On Wednesday, I was invited to talk about EPUB3 at IDPF's Digital Book World Conference which is part of the Book Expo America going on in New York City this month.
My basic thesis is that EPUB3's promise is as a galvanizing, common goal for both ebook publishers and ebook designers and production workers that will enable all of us to move forward together, even if it means getting to our objective at different times. Because EPUB3 doesn't break EPUB2 books in older ereaders, there is no reason to put off using EPUB3 right now. And because many ereaders are already supporting many of EPUB3's flashier features—some of which I show off in this presentation, there are lots of good reasons to go ahead and make the jump.
In my talk, I mention the fact that Hachette, part of the second largest publisher in the world and one of the Big Six in the United States has announced that not only will they soon deliver all of their ebooks in EPUB3 format, but that they will stop delivering books in EPUB2. They haven't served books in Kindle format since 2007.
The promise of a single file that works on all systems is before us, and EPUB3, our common goal, is what will enable us to get there.
I have not only published my slides, but I re-recorded my talk so you can get all of the details. Be sure to activate the audio portion.
(I couldn't get the audio to play in Chrome, but it seems to work just fine in Safari.)
Note that you can download (or buy) the EPUB3 version of What's up with Catalonia? that I use as a sample in my talk here.
You can buy the Monarch Butterfly book on the iBookstore.
Barcelona Beyond Gaudà is available both at the iBookstore and on my website.
I welcome comments and suggestions.
Friday, May 31, 2013
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Here's an ePub3 question for you. I've got a book, Nights with Leukemia, that's almost done and could come out about the time mere mortals like myself get access to ID-CC on or about June 17th.
ReplyDeleteI've heard there are major improvements in ePub 3.0 export. Would you happened to know what they are?
I'd hate to release the book only to have to do a new version a few weeks later.
InDesign CC improvements in regards to EPUB export include:
ReplyDelete- Export without CSS option (no overriding classes included in html markup)
- Better handling of conflicts when two+ styles mapped to same class
- Indexes now included in the export, terms are linked to their source at the paragraph level (this is huge)
- Edits to generated TOC are maintained in the exported epub
- Object Export Options (rasterize, alt tags, etc.) can now be applied via an Object Style
- You can map Object Styles to class names (as you can with text styles)
- Clean markup for bulleted and numbered lists; it's now up to the device/software to get them to compose and number correctly
- Smarter computation of nested lists, mixed bullets/numbers and regular paragraphs, smarter mapping of bullet character to list-style-type property
- Improved, systematic naming convention for classes generated by ID
- Keep Option "Start paragraph at" now mapped to a valid pagebreakbefore:always property
- for iOS device fonts (accessed via @font-face), com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file added automatically
- Font embedding for iBooks now passes epubcheck
- Empty p and li ranges completely removed
Hope this helps!
Anne-Marie
InDesignSecrets.com
Another informative presentation Liz... Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great presentation! I'm working on creating an interactive ePub3 utilizing Javascipt (with initial target being iBooks). I'm having some issues with creating text entry interactions. If you create a contenteditable div on a ePub3 page and allow the user to input the text via the virtual keyboard, the page elements resize inappropriately (at least in a fixed-layout ePub). I'm new to creating interactive ePub3s and have not found a great resource (or forum for that matter) that I can go to trouble shoot these types of issues. Any suggestions for my specific problem or a place to go to to seek help from the community?
ReplyDeleteA great presentation... So many things I learnt! Thanks Liz
ReplyDelete