EPUB is going to be more relevant than ever now that Apple’s announced that it will be the standard for eBooks on the iPad.
There’s pros and cons. EPUB is a standard becoming increasingly familiar to publishers, so the learning curve for book designers won’t be that steep; EPUB files can be produced in familiar programs like InDesign. But one of the challenges with EPUB is achieving precision layout and the (not so deep) depth of the reading experience. In short, the limits of the EPUB standard mean that there won’t be the revolutionary reading experience some people were expecting from the iPad.
But EPUB is indeed the standard Apple will be adopting. Check out recent BookNet Canada events about EPUB, including our EPUB Bootcamp and presentations at last year’s Tech Forum. Coming up, Liza Daly of Threepress will present at the 2010 Tech Forum on March 25 on best practices for creating EPUB files. If this is the standard, then we might as well get the most out of it.
