Skip to main content

Adobe's epub format and reader

By

The Adobe announcements last week were very interesting, but not for the reasons most people seem to think.

Here's the real story: The most important producer of print publishing tools is backing an XML-based format for electronic delivery, by making it a (relatively) painless option after preparing something for print. This means the new electronic format can come out the kind of editorial process publishers are already using. With all the limitations that this XML format has, it's much more in reach of publishers who can't afford to change all their editorial processes in a single go.

There's been a lot of concentration on the idea that a standard format will speed ebook reader adoption. This is something that vendors like Sony are realizing is important. Is this their first open format use in electronic media?. And indeed for the long-term future, I think that this is an important issue for vendors. For publishers and businesses right now, though, the focus on new reading platforms is insignificant outside of niche markets.

The Web is the platform that matters, especially for non-fiction content. At Tizra we've concentrated on PDF as the format that most publishers have in quantity, and on making it as close to a first-class web citizen as possible: that means we don't re-implement features (like bookmarks and emailing links) that web browsers already have, but instead we create a site where those features work as usual. That also means delivering pages as embedded content in HTML (with file download as an option, where it makes sense).

With our deep XML experience, we are going to be looking closely at how to take what is still designed as a monolithic file format for delivery and "Warehousing", and really get web marketing and product oomph out of it. Disaggregating .epub files will be as important as it is for PDF, but the results will be a little more precise and considerably more flexible.

And when we do it, PDF backfile or primary content will be delivered and managed the same way as .epub documents are managed.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Postcard from Tools of Change

By
Think back to the summer of 2007. The first iPhones are just hitting the stores. Kindle is still a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye. And in the words of Publishers Weekly, "a festival of practical geekery" is taking place in San Jose, CA. That festival was the first Tools of Change for Publishing conference. We were there , of course. And while comparatively small, it was the largest gathering we'd found of people who cared as much as we did about the transition from print to digital books. That's still true today, which is why I'm excited to be on the floor of ToC 2010 as I write this. The show's a lot bigger now, and has spread beyond its geeky roots to focus on seismic shifts we're all aware of…the explosion of handheld devices , social software and changes in the ways all of us find and use information. If you're here, come see us. We'll be in booth 114 with our partners Digital Divide Data , and you can ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle's Cool, but Remember the Web?

By Abe Dane
If anyone can obsolete the printed book, Amazon can, and they're clearly taking a formidable whack at it with their handheld Kindle reader. We can't help wondering, though, how many consumers will really pay $400 for a single-purpose reading device, when alternatives from a riotously competitive hardware market combine reading with phone, messaging, music and other capabilities. For example, the iPhone pictured here, with a tasty looking page delivered via Tizra's Agile PDF . We wish we could say it's the result of some special technology we came up with for delivering books to mobile devices, but really it's just a byproduct of the fact that Agile PDF makes books work like the web. So as the web finds its way into more mobile devices, so will books published with Agile PDF. Meanwhile, of course, there are already a billion or so eager readers accessing the web through more traditional means. By the way, the sesame crusted tuna's from Montreal's Aix Cui...
Post a Comment
Read more