Bill Mccoy's speech at 2011 EPUB Asia-Pacific Summit in Taiwan Check out: http://goo.gl/ntAv3

1. The
Business
Impact
of
EPUB
3
2011
EPUB
亞太高峰會
(Asia-­‐Pacific
Summit)
October
24,
2011
Bill
McCoy
ExecuIve
Director,
IDPF
Good morning. It’s a great pleasure be at an Asian event dedicated entirely to EPUB. I’m really excited about EPUB and
especially the new version, EPUB 3. I’m excited about the cool features and technology in EPUB 3 which was just finalized
earlier this month. But, excited as I am, I’m not going to talk about any of this today. Instead, I’m going to focus on the
business impact of the new release.

2. Working
to
enhance
global
availability,
richness
and
accessibility
of
digital
publicaIons
…
by
developing
and
promoIng
open,
interoperable
standards.
But first a little digression.
The IDPF is the global trade and standards organization for digital publishing. We have over 250
members from all parts of the value chain. We’ve recently worked to define more clearly our unique
mission, which is to help make digital publications more broadly available and accessible. We do this, by
developing and promoting EPUB as the open standard format for representing eBooks and other digital
publications interoperably.

3. This is exciting times for publishing– it really hit me visiting Frankfurt Book Fair and seeing a Gutenberg
Bible in Mainz that we’re part of the biggest change to publishing in 500 years.

4. OK, 800 years

5. Bücher
für Alle !
I saw a slogan in Frankfurt that really resonated for me. “Books for everyone!”.

6. Libros digitales
para todos
I’m speaking at another conference this Thursday in San Francisco - one of the
talks has pretty much the same title.
You could say that this is a distillation of the IDPF mission.

7. After Frankfurt I had a chance to enjoy a bit of Taiwan’s natural beauty. The
trails to get to these places were amazing – both the journey and the
destination were very rewarding.

8. But I kept seeing signs that frankly kind of made me laugh. I mean, you’re walking to get
somewhere great, but you’re exposing yourself to danger to get there.

9. It’s
exciIng
Imes
for
publishing.
But
very
challenging!
One place even had a helmet-loaning station. In the US I think we’d just close
the trail.
But where I was there, in a narrow rocky gorge, there was no other way to get
to the beautiful places.
And I started thinking it was a metaphor for what we are all going through in
the publishing industry
It’s exciting times, but also undergoing incredibly disruptive times.

10. Bücher
für Alle ?
This got me feeling doubful about our noble goals - every major technology transition creates winners and losers.
And the reality is that authors and publishers need to get compensated, or else there won’t be much premium
content for readers. And the value chain that supports content creators needs to eat too or it won’t exist. So I
started wondering whether EPUB 3 was really on track to meet those needs.

11. “Books for all started sounding kind of like a joke we make about politicians
promising “a pony for everyone!”.

12. Standards
have
absolutely
no
intrinsic
value
…
their
only
point
is
to
improve
efficiency
of
soluIons
that
uIlize
them
And really, IT standards don’t exist to achieve noble goals. And they rarely are
innovative, technically, because they aren’t themselves products or solutions.
They are much more mundane things. Some people call IT standards
“plumbing”, but I think even that’s giving standards too much credit. It’s very
very rare that you need to use standards to create content or software
systems.
To me, standards aren’t the plumbing for IT, they are just blueprints for
fabricating plumbing components that plug together – they make building
solutions cost-effective and scalable. You could roll pipe and machine tool
plumbing fittings but it would take you a lot more money and time. You use
standard fixtures when you build a house because it makes business sense.
So, for an IT standard to be valuable it has to significantly improve business
results for adopting organizations. Otherwise, it won’t be adopted. And there’s a
whole lot of standards sitting on the shelf to prove that point.

13. How
will
EPUB
3
impact
your
business?
So the only way it really makes sense for you to evaluate the latest release of
EPUB is from a B2B perspective. It’s not about cool technology or noble goals.
The key question is about impact on your business.
So, let me get to it.

14. EPUB
3
speaks
your
language
First of all, I think everyone knows that EPUB 3 adds global language support, Vertical writing, writing
direction, page progression direction, ruby, OpenType fonts, and more. I won’t go into any details or
demonstrations of this but I suspect you’re going to hear a lot about this from other speakers today. This
does illustrate a key point about the relationship of EPUB to broader Web Standards. EPUB is based on
Web Standards which is a key benefit of EPUB. But, global features in CSS such as writing modes were
kind of languishing in an unfinished state. The W3C has may priorities and commercial publishing and
typography are not necessarily high on their list. But that is precisely why IDPF exists, to serve that
community. So, IDPF took the initiative in helping to drive them forward, working in liaison with W3C CSS
Working Group. So this is a case where EPUB is helping to advance Web Standards, not just following
them.
So, EPUB 3 brings you an immediate and direct benefit by supporting your content that requires these
features, and indirectly because it’s going to lead to Web browsers getting more of these features as well.

15. EPUB
3
makes
enhanced,
interacIve
content
EPUB 3 is based on HTML5. I guess everyone who has heard of EPUB 3 knows that and also knows that HTM5 adds video and
multimedia features. Of course, readers increasingly are going to expect publications to appropriately take advantage of the digital
medium. Children’s books are a natural, textbooks will increasingly be expected to contain multimedia and interactivity –
simulations, built-in assessments, etc. New kinds of transmedia creations for entertainment are being invented every day by
creating author-slash-artists. EPUB 3 is a platform that enables all of this innovation, in publications that can be downloaded and
used offline as well as consumed online “from the cloud”

16. …
everywhere
…
And that content can be used everywhere. There’s no need to depend on
custom platform app development or proprietary runtimes whether they be
general purpose like flash or silverlight, or custom publishing-focused
solutions. Every modern browser now supports HTML5, and Reading Systems
are increasingly powered by browser engines (like Apple iBooks which is
based on the Webkit engine also used by Safari). And as browsers get faster
and more capable, you get the benefits for free.

17. …
scalable
…
And EPUB 3, by being based on HTML5, enables using standard Web
techniques to implement interactive functionality. That means you don’t need
specialized and expense app developers or specialists in proprietary formats,
but can leverage widely available skills that you’re already using for web
development. As publishers, you need to produce at scale. You can’t afford to
hand-craft titles one at a time – you’ve got to have replicable processes in
place.

18. HTML5
is
opImized
for
web
applicaIons
chrome.angrybirds.com
I’ve been talking up HTML5. So why do we even need EPUB 3 – why not just
use HTML 5 as-is?
Well HTML5 is pretty awesome, but the focus is not on documents or
publications. It’s app.
It’s amazing to me that a pretty engaging and immersive application like Angry
Birds can now be implemented in HTML5. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of
what you are going to start seeing.

19. What
can
you
do
with
HTML5
content?
But if you look at the source for Angry Birds in HTML5 it looks a lot like
spaghetti. A thicket of markup, style sheets, and mainly a lot of JavaScript and
data. Because of the legacy of hand-coded HTML, it’s not even possible to
reliably parse HTML markup with standard tools… “street HTML is basically a
jumble.
The only thing you can really do with an HTML5 app is “run it” and see what
happens. That makes It much, much harder to repurpose, to distribute through
channels, or even to archive it with confidence that it will work in browsers next
year. It may not even work right now if some of the various assets and services
it points to all across the Web aren’t available.
So you might say that HTML5 is powerful, but too wild for what publishers
need for scalable replicable processes.

20. EPUB
3
is
HTML5
domesIcated
• Structured
• Navigable
• Packaged
• XML
• Interoperable
So a critical critical business benefit of EPUB 3 is that it is not just HTML5 – it
makes HTML5 much more useful.
EPUB 3 is HTML5 content that follows rules defined in our specifications to
make that content structured, to ensure that it can be navigated, that is
packaged together with all necessary assets for offline consumption, and that
uses XML for all components including using XHTML not “street HTML”. The
results of this provide interoperability, which means tools and solutions that
produce and consume – or ingest – EPUB can interoperable with each other.
This last one is a key point. I predict that we are going to see a proliferation of
HTML5-based publishing solutions from vendors offering some of the other
capabilities in a different way than EPUB 3. After all the IDPF has no monopoly
on using HTML5, and there are a lot of ways that some of these things could
be done. But make no mistake about it – vendors offering HTML5 solutions
that are only “EPUB like” won’t deliver the interoperability of EPUB 3. To go
back to the plumbing analogy, their fittings will work best, or even only, with
their pipes.
I’ll come back to this vendor angle in a few minutes but first a bit more about
what we’ve added in EPUB 3.

21. EPUB
lets
content
reflow
21
everyone probably knows that EPUB is designed to support reflowable content, that can for example have 3 columns on a large PC screen,
and 2 columns on a tablet. Panning & zooming around a fixed-format PDF on a 6” or smaller screen is not one of life’s most pleasant
experiences, and consumers have rapidly voted with their feet in favor of reflowable content.

22. EPUB
3
is
also
for
fixed
layout
But, not all content is able to reflow easily. And, currently, if reflow is chosen then there is no way for publishers to convey page-level
formatting. If you’ve got a tablet then a larger page format may be very readable. So we have already started seeing adoption of
new features in EPUB 3 – inherited from HTML5 - that enable reflow. Apple has jumped the gun a bit on EPUB 3 and fixed format
and it’s taking off rapidly. This is an example of fixed-layout content that arguably could have been done in a reflowable manner, but
it may not have been cost effective and may not have been a good iPhone or e Ink experience.

23. Fixed-­‐Layout
EPUB
-­‐
2
This is an example of a kind of content that you might say is inherently paginated. Of course manga – comics – is another.

24. You have the kind of “spreads” you see in magazines – this one came from a book though. These are all real commercial titles

25. Now, I’m cheating a bit by claiming this as an EPUB 3 feature. But, hopefully only a little. EPUB 3 does add the basic capabilities
needed for fixed layout – absolute-position CSS as well as Scalable Vector Graphics – but we left out some of the metadata
needed to tie it all together properly. As tablet-based reading systems proliferate we need to make sure that the content being
created remains fully interoperable. And comics have additional requirements. So tomorrow we are going to have an IDPF technical
workshop here in Taipei to discuss fixed layout support in EPUB.
I’m being a optimistic that the IDPF workshop here tomorrow will be fruitful and help us avoid fragmentation in this key area.

26. EPUB
3
is
for
apps
and
websites
too
Adopting EPUB 3 is also an express lane for making it more economical and scalable to create
applications and websites too.

27. using
EPUB
with
browser
under
the
skin
saves
Ime
and
money
“There’s an app for that” has become a cliché. But it’s also something your CEO may be making a must-
do. Custom apps can certainly be developed without utilizing standards. But designing around EPUB 3 is a smart move. Under the
covers, this popular app is a thin veneer over an EPUB-based reading system that utilizes the Webkit browser engine built in to iOS.
This architecture frees the editorial and production team to focus on the content and the mobile app developers to spend their
(scarce and expensive) cycles on delivering a differentiated and engaging experience, with a lot less time needed to port it to other
platforms, since browser engines are on all of them. And a similar division of labor can work well for managing
production of excerpts and other content that you are distributing as web pages.
Now, I’m not arguing that every app publishers build should use EPUB. If your app will really be a custom
UI over a granular database form of your content, with no beginning-middle-end order, and not even any
articles or stories, then a completely custom app might be a better fit. But a whole lot of the time, the titles
publishers create will have aspects of stories to them – and after all humans are hard-wired for stories –
and using EPUB 3 can really be a win.

28. EPUB
3
makes
your
content
accessible
…
to
a
vastly
larger
market
EPUB 3 is superseding a specialized format (DAISY DTBook) for making publications accessible to people with disabilities. This is a
really big deal for this community and is the result of a close collaboration between IDPF and DAISY and its stakeholders. Even if
you don't need any features from EPUB 3, the benefit of switching from EPUB 2 simply in using HTML5's semantic markup may be
worth the upgrade all by itself. And meeting accessibility mandates is increasingly important for publishers.
But the business benefits of accessibility are not just for satisfying mandates for accessibility to the blind. The revenue opportunities
from accessibility are much much bigger than that. More and more people need larger print to comfortably read, and distributing
large-print p-books for every title is not realistic. Dyslexic and physically disabled readers also find traditional paper books
challenging. By some estimates as many as 20% of people have disabilities relative to reading... that's a big market to leave on the
table. And, we are all “situationally disabled”—we shouldn’t read while driving, and most of us while learning a to read—either as
children or as adults learning a foreign language—have wanted to listen and read simultaneously. Every EPUB-based e-book can
be, with a single click to increase the font size, a large-print edition. EPUB 3 also supports “media overlays” that enable prerecorded
audio to be synchronized with text (and it’s already in Apple iBooks). Offering up combo e-plus-audio books isn't about accessibility,
it's about a whole new business opportunity. I was going to demo this but I’m betting that you’re going to see it from one of the other
speakers later today.

29. EPUB
3
is
a
strategic
weapon
for
publishers
Well, now that I’ve talked about some of the specific ways EPUB 3 can deliver
business benefits I want to step back and look at the big picture. EPUB 3 can
be a key weapon for publishers and others – it’s strategic, not just tactical.

30. There’s a poker term called having “hand”. If you have it, you have a lot more
options, a lot more leverage.
In negotiations with digital distribution partners EPUB 3 gives you “hand”. Even
vendors who have stuck to proprietary formats have had to create workflows
accommodating EPUB. Most of the titles Amazon sells for Kindle were sent to
them by the major publishers as EPUB 2. Last week Amazon announced they
are following the footsteps of EPUB 3 and adopting HTML 5.

31. Why is that good? Remember, this is some solution providers’ ideal world.
As publishers, you want to get your premium content to readers. A level playing
field is much better for you.
EPUB, developed via an open and transparent process, and freely usable by everyone without patent encumbrances, ensures that
“level playing field”.
Now – some of you in this room ARE solution providers, not publishers. Probably YOU’D like to end up in control. But the reality is
that chances are slim for that to happen. EPUB 3 gives you plenty of room to differentiate your solutions and add value. Things like
navigation experiences, social reading, and much more are totally up to you. And certainly you are better off competing on a level
playing field than having it tilted against you. But you are free to attempt to tilt as much as you want – consider IDPF an insurance
policy.

32. And for publishers the risk is worse than just being disadvantaged. You might get locked-in. Standardizing on EPUB 3 for enhanced
e-books is a smart move to avoid that outcome.
Your content is king; don’t sell it out. Even if vendors offer to help subsidize conversion – there’s no free lunch, that bill will come
due, sooner or later.
You need replicable processes that are cost-effective – publishing for every proprietary platform du jour just doesn’t scale.
It creates a legacy headache.
And remember that each format you authorize for distribution multiplies the risk of introducing errata and other brand-diminishing
artifacts.
Just because someone says it’s HTML5-based that’s not good enough – remember, you want interoperability, to use standard tools
and services. There’s too much variation in “raw” HTML, too much room to create lock-in.

33. What
if
all
digital
books
were
controlled
by
a
few
commercial
companies?
The worst-case scenario is if one or more vendors ends up in total control over
distribution of all books.
It seems pretty obvious that some are trying to follow the iTunes/iPod playbook, and that the risk of one or perhaps a few
commercial vendors effectively controlling all commercial publishing is now an obvious danger.
Now, some folks in publishing may not be too alarmed. Adobe’s dictatorship during the desktop publishing era (PDF, PostScript)
was, by and large, benevolent, But, Adobe’s focus was on authoring tools, and now the issue is a potential chokehold on all
distribution.
If that should happen, based on from the iTunes/iPod model we can bet where the profits will go – to those who end up in
control of distribution.
Adopting EPUB 3 and making it your standard is a weapon to guard against that outcome. Because, no company controls
EPUB or the Web Standards it uses.

34. adopIng
EPUB
will
make
happy
readers
And, consumers and the libraries, government agencies, and other advocates
are waking up to this danger too. Adopting EPUB 3 is smart brand marketing to
savvy consumers – letting them see that you are going to be a doorway to
content, not a gatekeeper keeping them from it.
Practically speaking, using EPUB ensures that you’ll get your content out
everywhere – and readers want your content on the devices and apps they
want to use.
Last but not least consumers are increasingly noting quality defects in eBooks
– standardizing on distributing EPUB to your channels and insisting on
consistent handling will maximize consistency of your reader’s experience with
your content. After all you’re the publisher, and when there’s a typo or artifact in
the content, it’s going to reflect back onto your brand more so than the reading
system vendor.

35. It’s
your
EPUB
Another reason to adopt EPUB 3 is that you made it. EPUB 3 was developed by an open process over the past 18 months. We had
a working group of over 100 members, and I know a number of you are hear in the audience today. 2 of the 4 F2F meetings during
that process took place in Asia, one in Sapporo and one right here in Taipei.
EPUB’s custodian, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is the only global trade and standards organization specifically
for the digital publishing industry. And EPUB is the only publishing format that’s been developed in this kind of open, transparent
process.
That development continues and I encourage you, if you are not already a member, to join in order to get a seat at the table
Membership includes over 250 publishers, associations and governmental organizations, libraries and vendors. I’m delighted with
the rapidly growing membership in IDPF from Asia, with Taiwan being the fastest growing membership of all. Thank you for your
support!
You already indirectly support the IDPF if you are a part of member group that has already joined IDPF, such as Japan Electronic
Publishing Association, Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan, our hosts TPDF, BISG, EDItEUR, and IDEAlliance, Many
publishers, small and large, also value direct membership in the IDPF to give them a seat at the leadership table in setting
directions and priorities for enhancing and supporting this key standard. Of course membership brings other benefits such as
networking opportunities, discounts to conferences, and so forth. So I certainly encourage you to consider joining IDPF as well as
adopting EPUB 3 in your business.

36. The
future
of
publishing
is
up
to
you
But I want to stress that the IDPF is not a source of solutions.
As mentioned, standards exists only as a lubricant.
I've been talking about the business benefits of some of the things EPUB 3 is, and I also want to mention a key thing that it isn't.
EPUB 3 describes it doesn’t’ prescribe.
EPUB 3 doesn't say anything about what books and magazines in the digital world look like, or how we engage with them. No more
than HTML spec said anything about Facebook or Google.
I think it's an important property of standards - a requirement really - that it not be where you try to do innovation. That's particularly
important here because none of us really know what the future of books and magazines is going to be - there are going to be ways
to tell stories and teach that haven't even been imagined yet, so how can we possibly standardize the future of the book?
EPUB 3 is going to be a great foundation for that future, but it's really just a tool. EPUB takes care of the boring stuff so you can
innovate by delivering compelling content and experiences. It’s up to you to create the future of publishing.

37. Let’s
keep
moving!
Just remember, please don’t linger...
And clearly we are moving fast. We got EPUB 3 done in a year, which for a
standard is light-speed.
And, I'm eager to hear from other speakers today about innovation with EPUB
that's going on all across Asia and I'm delighted that all of you have invested
your valuable time in today's program.

38. EPUB
is
open
for
business.
To sum up. a global open standard for digital publications is good - because it's good for business. which is ultimately what we need
to make "Books for All!" a reality not just a slogan.
EPUB is that global standard and we’re working to make EPUB 3 an accelerant – helping you create and distribute compelling
content: broadening your reach, increasing engagement of your readers and lowering your costs. The platform to build your
innovation on. Thank you.

39. Any
quesIons?
bmccoy@idpf.org
idpf.org