to the Mac (because there's no iBooks app for the Mac!) so there's no continuity in reading. Apple does a great job with user-experience but they've dropped the ball on that one.
The Mac doesn't need an iBooks application. The Mac needs Preview.app to be updated/extended to fully support the ePub 3.0 format, along with the ISO changes to PDF 2.0.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portabl...Format#PDF_2.0
Then one could test all their ePub/PDF docs before publishing to the iBook Store without the need to test on the iPad or iPhone directly. They just need to add a Debug Mode for Document processing inside Preview which would be a big win on their part.
Does anyone have a list of how much of the which ePub specification iBooks fully supports?
That list would be more interesting to me.
http://idpf.org/epub3_proposed_spec_released
Yeah, such as when or if they are ever going to support something as basic as custom fonts. It is a real pain to make eBooks for the iPad when they don't follow the standards.
If you don't mind Mel.
I checked one on my wife's Nook (something about Elephants) and it looks like a nice feature for the little ones.
I just spent some time looking, but I can't find a way to tell if a book is a speaking book. I tried to type several different phrases and words, but in checking the results, none of the books, as far as I could tell, were speaking books. It would be nice if there was a category for them, as there are supposed to be books that will do this.
Right now, it seems that unless you already know of a title like this, you're going to be frustrated.
My daughter grew up with the Mac, and we bought her many talking books that ran on it when she was very young, such as "Grandma and Me". I'm convinced that this was one of the reasons why she started reading regular books shortly after her third birthday. We had also bought her the D&K dictionary, which she memorized in one day.
Of course, the fact that she saw us reading much of the time was an influence as well.
For those that aren't aware of it -- there is a wealth of free books out there at:
Gutenberg.org
Most of these come in both ePub (iBook) and Kindle format.
Also, if you run across some text that you want "publish" into iBook format, the Mac Pages app can export in ePub format -- including images, etc.
My 15-year-old granddaughter "wrote," and had us group read, an iBook to try to sell the family on spending $500 to attend NASCAR this summer at Infineon... Nice effort, but the jury's still out.
Yes, it's great. Been using it for years.
There's also the Google project of scanned books. I've got a lot of those as well. Google goes it differently. Where the Gutenberg project relies on people to OCR, edit and format the books, Google just scans the pages, including the covers, and every single blank page. The book is a PDF. But it's a scanned PDF, and runs tens of MB's in size. I've got lots of microscope and machinery books from the early 20th century, going all the way back to the early 18th century.
In addition, there are fantastic books about past times written in the actual time, that are now history books. I've gotten a much better idea of how people felt back in earlier times by people writing about them when history was being made. We'd be surprised at how they thought.