What is EPUB?

October 24, 2011Leave a reply

EPUBEPUB is a formatting standard for publishing ebooks like those you can find on Apple iBooks, Google Books and many other online sources of electronic books. This standard was set by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).  This standard is open, which means anyone can learn it inside and out, and it is royalty-free, which means you don’t have to pay anyone to use it. Built into EPUB is a platform for digital rights management (DRM), which is a hot topic in any digital media including text, music and video.

The current version of EPUB, 2.0.1., uses as its data type definition (DTD) the DTBook standard established by the Daisy Consortium.

The basics of the EPUB standard look like this*:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Pride and Prejudice</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/main.css" type="text/css" />
</head> <body> ...
</body> </html>

The EPUB package can contain text, audio, or a navigation control for XML (NCX) which is a file used to navigate to any section of the book. The main file in this package is an Open Packaging Format (OPF) file in which meta data such as title and language are stored.  This OPF file might have any number of other optional elements and attributes. A full list of OPF specifications can be found here. There are also recommendations being made for EPUB 3.o which takes HTML5 into account.

, , , XML Examples

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