Earlier this week (a lifetime at Laguardia ago) I attended the IDPF’s Digital Book 2010 at BEA in New York. The show was very well attended (700’ish in attendance) with a great international representation and a large number of Canadians in attendance. It was nice to see some success stories and hear where things are heading with regards to epub and IDPF. Parts of the conference felt a little ‘sales-y’, but there was enough implementation and technical information to keep me, and I think many others, interested. Here are a few of my takeaways:
- The first/final epub logo was shown. (I can’t find it on the IDPF web site yet, but I’m sure it will be there soon).
- epub version 2.01 available and version 2.1 working group struck.
- epubcheck to be updated to include CSS support.
- Strong international support for epub. Great interest from Japan, China and Korea in adding Kanji and expanded directional reading support (For some of the issues see here => http://www.jepa.or.jp/press_release/reqEPUBJ.html).
- epub 2.1 to include more language support, new layout techniques, more enriched media support, support for mathematics. Looking at a release early in 2011.
- Some interesting presentations on some of the things that can be done now in epub (if the reading software supported it) and some of the things that could be coming in future versions (I recommend checking out Liza Daly’s presentation when it is posted).
- The ongoing discussions on ‘agency’ pricing, lack of marketing for ebooks and the difficulty with ‘windowed’ releasing.
- DRM panel had an interesting presentation from Ronald Schild on the German ebook platform libreka! a co-operative effort between the German Publisher and Bookseller Associations to offer a common platform for ebook sales. They use social DRM and have never found a pirated copy of one of their books online (admittedly from a semi-small source).
All in all a good day. Congrats to IDPF and Michael Smith.
IDPF has said they will be posting the presentations online and we will update this post with the link when they do.
PS. Teleread has a good summary of the different sessions.
