EPUB 3 is coming - or is it?

[Chang]

I couldn't find a thread related to this so I decided to open a new one.

Last week, on the 15th of February, the first EPUB 3 public draft was released. For me, it looks like EPUB 3 is really coming because it has been developed actively since May 2010. Also, they have already planned to publish the final version of EPUB 3 at the Book Expo America in May.

But I'm concerned will it be adapted by new and old reading devices. Already at the moment, different reading platforms show same EPUB file in different ways. Will this problem be history after EPUB 3?
Many new improvements will be done compared to EPUB 2.0.1 but some issues still remain unsolved. For example, finally video and audio will be supported by the standard but at the moment seems that only H.254 video format is supported (link).

What are your thoughts about EPUB 3. Will it set the new course for e-books or will it be a flop?

Link to news about first public draft: http://idpf.org/news/epub-3-specific...draft-released
Link to EPUB 3 Specification: http://idpf.org/epub/30
EPUB Revision: http://code.google.com/p/epub-revision/

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Chang

Already at the moment, different reading platforms show same EPUB file in different ways. Will this problem be history after EPUB 3?

Highly unlikely. Different readers will have different defaults, and a different support for the optional elements (and different bugs).

For example, finally video and audio will be supported by the standard but at the moment seems that only H.254 video format is supported.

I read it as meaning that only H.254 is required, but more formats can be supported by a reading system. It's not good, but not as bad as it could.

What are your thoughts about EPUB 3.

Valloric (the Sigil creator) has written this

[Freeshadow]

thx for the link i was looking forward to a discussion of the draft on MR

[EowynCarter]

Valloric (the Sigil creator) has written this

And I had good time reading this. Right on target.

I was editing a css in sigil not so long ago, and I bumped into a comment in the css : "To fix iBooks text align bug".
After "Fix for IE", "Fix for iBooks"...

I still haven gotten why this e-book manage to choke my orizon. **shrugs **

[Valentino]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Valloric (the Sigil creator) has written this

Totally depressing. It seems everyone to do with ebooks has their heads up their asses no matter where you look.

javascript in epubs will be horrible. I use noscript and requestpolicy in firefox to avoid it in my browsing. To get that crap in a book is ridiculous.

/edit
With the garbage formatting that we have now, add this and I have so many questions about their decisions that I really don't care anymore.

[Freeshadow]

yeah, it's a pity they implement $_stuff insted of reminding themselves that throughout the centuries typesetters managed to develop their craft in order to smooth reading experience, and implement their all M.C: Escherean quirks first. i.e. all the thricks done to a bookpage to level-up reading experience (which I'd describe as finetuned asymmetry to trick humans eye into seeing it as "cleaner and well placed"

As for now most ereading benefits are hardware-based: weight, and size mainly,
the rest is ignored...
to make something "better as" it has by mere logic 1st be "as good as" and as long as achievements and craft of typesetting professionn is ignored an "as good as" status quo can't be reached - instead of working on the smoothing they work on jamming in distractions.
what bet, that some of the morons looked at any potter-movies newspaper with it's stupid dancing photos in the paper and tought "that 'd be cool if we could do that with readers"
And that would be IMHO the best idiocy-case to come.
After you finished vol 1 of a bookseries, just wait for the banners popping open:
"book two of the adventures of foobaria coming out soon" And this to happen every time you reread...

[Toxaris]

Don't forget, there will be a transition period. I highly doubt that the readers will get a firmware update (the most anyway) to be able to handle the updated format. Since also the navigation and TOC mechanism will be changed.

[Visuddhi]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Don't forget, there will be a transition period. I highly doubt that the readers will get a firmware update (the most anyway) to be able to handle the updated format. Since also the navigation and TOC mechanism will be changed.

I read somewhere (on some idpf page) that they epub 3 need to be backward compatible, so that they can be read by older machines, if i remember correctly, this means that the .opf and ncx will also be in epub3 (sorry no links or proof to back up my point )

[Chang]

I decided to bring this up again because I'd like to know what people think about EPUB3 nowadays. I still haven't seen any reading device that would support EPUB3 except iBooks which supports partially.

New version of ADE is under development and they are sharing ADE 1.8 beta (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions1-8/) for public. At least, the beta version doesn't support HTML5 audio or video tags but I didn't test how EPUB made with 3.0 specs would work on it. I hope the final version of new ADE would support EPUB3 because then it would be a first step from a big company to support EPUB3.

Some Walrus Books company released video (http://vimeo.com/25185473) of EPUB3 ebook that works on iPad. I'm not so impressed because stuff like this has been working on iPad for long time already. Also, creating books like that without proper tools is not cost-effective. Would be nice to know how many hours they have spent on creating that one book.

The Proposed Specification of EPUB3 (http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-overview.html) has been out for few months but when reading device manufactures and other companies will adapt and support it?

When do you think the first e-ink reading device which supports EPUB3 (at least partially) will be released and by who? What about EPUB tools, e.g. InDesign, Sigil and others will be able to produce HTML5? For InDesign, I think it will take some time, probably not even in CS6 version yet but I think Sigil can be adjusted for HTML5 quite quickly when it's necessary.

Other thoughts about adaption of EPUB3 and its tools?

[Terisa de morgan]

And instead of putting video in ebooks, why don't they define a dictionary format, so customers are not tied to device? No, wait, that is useful, but not glamorous.

[Jellby]

I still haven't seen any reading device that would support EPUB3 except iBooks which supports partially.

I still haven't seen any reading device that supports EPUB 2.0.1, except all the devices that "support" EPUB, which do it partially.

My thoughts about EPUB3 is that it adds some useful things, but fails to specify some more useful things, and it will probably be ignored. OK, it won't be ignored for things like "I can add video, it's in EPUB3", but will for "I should support MathML, it's in EPUB3".

[priya.k]

I tried the EPUB3 with audio & video and it works FINE and its quite simple too.


But i am struggling to get the MathML EPUB. Can anyone have an example/sample of EPUB3 with MathML. I have tried with the help of specification still there are so many validation errors showing

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by Chang

I decided to bring this up again because I'd like to know what people think about EPUB3 nowadays. I still haven't seen any reading device that would support EPUB3 except iBooks which supports partially.

iBooks don't support epub Feel free to prove the contrary by using an SVG book cover and own embedded fonts.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Chang

Some Walrus Books company released video (http://vimeo.com/25185473) of EPUB3 ebook that works on iPad. I'm not so impressed because stuff like this has been working on iPad for long time already. Also, creating books like that without proper tools is not cost-effective. Would be nice to know how many hours they have spent on creating that one book.

"The more you read ... the more points your lose. And the more points you lose ... the blurrier the text becomes ..."
Were they trying to simulate the eyestrain you get from reading on a highly-reflective LCD screen?


But yeah, I think you're right. iBooks has always incorporated the capabilities of the generalised WebKit browser used by the iPad, so HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript have always worked, this has nothing to do with ePub 3.

The book certainly looks very nice, but I suspect they simply laid it out in Apple's bastardised 'fixed-layout' format and positioned everything using absolute co-ordinates. And yes, they probably spent a ton of time doing it that way instead of going the easy route and releasing it as a PDF.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

iBooks don't support epub Feel free to prove the contrary by using an SVG book cover and own embedded fonts.

I cannot say about SVG, but embedded fonts do work. It's just that you have to do something non-standard to turn on font embedding.