IPA recommends that publishers and their national publishers’ associations familiarise themselves with EPUB 3 and explore whether and how they can make best use of its functionalities.
Meeting in New York earlier this month, the Board of IPA endorsed the EPUB standard, and in particular its current version EPUB 3, for the following reasons:
- IPA believes that a competitive and diverse digital environment requires the widespread adoption and use of free and open standards for digital content by publishers, technology providers, and distribution platforms.
- Open standards that are collaboratively developed and vendor-independent provide an inclusive context which gives publishers great freedom in the way they develop their digital businesses.
- Standards must be developed through transparent, inclusive and business modelneutral standards bodies. The international publishing industry is adequately represented, together with other stakeholders, in the governance of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the global trade and standards organisation dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing and content consumption.
- EPUB 3 is semantically enhanced, reliably navigable, and enables publishers to progress from producing static documents to creating interactive experiences.
- With EPUB 3, content can be encoded into a distributable publication file that is interoperable across devices and can adapt smoothly to different sized displays.
- EPUB 3 is a truly international e-book standard. It fulfils the requirements of publishers around the world, including by supporting global language requirements, such as vertical layout, alternative writing, and page progression directions, as well as other typographic capabilities needed to express the wide range of world languages.
- Furthermore, EPUB 3 can be made fully accessible to print disabled readers.
Mr Bammel, IPA’s Secretary General, said: “Digital publishing is now truly global. IPA strongly urges all publishing industry stakeholders to adopt EPUB 3 so that the publishing industry can achieve an interoperable and fully accessible global standard for e-books and other digital publications”.