IDPF Urges Adoption of .epub Standard at Forum
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 05/20/2008
- Conference draws large numbers
- Potash hopes .epub will spark “explosion of adoption from all corners and all markets.”
To the publishers and vendors attending the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) conference in New York on May 14, ebooks are already a given: the innovators and earliest adopters have ceded their ground to 
the majority, while fears about unproven technology have given way to talk of expanding into new markets. It was this very sense of establishment and expansion that was readily apparent in the opening remarks from Steve Potash, conference facilitator, IDPF president, and Overdrive CEO, as he urged the overflowing crowd gathered in the McGraw-Hill auditorium to embrace the IDPF’s new .epub standard in the hopes of sparking an “explosion of adoption from all corners and all markets.”
Many, if not most, publishers today already develop digital versions of their catalog holdings at some point in their workflow, even if those digital editions are not available to end users. Currently, however, these documents take many forms and vary greatly from publisher to publisher. The IDPF has been working for the last few years on a codified system for packaging content and metadata for all of these books into a standardized XML package.
The most recent incarnation of the .epub standard is actually a collection of three open specifications describing the way ebook content should be encoded and structured in XML, then collected into a single container for distribution.The next step for most publishers, and the step likely to be the most beneficial to libraries and their patrons, is the further move toward increased interoperability and standardization of this ebook content. The IDPF’s .epub standard was designed with this flexibility in mind and is notable for its ability to re-flow text in order to suit the particular constraints of any compatible display device.
Currently, the ebooks for sale online and licensed by libraries are available in many different formats, most of which are proprietary and often tied directly to one particular reading device or platform. For example, the ebook site Fictionwise.com lists as many as 12 different formats available for downloading a single book, including separate ones for Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Palm brand smartphones like the Treo. Creating and maintaining so many formats raises costs for vendors and increases complications for libraries that need to be able to support all of the technologies their patrons are using to access these ebooks.
