ePub becomes the official IDPF standard!

[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.

A couple of things I'm surious about and maybe someone here knows the answer:

- I find the mobipocket pagebreak tag really useful for new chapters etc. It is of course not part of xhtml. The CSS 'page-break-before' attibute only works with print stylesheets (SFAIK) is there a standard-compliant way to have page-breaks?

- html (and SFAIK) xhtml are pretty awful for formatting poetry on small screen devices (one of the standards even recommends using pre-formatted text). Mobipocket have supports a p 'align=poetry' but it's not a good solution (to put it mildly). Is there a better solution somewhere in the eBook standard (eg 'XML islands' whatever they are)?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by andym

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.

You'll only be able to open a MobiPocket book in different devices if you downloaded it witht he PID put in the file. If you download a MP book for your cell phone and later on buy an iLiad, that book won't work on the iLiad. You'd have to go back to the shop and redownload it so it has the iLiad's PID in it. DRM is a hassle.

[nickbogaty]

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.

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

--
Nick Bogaty
Executive Director
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)

[andym]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You'll only be able to open a MobiPocket book in different devices if you downloaded it witht he PID put in the file. If you download a MP book for your cell phone and later on buy an iLiad, that book won't work on the iLiad. You'd have to go back to the shop and redownload it so it has the iLiad's PID in it. DRM is a hassle.

You can register 4 devices with mobibooks. Ok it's a hassle if you then change one but it's not a big deal.

I agree that DRM is a hassle, and I'd rather have 'social DRM' but I'm afraid if you want to read contemporary fiction then you are going to have to deal with DRM in some form or another. And given that, I'd choose software-specific DRM over hardware-specific DRM any day of the week. I can get a device that will read Mobipocket files from any number of firms. If i want to read BBeb files I'm tied to Sony. I know which alternative I prefer.

[andym]

Nick

Thanks for the response. OK - 'fancy wrapper' was a simplification.

Am I right in what I say about page breaks? It seems to me that ebook readers aren't really catered for in existing standards because they are screen devices that behave like paged media (OK yes I know some can also scroll). I'd be interested to know if there are standards-compliant ways around this.

ditto poetry.

[nickbogaty]

Hi, you can do this by using CSS:

CSS: "page-break-before: always" or "page-break-after: always"

See: http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/OPS_2.0...l#Section1.3.5

[cherdman]

As long as this new movement can end the format wars and bring peace to the ebook galaxy, I'm fine. I heavily favor Mobipocket so I really hope that Mobi can integrate with this format somehow.

BTW, ePub is a terrible name. Sounds like an internet bar or something.

[Oh, Why Not?]

*BTW, ePub is a terrible name. Sounds like an internet bar or something.*

And that's bad?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cherdman

As long as this new movement can end the format wars and bring peace to the ebook galaxy, I'm fine. I heavily favor Mobipocket so I really hope that Mobi can integrate with this format somehow.

BTW, ePub is a terrible name. Sounds like an internet bar or something.

I'm hoping we get a version of Digital Editions for all our reading devices to handle epub. Then it won't matter what MobiPocket does or not.

[andym]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm hoping we get a version of Digital Editions for all our reading devices to handle epub. Then it won't matter what MobiPocket does or not.

People will obsess about what Adobe does instead.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Hopefully, if everyone adopts ePub, it won't matter if you use Digital Editions or not. If every reader can convert ePub to their system, you can read on whatever you like!

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Hopefully, if everyone adopts ePub, it won't matter if you use Digital Editions or not. If every reader can convert ePub to their system, you can read on whatever you like!

Converting from epub to LRF or Mobipocket should be pretty straightforward overall and I expect that some people will write such software as soon as we start having epub files.

By the way, we can't upload epub files on Mobileread for the moment ? That's one extra file extension that should be added to the upload list ! I'll upload a few examples that we output with Feedbooks in the upcoming weeks...

[NatCh]

You can always zip (bizarre idea, I know, considering) them and upload them that way, until Alex gets the list of files adjusted.

[Robert Marquard]

Here http://www.mobipocket.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6918 Mobipocket tells us that they will work on native IDPF 2.0 support.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

"Standard DRM" cannot exist. DRM relies on a secret. The eBook Reader must know that secret in order to display the DRMed content.

If you document that secret, it's no longer a secret and the DRM can be removed (remember what DVD Jon did?).

Actually you don't need new filetypes or other techniques for DRM. It could be as simple as a password on the zip file. This is already supported by zip. Once opened you could use whatever additional controls you needed on the content. I agree that there is unlikely to be a universal DRM implementation.

Dale