Quote:
Originally Posted by andym
As to ManyBooks. epub is nothing more than a fancy wrapper for xhtml. If you check out the ManyBooks iPhone download setting this already comes in a folder with an xml manifest so producing all the bits and bobs to make an epub document shouldn't be a difficult job for them. The really difficult job is getting the good-quality html/xhtml input to start with.
As far as I can work out, it will be open to different content producers and vendors to produce encrypted versions. I'm assuming that just as now you will be able to buy e-books with Mobi DRM which will work on different machines and I expect the same will be true for Digital Editions. But you won't be able to open Mobi books with Digital Editions or visa versa. I can appreciate people's reservations about being tied into the products of one company but at least the software will be available for a number of platforms so you aren't tied into one piece of hardware.
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The above quote is largely correct. .epub is a bit more than html/xhtml though. .epub, for one, offers a way (this is the OCF spec) to package your xhtml, images, multimedia etc. using zip. Also, the markup (the OPS spec) itself includes table of contents (via NCX), inline islands for non-XHTML, SVG support, embedded fonts etc. so it's a bit more complex than just XHTML/HTML. I will note that another "blessed" vocabulary in .epub is DTBook developed by the DAISY Consortium. This will be of particular interest to publishers producing books for the sight-impaired community and will offer (with some small additions) K-12 publishers with NIMAS compliance.
I do absolutely agree with the statement that the trick is getting good XHTML to start with which is why we required valid XHTML as opposed to OEB where valid XHTML wasn't required. The IDPF will also be providing validation tools so we're sure everyone's .epub (the container and markup) is largely the same.
Finally, you are also correct with regard to encrypted eBooks. All of the vendors will still wrap their epub files in vendor-specific DRM (for the time-being) if that's what their publishing partners want (some won't, some will). For non-DRMed books, you should be able to open .epub in any software that implements .epub including Mobi, Digital Editions, ETI, OSoft etc.; full interoperability for unencrypted eBooks. .epub doesn't address DRM.
-Nick
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Nick Bogaty
Executive Director
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)