A summary of the changes and benefits that can be expected from EPUB 3. Aimed at a non technical publishing audience. Independent Publishers Guild's quarterly Digital meeting in October 2011 held at Faber & Faber, London.
1. EPUB 3.0
Why should you be
interested?
Nic Gibson
21st September 2011
@CorbasLtd
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2. Big picture
• Solves some problems with EPUB 2.01
• Standardises things that used to be reader specific
features
• New multimedia features
• Dynamic content
• Improved metadata
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3. What’s wrong with EPUB 2?
• Unclear specifications
• Some things are just hard
• The table of contents
• The cover
• …
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4. Problems fixed
• Tables of contents
• Conformance issues
• Multiple representations
• Vector graphics
• Equations
• Directional text
• Fixed layouts (sort of)
• Much better stylesheet support
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5. New opportunities
• If you needed some features, you had to create an app
• Now you can do
• video
• audio
• synthesised speak-along
• synchronised speak-along
• Scripting!
• Semantics (for the academic publishers)
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6. Audio and video
• Done iBooks?
• If you have you know how it works in EPUB 3
• But…
• it’s a formal part of the specification now
• given the increase in capabilities of readers, it’s going to
be fairly standard
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7. Speak-along
• Media overlays allow synchronised recorded audio
• music
• speech
• Alternatively, you can get synchronised synthesised audio
• speech only
• there are cues you can use to make the audio sound
less like a 1950s sci-fi film
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8. Scripting
• Scripting (via JavaScript) is an option in EPUB 3
• Pop-ups
• Animation
• Crosswords
• Puzzles and quizzes
• No well-defined fallback
• Works well in iBooks already
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9. But that’s not all
• Referencing URLs for images
• We have semantics!
• possible to define that something is a footnote
• indicate that the content is a glossary
• Links into EPUB files have been defined
• It’s up to the reading devices to handle it though
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10. Problems?
• Fixed layout was deliberately not standardised
• No Kindle conversion path (yet)
• No simple solution to problems with
• footnotes
• tables
• No readers yet
• very hard to try it right now
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11. Status
• Most recent version of the spec was 8th September
• No devices yet
• InDesign doesn’t output EPUB 3 yet
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12. Now what?
• Join the IDPF
• Have a say in the future
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