Embracing Modern Digital Publishing

EPUB 3 is where publishers, distributors, tech developers, authors, and management need to focus their digital publishing efforts. 25 Years ago PDF hit the scene and provided a great way to ensure print fidelity anywhere. Today, publishers that still distribute PDF as a digital book, are showing how behind they really are. The publishers distributing EPUB 2, while not exactly in the Jurassic period, are now behind the times as well.

You can make a business decision to stick with PDF for online reading (try that on a phone), and if you are already using EPUB 2, you can also stick with that. However, Any new developments in software or production processes should be using the EPUB 3 format. If your vendors are telling you that EPUB 2 is just fine for what you are doing, or if marketing folks say there is no reason for you to embrace the latest version of EPUB, then it is time to look elsewhere for sound advice.

HTML 4 was a great improvement for the web, but all new sites are taking advantage of what HTML5 offers. If I were building a website today and the developer said they were going to use HTML 4 and would not use JavaScript, I would laugh them out of my office. Similarly, why go with EPUB 2, which uses HTML 4 and discourages JavaScript instead of EPUB 3, which builds on the richness of HTML 5 and JavaScript, plus a lot more. Even the simplest of digital publications benefit by the features of EPUB 3.

Just get accustom to change! The digital formats are going to improve over time. There are a lot of talented people who are working on EPUB 3 in the W3C, the same standards body that brings you HTML. These people are committed to the publishing industry and providing paths from EPUB 2 to EPUB 3, to EPUB 4 and on to Web Publications and beyond. So, I suggest you strongly consider embracing modern digital publishing techniques and EPUB 3, the latest version under development is EPUB 3.2, but don't worry, as long as you are in the EPUB 3.x generation, you are in good shape.

For an excellent technical discussion of the reasons to move from EPUB 2 to EPUB 3, visit:

https://github.com/readium/readium.github.io/wiki/EPUB-2-sunset