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

We recently attempted to explain the new ePub standard and did a pretty good job of simplifying it for the lay audience if we do say so ourselves. However, a reader’s comment suggests we may have oversimplified it. He introduced the concept of “wrapping” ePub in proprietary shell.

What does that mean and why is it important to you?

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard, we explained, was designed to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. We said that Sony was planning to scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of ePub, enabling users to read e-books on any reading device that supports the ePub standard.

Well, yes – and no. Here’s what a correspondent wrote:

“Unfortunately, Sony’s version of ePub, as currently described, will be wrapped in Sony’s DRM, so books downloaded to Sony’s e-reader will not be readable on other devices. ePub does not necessarily mean open, which should be the goal of IDPF and the reading community.“

“DRM” stands for Digital Rights Management, a long way of saying controlled or restricted access to digital content. Proprietary, in other words. Kindle is an example of a proprietary, closed standard.

We referred the question to Michael Gaudet, who frequently unpacks technical complexities for us, and here is what he had to say to our commenter:

What I think you’re asking for is a world with no DRM. While you may see it as unfortunate that Sony isn’t as forward thinking as you’d like, I’m sure Sony and the IDPF are trying to be as realistic as possible in accommodating the ebook market’s suppliers: publishers.

ePub has always been formulated with the anticipation that retailers could wrap it in DRM if they needed to, and many publishers ask for DRM and won’t retail ebooks without it. Each ePub retailer needs to consider how to solve the DRM requirements for publishers and customers, and it’s never going to please everyone.

The biggest publishers who are still actively specifying DRM controls are members of the IDPF and they made these demands in standards meetings for the ePub format, and retailers like Sony and Content Reserve saw what’s coming down the road well in advance of their customers. It would have been suicide for Sony’s ebook store to ignore all the content from publishers who require DRM at this time just because it’s fashionable to bash DRM.

It’s unknown yet whether Sony’s ebookstore ePub implementation will be readable on other devices, but chances are that it can be, depending on the other devices’ software to unlock DRM from multiple vendors. It’s highly likely Adobe’s Digital Editions could support Sony’s ePub in the future, and if that’s possible, then so will other reader platforms that acknowledge ePub.

When customers choose to buy non-DRM books from other retailers that offer them, like Fictionwise, the Sony device is a very welcoming platform for ePub, and I think that’s probably more important than Sony’s store right now. The opportunity exists to read ePubs with or without DRM, and that’s better than where we were a year ago.

Obviously, ePub is not so white, and DRM is not so black. We hope you can live with shades of gray until a true One Size Fits All Standard rules all digital content.

RC

I’ve made a rule for myself to ignore an unfamiliar phrase the first couple of times I hear it, but if I hear it a third time I pay attention. If you haven’t heard the term “ePub” up to now, you’re going to do so with increasing frequency. So maybe you’d better listen up.

If you understand nothing else about e-book readers, at least understand this: they operate either on a closed standard or an open one. If closed, you can read an e-book only on that device. If open, you can read it interchangeably on many devices. Ideally, you should be able to read it on any device.

Music lovers know all about closed systems from Apple’s iTunes store, created a few years ago. You could not transfer music from your iPod to non-Apple players.

The most prominent example of an e-reader with a closed standard is Amazon’s Kindle. You simply can’t download a Kindle title into your cellphone or PDA. Amazon designed its product to keep retail e-book sales inside the Amazon family, and so far the strategy has been a big success. Arguably, however, the success can be attributed to Kindle being the first big commercial e-book reader, and by far the most actively promoted and publicized. Many Kindle owners swear by the device, but with competition mounting from a number of manufacturers and retailers, the next generation of consumers will have more choices. Some of the e-book readers will have a more open format.

Another example of a closed, or proprietary, device is the Sony e-Reader. However, an announcement by Sony of its intention to switch to an open standard will add momentum to the forces arrayed against Kindle. The name of that open standard is ePub. “By the end of the year,” writes Brad Stone of the New York Times, Sony “will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.”

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. IDPF is a trade organization of e-book manufacturers, retailers, software developers and publishers that from the dawn of the industry – 1998 – has been working to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. Think of it as the e-book equivalent of the standard 33 1/3 rpm established for long-playing phonograph records and 45 rpm for singles. “Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied,” writes Stone.

Once Sony switches over to ePub, you’ll be able to read an e-book on any reading device that supports the ePub standard. As Stone points out, the battle that will take place around the ePub flag will involve a host of giants, not the least of which is Apple. So, as you shop for your next (or first) e-book reader it is definitely in your best interests to remember the word “ePub”.

Read Brad Stone’s Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Lexcycle announced yesterday that they’ve been acquired by Amazon, which either comes as good news to you if you like industry consolidation, or bad if it worries you what Amazon might be planning (eg. the curious case of Mobipocket). However, Marc from Lexcycle was quick to dispel some of the fear by way of his blog:

“We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.”

Lexcycle Inc. has been of the little Davids of the ebook world. They are a little group that set out to build an ebook reading application for the iPhone and they quickly fostered a great following. Their free application, Stanza, has been one of the break-out hits among ebook enthusiasts, allowing people to use their iPhone to gain access to unfettered free e-books on the net, while supporting major formats like .pdb and mobipocket (non-DRM only). They were also able to wrangle Fictionwise.com & eReader DRM support, including shopping for ebooks (so you can buy E-Reads titles) through Stanza via its online catalogs (with a special Stanza account). And most importantly, they’ve been rallying support for ePub. Stanza has one of the best implementations of support for the darling new standard.

But rather than attempting to defeat one of the roaming giants of the digital frontier, Amazon’s Kindle, it seems that they’ve allowed themselves to be gobbled up. Amazon surely noticed that Stanza was more popular than their Kindle application for the iPhone. So, what will happen? Could it mean Kindle support (finally) on Stanza? Or is it a way of competing against (and potentially blocking) Barnes & Noble, who now own Fictionwise?

In the minds of many Stanza fans, Stanza should be an open ebook reader and open sales platform, where all sorts of vendors can feed various formats, DRM’d or otherwise, and allow everyone to compete fairly. This is contrary to the strict boundaries that Amazon uses to protect its sales. But I think the agenda at Lexcycle has always been to give people a great tool to read, and that’s why working with the very powerful (and wealthy) Amazon is still a means to that end. I think that’s how Stanza was envisioned at its onset, so I’m not necessarily worried yet. Both companies have been responsible for the growing acceptance of ebooks in the last year. These are all people who genuinely care about the ebook experience. They could be a good fit.

- Michael Gaudet

This summer we’ve seen a quite a few interesting moves made by ebook technology leaders and there have been hints about the best of what’s yet to come this fall, such as new devices from Amazon and Palm. The most important development, I dare say, is one that’s been totally overlooked by the media, averse as they are to technical acronyms. This week, the voting members of the International Digital Publishing Forum (aka. the IDPF, which includes E-Reads) made the OPS 2.0 (Open Publication Standard) official. The OPS specifications are the next generation standards for ebook production. The good news for publishers is that this should reduce production costs in the long run, which will in turn be good for consumers because publishers will be able to afford to convert more titles. And, if the developers of ebook software, like MobiPocket, Sony, Adobe, Microsoft, etc., all implement the new specifications fully, then the new standardized files (better known as the “.epub” format) should be the document format of choice for our collective ebook future. I say “should,” because it’s still not a sure bet.

The biggest hurdles the “.epub” format has faced since the spec was first drafted are getting three specific groups to have interest in using it. The first group is the software companies responsible for digital-rights-managed ebook readers. There’s no point producing “.epub” files if hardly anyone can use them yet. Publishers, such as E-Reads, want to be able to produce our books in the standard “.epub” format and then send them off to retailers, who will either sell the unencrypted “.epub” files, or encrypt them by using automated processes to convert them into any DRM format the consumer needs, such as Sony’s Reader format, but, as things are right now, it’s a rare piece of software that can already read or export “.epub” files, so retailers aren’t very interested yet and they’re still asking for MS Lit, PDF, Mobi, etc. In fact, only the recently released Adobe’s Digital Editions software is really set up to use “.epub” files properly and many other reader applications have yet to completely implement support for the new format. This is because the first group, the software, is still waiting for the second group, the consumer base, to care. Sony has committed to adding “.epub” support for books that the consumers bring to the Sony Reader on their own, but are consumers using the “.epub” format? Well, there can’t be grass roots demand for the format when the average consumer is so unfamiliar with it, can’t buy it, and has barely any software that supports it. So it falls to the third group, publishers, to start the ball rolling by ordering books to be made as “.epub” files for their archives.

The Benefits of the “.epub” Format

If the average person has never heard of the “.epub” format, let alone tried it out, you can see why more developers aren’t yet rushing to make it a “value-added” feature for their software. But the format has some terrific virtues. Unlike a PDF, an “.epub” ebook is designed so that any reader can have better control over how they choose to read a text, with no matter what device they’re using. They can easily change fonts, styles, or page sizes and the document will reflow appropriately. And, unlike new reflowable document formats like PDFX or MS Word’s DocX, “.epub” is really uncomplicated and it makes for a good legacy format for digital text, because an “.epub” file could easily be converted into any file format you’d like because of its standardized XML structure.

There are two steps to making an “.epub” file. The first is to use OPS (Open Publication Structure), which is just a method of formatting text files with XML tags. This was developed so that there’s a uniform way to prepare texts for any device and so that it’s easy to reverse-engineer and edit. Next, additional materials, like a cover graphic, are then bundled with the text into a compressed folder with the extension “.epub,” which is, really, just a .zip archive. This is the container file, known as OCF (Open Container Format).

For now, the “.epub” format will have to compete for reading audience against established favorites such as HTML formatted books, and RTF files, as well as PDFs, DOCs, and dozens of other conventional formats, so it’s up to publishers and developers to make this happen.

The Future Starts Now

To break the old cycle, software and ebook technology companies are trying to spur the use of “.epub” files with some big guns. Adobe is one company that’s trying to pave the way forward with its latest version of InDesign CS3, which can export ebooks to Digital Editions in the “.epub” format (more about that can be read here). Since it’s official release in June, Digital Editions has been a free download; it’s an effort by Adobe to create an iTunes Library equivalent for ebooks. So, with Adobe software you already have an end-to-end package for creating and reading standardized ebooks, and a showcase for the advantages of the next generation of ebooks. Now we have to impress upon everyone else sitting on their hands that this is what we want from them, too.

I corresponded with Nick Bogaty of the IDPF yesterday and he said, “All major and small publishers I have spoken to are very excited about (the 2.0 standard) and are contracting their conversion houses to start work on .epub conversions. Obviously, it helped to have a company like Adobe participate, but this was (equally helped by) the participation and leadership (of) the folks at eBook Technologies, Garth Conboy, John Rivlin and Brady Duga. It really was a joint effort which couldn’t have been done without widespread industry support.”

It’s this collective effort that will, we all hope, provide the momentum publishers, including E-Reads, need to keep adding new titles. The bottom line is that we’re all trying to create a useful and ever-growing body of legacy work that the public will want to access for a long time, and the “.epub” format is the best opportunity to get virtually everyone in the ebook world on the same virtual page.

- Michael Gaudet