Happy 2nd Birthday ePub3!

It was two years ago at Frankfurt in 2011 when ePub3 was officially released. It was heady stuff! The world of digital content publishing was about to take off!

"Houston. We have a problem! The motors wont start!"

Since then very little has happened in the ePub3 world and it is looking as if very little will happen in spite of the over-priced Readium SDK project and some other noise.

Two years later there is AAP talk about some mini/compromise version of the specification but that is shaping up as talk.

There are a number of problems with the ePub3 IDPF specification 2YO child:

1. It's parents. It has been created by a monoculture producing a monotonous culture that repeats itself with more words and rules.
2. EPub3 is so technology backward looking it drops all significant forward feature values.
3. It has fall-back strategies to support reading systems built on the 2007 specification. While it is reasonable to expect an ePub3 reader to seamlessly open an ePub2 book, the opposite should never be a consideration if it has advanced HTML5 features.
4. It trys to specify too many things that are reading system features as part of the content package specification.
5. The IDPF is now trying to throw more spanners to the moving parts of the digital content machine. These activities seem to be designed to keepIt seems to be an occupational therapy exercise.

However having said those unkind things, the up-side is there is enough good stuff in the specification to create a viable ePub3 specification reading system. AZARDI and Apple iBooks have demonstrated that.

Without a doubt, core to creating an ePub3 reading system is picking and choosing the usable and valuable features.

ePub3. Is it Mirrors and Strings?

The ePub3 specification is basically a set of packaging components with some crazy fringe features. Most importantly (for us) it specifies and allows Javascript, MathML, SVG and Rich Media. These have nothing to do with ePub3. They are all generic, standard HTML5 features.

About the only new ePub3 feature that is truely valuable is Fixed Layout.

The reason we support ePub3 is that it is not proprietary, plus it enables publishers to have one format for delivery to all platforms and devices (phones and tablets) of any screen-size and aspect ratio.

Unfortunately it is unlikely that any other reading system will support Fixed Layout to Reflowable and interactivity with the power and flexibility of AZARDI. Most commerical reading systems are working into a fixed size tablet or reading window and their "App" versions are usually weak, or replicas of the fixed window reading systems. 

Where ePub3 Can be Important

We have a strong focus on textbook production for developing countries (developed countries too, but that is covered by everyone else). To be even slightly useful for education content a reading system must support:

• Extreme interactivity (Javascript is optional in ePub3) It is impossible to make a textbook in ePub3 without JQuery and a lot of other Javascript. Take a look at the self-practice exercises, learning tools and widgets on our Interactive Arithmetic for the World post.  Download the ePub3 Year 5 Maths. Operations on Numbers
• Rich media (This was locked to MP4/MP3) Moving forward, and as the market fragments more audio formats can be supported by closed delivery systems.
• MathML This is mandatory and best supported in AZARDI. Get The Theory of Heat Radiation by Dr. Max Planck with 2,968 equations all set in MathML.
• SVG We are currently working hard with SVG Primitives for Education. These make it easy for education publishers to include sophisticated but light-weight technical illustrations for maths and science in their books. 
• Fixed/reflowable page presentation. Only supported in AZARDI. iBooks offers one or the other per book. Check out the AZARDI Fixed Layout Grows Up (ePub3 Download) feature demonstration ePub3. This is essential for textbooks of value.
• All languages. This is of course implicit in the Unicode specification and essential for ePub3. One of our earliest tests/demostrations was Around the World in 28 Languages (ePub3 Download)

And all this production and development action is pushed into the ePub3 core package. That's it.

ePub 3 Feature Analysis

The IDPF have a test suite under construction. This is a reasonably complete list of the specification mechanics of ePub3.

We took it for a test run with AZARDI Mid September 2013. It is far from complete and the fixed-layout test cases are languishing but it certainly is one of the better efforts by the IDPF over the last two years.

You can view the "Testing the IDPF ePub3 Test Cases" results here.

A good point about this list was we were able to create a table of ePub3 features, seen in detail for the first time. This list still does not included the official fixed layout features at this time.

So Happy Birthday ePub3!

EPub3 is a useful packaging tool especially for education text-book content. But it is "convenience packaging" rather than some sort of digital content breakthrough.

We are starting to see some other ePub3 reading systems limp onto the market... sort-of. These will have selective support of specification features and inevitably there will be a mismatch in the way they support important features such as Fixed Layout. Look out #eprdctn folks. Your job is about to get a lot harder if you are locked into the InDesign desktop tools.

The Readium SDK project is slowly moving ahead. We certainly hope it will make a difference. It's a step forward! And it's only US$60,000 a year to use. We will probably not be the first in line so it will be limited to organizations who have the ability to pay the toll. A true open-source MIT like license would have been much more useful for the publishing industry world-wide.

Anyway! Happy Birthday ePub3. You have had a very noisy talk-the-talk two year start-up.

Hopefully you will be able to manage a little more walk as we move into your third year. Even walking with a limp would be OK.