EPUB 3 Best Practice

Transforming the Mobile Experience - The IBM Move to EPUB to Create Rich, Inclusive Content Across the Enterprise

27th May 2014

It is time for enterprises to think about documentation in a new way that tailors content for any mobile device and offers greater levels of "out-of-the-box" accessibility, especially on mobile platforms. At EDUPUB 2014, IBM announced with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), its decision to standardize on EPUB as its primary packaged portable document format.

txtr delivers EPUB 3 reader for iOS 7 with Readium SDK.

22nd May 2014

txtr, the leading independent e-reading platform today launched an EPUB 3 and EPUB Fixed-Layout compatible reading app for iOS 7 based on Readium SDK. Over the past nine months, txtr as been a key contributing member to the Readium Foundation, an independent open source consortium developing software to advance adoption of EPUB and the Open Web Platform for publishing.

Wiley Announces EPUB 3 Support

19th May 2014

Wiley, the international provider of scientific, technical, educational  and medical content has announced that EPUB 3 is to become their standard for all Wiley e-book product in reflowable format from February 2014.

Improving the reader experience with EPUB 3 gives further details of the announcement and is testament to the ongoing strong support and commitment that Wiley have given the EPUB 3 standard both in the development and adoption stages.

EPUB 3 Validation

Matt Garrish
24th February 2014
Adapted with permission from EPUB 3 Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) To paraphrase a common expression, there are three things you need to know about a finished EPUB 3 file: it must adhere to rules, rules, and damned rules. Which is only to say that there is nothing unique about EPUB 3 as a document publishing format. The rules are there to ensure that your content can be opened and rendered by any reading system. They can’t tell you how your content will look on any given reading system, but they can alert you to bugs that are the result of bad markup. If you skip the validation stage and assume that just because it seemed to be fine testing in a reading system, or a program exported it so it must be valid, you run the risk of a lot of wasted time and effort later.

EPUB 3 and Global Language Support

Murata Makoto, CTO Japan Electronic Publishing Association
21st February 2014
Adapted with permission from EPUB 3 Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) Although EPUB 2 was widely adopted in North America for ebook production, and to some extent in Europe, it has begun to gain traction worldwide only since the advancements made in EPUB 3 to support a more diverse range of languages, writing modes, and styles. The sudden growth in IDPF membership in new areas, most notably Asia, that has occurred both during and since the release of EPUB 3 reinforces that the format is now truly the global standard for ebooks. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it gives a tutorial of those features of EPUB 3 for global language support. Second, it shows best practices for EPUB authors. Some of the practices outlined are prescriptive, while others are intended to be thought-provoking. It is hoped that these best practices will help such authors to establish dos and don’ts for particular tasks at hand.

EPUB 3 Font Embedding and Licensing

Adam Witwer, Senior Product Manager, Safari Books Online
21st February 2014
Adapted with permission from EPUB 3 Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) While embedding fonts in an EPUB file is simple enough, how reading systems support embedding has been and remains spotty and inconsistent, often frustratingly so. Also, while embedding fonts is trivial, adding the required obfuscation—required by most commercial font foundries—is much less so. Also, licensing for embedding in general can be an administrative and technical nightmare. This article does not argue for or against embedding fonts, or perhaps more accurately, it argues for both. In doing so, this article aims to give you the information that you need to decide for yourself what the “best practice” is around font embedding.

EPUB 3 Content Documents

Matt Garrish
21st February 2014
Adapted with permission from EPUB 3 Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) The most recognizable part of an EPUB to readers is the content itself, so it’s not surprising that many of the integral components that make up an EPUB are often overlooked and the conclusion drawn that the format is simply what gets rendered. EPUB is not just a website in a box, though and content is one piece of a much larger puzzle. The journey through EPUB content is actually going to be spread out across a number of articles. This one aims to provide a general overview of content documents, covering the major features and additions in EPUB 3, as well as the CSS profile.

EPUB 3 Media Overlays

Matt Garrish
20th February 2014
Adapted with permission from EPUB 3 Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) This article will concentrate on how to provide synchronized audio narration, one of the key new additions introduced in EPUB 3. Media overlays, as you’re about to see, are the secret behind how this magic works. When you watch words get highlighted in your reading system as a narrator speaks, the term media overlay probably doesn’t immediately jump to mind to describe the experience, but what you are in fact witnessing is a media type (audio) being layered on top of your text content.

EPUB 3 Text to Speech (TTS)

Matt Garrish
19th February 2014
Adapted with permission from EPUB 3 Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) An alternative (and complement) to human narration, and the associated costs of creating and distributing it, is speech synthesis—when done right, that is. The mere thought of synthesized speech is enough to make some people cringe, though, because it’s still typically equated with the likes of poor old much-maligned Microsoft Sam and his tinny, often-incomprehensible renderings. Modern high-end voices are getting harder and harder to distinguish as synthesized, however, and the voices on most reading systems and computers are getting progressively more natural sounding and pleasant to the ears for extended listening. The need to be able to synthesize the text of your ebook is always going to be vital to a segment of your readers, especially when human narration is not available. It’s also generally useful to the broader reading demographic.

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