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E-book Publishing


FEATURE


Enhancements anticipated but workflows still print-focused


hyphenation, embedded fonts, enhanced metadata and improved accessibility. ‘As e-books inevitably become more interactive and media-centric, EPUB 3 will be important in ensuring cross-platform compatibility for new titles that offer these enhanced user experiences,’ noted Gary Coker, vice president of strategy and research for MetaPress. ‘I think we’ll see e-book platforms supporting EPUB 3 almost immediately, certainly early in 2012. The challenge then will be publishers’ readiness to produce content that takes advantage of the capabilities of the format.’ However, Coker believes that the challenges


of formats are fewer for the companies that provide the publishing technology: ‘Producing e-books for different formats is not as difficult as it may seem. We’ve always had to deal with dynamic and emerging formats in the scholarly space, so the various e-book formats currently in play are really no more challenging to support than what we’ve seen in the e-journals realm,’ he said. The greater challenges, he said, lie in


There are plenty of ambitious plans for e-books, especially using the new EPUB 3 standard but some publishers are still geared towards print books, writes Siân Harris


3,’ said Alex Schrijver, VP of sales, EMEA and APAC, for MPS Limited. He is excited because of the potential impact of the standard on what becomes possible with e-books. Currently, most e-books are in the PDF


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or EPUB formats. However, both have their limitations. As a PDF is a static piece of text, there can be difficulties with it scaling or rendering properly. And, although EPUB brings in the advantages of XML, there are restrictions to what it can do. For example, currently non-Roman characters have to be included as images. This limits what can


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ne of the highlights of the Frankfurt Book Fair for many people is expected to be discussions about the new EPUB 3 standard. ‘We are very much looking forward to EPUB


be done with mathematical text as well as languages such as Arabic and Chinese. In contrast, EPUB 3 allows the use of MathML, which enables formulae to render better and be used in a more consistent way. It also means that characters can be scaled, and that text can be searched properly. The flexibility to cater to non-Roman languages will open up new markets, according to Schrijver of MPS. ‘Publishers who publish in those languages are asking for e-books now,’ he said. ‘The opportunities are endless. There was lots of interest from publishers in EPUB 3 at the London Book Fair and many publishers are thinking of converting old EPUB files to EPUB 3.’ The new standard also promises to support video, audio, interactivity, multicolumn layout,


distributing e-books to the different devices. ‘Publishers need to understand the habits and environments of their target user bases in order to target the right devices and formats. Many publishers and vendors will need to invest in new skillsets, such as app development for smartphones and tablets, in order to offer the expected user-experiences,’ he added. Part of understanding user-needs includes considering extra functionality that might be required. As Hervé Essa, vice president of international sales at Jouve observed, ‘Animations and social tools add the most value to non-fiction and educational content and tablets and PCs are the target devices. Dedicated e-readers are highly optimised for the consumption of narrative content that may include such features as search and the provision of definitions.’


Challenges along the way Of course, we are no longer at the beginning of the e-book story. Over recent years, enormous numbers of research, reference and textbooks have been released in electronic


OCT/NOV 2011 Research Information 21


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