If you’re not sure what ePub is, don’t worry. It will soon be history.

This digital format, which has done as much in its own way as the Kindle to hyperdrive the e-book business, has been the industry’s workhorse ever since ePub 2.0 was officially adopted in 2007 as the standard for production of reflowable digital books. It is the building block for Sony, Apple, Google and other e-book formats.  Even Amazon, which has its own proprietary format, accepts submission of ePub files, which can then be converted to Kindle’s unique language. (See What is ePub and Why Is It Important to You?)

EPub is still a superb tool if all you want to do is read – or publish -  an e-book in English or another western tongue. But what if your native language is Chinese or Japanese or Arabic or Hebrew?  EPub is not up to the task of handling symbols and pictograms or languages written up and down or right to left.

Or what if you want to “read” a vook or an app replete with videos, music and other enhancements? The ePub format is simply inadequate to the challenge of creating these complex multimedia works.

Enter ePub3, a more global, complex, interactive, media-rich format perfectly suited for the demands of the next generation of book (if after it is completely enhanced it will be recognizable as a book). EPub3 is currently being reviewed and tested by publishers, developers and other interested parties with an eye to rollout in 2012.

In an interview in O’Reilly Radar, Book Master executive Bob Kasher highlights three significant features of the new format: language support, greater accessibility, and increased multimedia functionality.

1) Language Support. “Language support, Kasher explains, “will allow ePub3 to save and search non-Roman scripts — such as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic — as font characters rather than jpegs… It will truly internationalize ePub.”

2. Greater Accessibility. By “greater accessibility” Kasher means that the new format will be far friendlier to the visually impaired, employing so-called “DAISY” (Digital Accessible Information System) standards for digital talking books, according to the DAISY Consortium, the official international organization.

3. Support for Multimedia Applications. Finally, and foremost, “ePub3 will be much more adept at supporting multimedia capabilities for both HTML5-based devices and the coming generation of tablets supporting both Flash and HTML5. It is hoped that in doing so, ePub3 will help develop an enhanced ebook standard that can be used across a variety of media and content.”

HTML by the way is the language that governs most Internet websites, and HTML5 is being designed to accommodate the same demands of multimedia and interactivity for the Internet that ePub3 is designed for text. (See What is HTML5, and Why Should You Care?)

For those of us who are perfectly happy settling down with a plain old conventional bells-less and whistles-less e-book, don’t worry: ePub version 3.0 will be “backward compatible” with 2.0, the current standard, even though it will one day be looked at by our grandchildren as primitive and one-dimensional – just like us.

Read What to expect in EPUB3

Richard Curtis