Ebooks and .epub at IDPF

To the publishers and vendors attending the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) 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. This combination of acceptance and expansion was readily apparent in the opening remarks from Steve Potash, conference facilitator, IDPF president, and Overdrive CEO, as he urged the overflow crowd in the McGraw-Hill auditorium to embrace 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. 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. IDPF’s .epub standard was designed with this flexibility in mind and is notable for its ability to reflow text in order to suit the particular constraints of any compatible display device. Currently, 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 for 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 raise costs for vendors and increase complications for libraries that need to be able to support all of the technologies their patrons use to access these ebooks.

The topics that generated the most discussion at the meeting were related to new markets for ebook content, including international markets, as well as the domestic venues for mobile and “on-the-go” content. Closely followed experiments and trial giveaways from publishers like Harlequin, HarperCollins, and Random House demonstrated significant interest in serving content to users in nontraditional ways, such as on devices other than desktop computers and monitors. But while the .epub standard and its flexibility in terms of reflowable text are well suited to serving the mobile market, significant barriers still exist in terms of the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that are added on top of the .epub encoding, significantly hampering ebook portability in most cases.

Moreover, although ebook devices like the Sony eReader, the iRex iLiad, and Amazon’s Kindle were frequently mentioned and demonstrated during the day, smaller handheld devices like Apple’s iPhone and other smartphone devices were just as frequently presented as a sort of holy grail for ebook content. Using these devices as ebook readers could potentially revolutionize sales in digital publishing, but this mobile market has as yet remained mostly inaccessible to the industry.