The revolution of ePub3

Technology is changing at such a fast pace that sometimes it is very difficult to follow the technology. Generation first eBooks were very simple and were limited to text only. It was good for fiction books or the books that only contain text in it. This is equivalent to the websites that only contain text and a few images at the beginning.

These days’ publishers are looking to add more features into their eBooks like adding media types adding sound, images, videos for better explanations, animation for attracting kids, mathematical formulas in their eBooks. The IDPF that created the EPUB standard has now published the EPUB3 standard too. Although there are many similarities with the two and this ePub3 is also compatible with ePub2 but it has its own standards too.

Special features of ePub3:

• It uses HTML5 for multimedia files for providing better support.
• CSS3 is used for advanced graphic layout and designing.
• It supports SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) for creating graphics that can be adapted easily to the screen of different sizes.
• It supports JavaScript.
• It supports animation.
• MathML is used for mathematical formulas.
• Supports Media Overlay to enable talking books and assistive technology.
• Better supports for right to left languages such as Hebrew Arabic and Japanese.

 These points are just to highlight the features but the inner structure of standard ePub3 is much more advanced as compared to the previous one. The new standards for ePub3 were approved by IDPF in October, 2011. However it has been a year but the readers still are not able to support the standards completely.

Is it important to get ePub3 when everything is present on the web or convert to ePub3?

People are also right when they say that why we need to buy ePub3 when everything is available on the internet. But personally I feel that there are a number of reasons why there is a need for ePub3.

Let us have a look at the 3 main reasons why you need ePub3 or ePub3 conversion:

1. Sometimes the web connections are not available or they are too expensive that you can afford. For example if you want to read when you are travelling and there always remain a network problem when you are travelling by air or by train.
2. Limitations with the bandwidth. If a class of more than 20 students is trying to access the same website it would be very difficult to access the same website and you won’t be able to open the book you want to read.
3. When information is present on the web server it is up to the owner of the server to make it accessible for the readers and if the owner takes the server down, you won’t be able to access the information anymore.

When you download a ePub3 eBook, you owe that book and can do whatever you like with the book. This is something that you cannot do with the books online.