EPUB 3 on current e-readers - drawbacks and opportunities

摘要

In recent years the International Digital Publishing Forum's ePUB format has become one of the major data formats for the production of electronic books (e-books). With the publication of its most recent version, ePUB 3, several new features have been added to the standard, which now allow for the inclusion of multimedia objects (audio, video), additional interactive elements (media control buttons, drag-and-drop functionality etc.), and of reading system-specific layout (CSS 3 media queries). In theory, these new features could be the key to present an enhanced viewing experience that cannot be achieved with printed books in a comparable way. However, ePUB 3 being a markup language based format (relying heavily on HTML 5 for content description), its success depends on whether the corresponding e-book reading systems (from here on referred to as e-readers) are able to interpret the markup code in the intended way. In this paper, we present the results of a study analyzing the ePUB 3 support (and especially the support of the new multimedia features) in current e-reading technology. The results suggest that many of these innovative functions are not fully implemented yet, and that for some features, diverging implementations exist - leading to incompatibilities in e-book-production.