O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing (@ToC) (#toccon) has begun in New York City. It’s the annual conference for professionals to discuss where digital publishing is headed. Some sessions will be live-streamed; also see the program schedule.
According to ePUBSecrets (@ePUBSecrets), the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) (#idpf, #epub), the group responsible for the ePUB specification, chose the launch of TOC to announce its new ePUB 3.0 reader Readium (@readium), “a new open source initiative to develop a comprehensive reference implementation of the IDPF EPUB® 3 standard.”
This vision will be achieved by building on WebKit, the widely adopted open source HTML5 rendering engine.
“Adobe has been a strong supporter of EPUB 3 and we look forward to continuing to provide our customers with the ability to create and render rich content experiences and compelling eBooks with this format, which enables enhanced interactivity, rich media, global formatting, and accessibility,” says Nick Bogaty, Director, Business Development, Digital Publishing, Adobe Systems Incorporated. “Adobe welcomes the Readium project as an important step to help foster increased consistency across EPUB 3 implementations.”
Others supporting the IDPF EPUB® 3 standard are ACCESS, Anobii, Apex CoVantage, Assoc. American Publishers (AAP), Barnes & Noble, Bluefire Productions, BISG, Copia, DAISY, EAST, EDItEUR, Evident Point, Google, Incube Tech, Kobo/Rakuten, Monotype, O’Reilly, Rakuten, Safari Books Online, Samsung, Sony, VitalSource, Voyager Japan.
Noticeably absent is Amazon and its Kindle ereader, which uses the proprietary digital format AZW based on the Mobipocket standard.
Read the news release in full.
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