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By Dr. Lawrence Kingsley

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About Telepublishing Ebooks

Telepublishing Ebooks, an imprint of Telepublishing Report, are analytic
reports on IT theory and practice, consumer trends and developments, and
best-of-breed products. See editorial note on last page for contact informa-
tion. For additional information write editor@telepublishingreport.com.
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EPUB: UNIVERSAL FORMAT

FOR PUBLISHING ON THE WEB

By Dr. Lawrence Kingsley

E-book from Telepublishing Report

Cambridge,MA

© 2022
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EPUB: UNIVERSAL FORMAL

FOR PUBLISHING ON THE WEB

By Dr. Lawrence Kingsley

HTML pages have been the substance of the Web as we now

know it, but the iPhone introduced a problem—small screens--
which required new solutions. No one wants to scroll complex
pages left and right to see what the iPhone could not display
in one screen. If a typical page designed for a desktop monitor
or even notebook computer were scaled down so that all the
information would fit on an iPhone, the page would be too small
to read. The same problem exists whether a Microsoft Word,
PDF, or Adobe InDesign document are in question; reliance on
graphic formats like .jgp, .tiff, or .bmp changes nothing; and
until recently, other smartphones were able to display complex
pages no better than the iPhone. Yet, as we know, the demand
for Internet access in mobile communication has continued to
grow, and users want the kind of Web experience which home
and office LANs had made familiar—that is, ability to read an
entire Web page with only the vertical scroll bar or next page
button.
Three solutions for rendering complex pages have been
derived. The first, in the late 1990s, was the scaling down of the
Web site itself with the hope of getting carriers to list the site
on cellphones. That notion not only gave the carries too much
control, but ended when access to the entire Web became a user
demand. The second solution, which we still have, was to turn
Web sites into apps that know how to modularize the content for
small devices. This approach suffices for menus, buttons, and
structured (database) information, but leaves the unstructured
information undefined—often the kind of content that in the
real world appears in books, magazines, and newspapers. A
third solution thus became necessary under sponsorship of the
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which
merged with the W3C in 2017—the use of adaptive content,
whereby page margins can change for each device. IDPF
created a standard called ePub which has evolved into its third
version, ePub 3 (now updated in a proposed 3.3 version). Bill
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McCoy, former Executive Director of IDPF, notes that ePub, in

all its versions, allows a publisher to “create one file and send it
to many distribution channels,” so that the publisher does not
have to recode the file for each device. Instead, the file reflows
for different screen sizes. Furthermore, security features of ePub
3 make illegal copying of copyrighted material less likely than
with PDF. Adobe’s site notes: “You can limit access to a PDF
by setting passwords and by restricting certain features, such
as printing and editing. However, you cannot restrict saving
copies of a PDF.”
The version number of ePub 3 is commonly omitted unless
it is important to observe this distinction. Apps that support
ePub are available for Android, iOS, and Windows 8, but not
for Kindles. However, publishers can submit a manuscript
to Amazon in ePub, and Amazon’s KindleGen software will
convert the ePub to .mobi and to Amazon’s proprietary KDP,
which the Kindle needs. E Ink devices are unable to support
ePub in any fashion, but McCoy finds that they are losing market
share to tablets and smartphones. Nooks, Kindles, and iPads, in
comparison, are ideally suited to e-books, and “All the ‘Big Six’
publishers in the U.S.,” according to McCoy, “are sending one
standard ePub file to all their distribution channels, including
Amazon.”
There are numerous companies which make a business of
hand-coding a word-processing document for ePub. Aptara,
Code Mantra, and Innodata are just three of these companies.
They make a case that they can handle complex layers, interactive
objects, fixed layouts, and multimedia that would choke the
automated utility in Adobe InDesign for ePub conversion.
Although InDesign V did a poor job of ePub conversion, InDesign
VI brought improvements, and InDesign Creative Cloud goes
further yet. Third-party plug-ins for InDesign offer additional
refinement. Automated conversion, for better or worse, is also
available from companies like Dictera or Smashwords. Calibre
is a popular open source program for the same purpose.
Since tablets are a growing part of the market, and since
screen size on smartphones is increasing, as on Samsung’s
Galaxy S-IV smartphone, ePub 3 has come to embrace what once
would have been heresy—fixed layouts, meaning publications
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without reflowable content. Book Baby lists as books that usually

require fixed layout: “Illustrated children’s books, cookbooks,
coffee table books, graphic novels, technical manuals and any
book that relies on a heavily-designed, static presentation,
full-page images, or text that overlaps with images.” 1 While
McCoy recommends reflowable content from the standpoint of
accessibility and support for multiple devices, fixed layout, he
says, was a “must do” option for IDPF’s goal of becoming the
universal format for the publishing on the Web.
Platforms
Once the publication is converted to ePub, Web sites and
aggregators ready to blast the publication out the world. Among
the largest distributors on the Web are traditional distributors,
Ingram and Baker and Taylor. Their co-opetition—destinations
as well as distributors themselves—consists of sites like iTunes,
Google Play, BN.com, Sony’s ReaderStore, and the Kindle
Store. Aiming for the same market, but nowhere near the size of
these mega-sites are Kobo, EBSCO, OverDrive, Lulu, Scribd,
Smashwords, and at least a dozen other sites.
To compete with Amazon as the go-to site for e-books,
companies tend to have either a niche strategy or interesting
software. Niche players include OverDrive, which has an
established presence in libraries, and Zola, which is trying to
partner with traditional bookstores by becoming their back end
on the Web—namely, an ordering service for books not stocked
by the local bookstore. Zola also introduces a social tie-in that
lets followers see content highlighted by a friend.
Companies which are trying to define their uniqueness in
terms of a complete platform for e-book creation, hosting, and e-
commerce include Vook, which has privoted from a publisher, to
publishing platform, and now consultancy for its platform;
BlueToad, which has an elegant page turner called a flipbook; and
Metrodigi, whose Chaucer software appears to support “all” the
important imput and output formats. On the other hand, market
leaders also offer tools for assembling an e-book— namely,
Apple’s iBooks Author, currently focused on textbooks, and the
composition tools of Kindle Direct Publishing.
The shoe which has not dropped yet, but which is tempting

1
See: http://www.bookbaby.com/help/faq.
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to imagine, is a future integration of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud

and Creative Cloud—i.e., marketing and big data combined
with Adobe’s authoring tools for publishing. Creative Cloud is
the Web-based follow-on to Adobe Creative Suite VI, two of
whose versions contain Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and
DreamWeaver. One would doubt that many authors outside
of IT, the graphic arts, and computer journalism are skilled or
motivated enough to learn software of this depth, so even though
it has never been easier to self-publish books on the Web, there
is still a role for publishers that relieve the author of any duty
except writing.
So far at least, it appears that the battle over disparate formats,
hardware, and distribution channels will be fought for years
ahead. Merger and acquisition among software and platform
providers are reasonable to expect, but in publishing it is always
the quality of the content that wins out in the end, not the size of
the publisher, not the professionalism of the formatting, and not
the publisher’s hype.
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