If you’re interested in diving into EPUB 3 right now, Dave Cramer from Hachette Book Group was kind enough to put together a sample EPUB version of Moby Dick featuring an EPUB 3-compatible table of contents (the “EPUB Navigation Document“), some example of the new metadata, and a media-overlay sample of synced audio and text. [...]
The first version of EPUB used the NCX format to describe an accessible, machine-readable Table of Contents. NCX had come to EPUB from DAISY’s DTBook standard and was a crucial navigational aide. Unfortunately, NCX was rarely understood and is not very human-readable. As part of the alignment with wider web standards, EPUB 3 has dropped [...]
EPUB 3 is tricky to experiment with today. Like any brand-new specification, there aren’t many of the resources we often take for granted, from books to software to validation tools. However, if you’re already comfortable getting your hands dirty you can get meaningful validation for your EPUB 3 documents now. In the future, we’ll probably [...]
Slides from my talk on creating accessible interactive ebooks with EPUB 3 are available:
Accessible interactive books with EPUB 3
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The new flexibility in metadata for EPUB 3 is a strength. Instead of locking down the set of permitted metadata schemes and schemas (like EPUB), it allows us to use a range of definitions. While this flexibility comes with some dangers (see the discussion in the comments here about what to do when there isn’t [...]
Update: I should have been clearer that the “bare” use of subtitle without referencing a scheme is really suboptimal. Using already-defined properties/definitions and referencing them explicitly (like the ONIX codelist example below) is a much better technique, but I did not come up with a compelling property for subtitle, hence the call for better options. [...]
Now that EPUB 3 is an IDPF Proposed Specification it seems like a good time to update some of our EPUB blog posts. One of the most popular was Best practices in ePub cover images, which helped clarify how to include a cover image for most ebook readers. While cover image markup wasn’t specified in EPUB, I’m happy to report that EPUB 3 clearly explains how to include a dedicated cover image.