What is the difference between epub and epub

Search Search. Sign In Account Management. Information Title. URL Name. Summary Description. Everyone except Amazon, who were happy with their closed Kindle garden. Many of these new tablets could display in color. And the new ePub2 files, being based on the same HTML that drives the Web, allowed for much greater sophistication with regards to text formatting and layout. In the early years of this decade, the International Digital Publishers Forum the group who oversaw the creation of the ePub standard continued to look at ways to improve the ePub format.

This new iteration was called logically ePub version 3. Broadly speaking they included:. Suffice it to say that the newer language of web allows for much more sophisticated structuring and formatting of ebooks. Just get a little geeky: the new version of HTML introduced a number of new elements — the building blocks out of which you create a web page or ebook.

It also allowed for a number of functions that were specifically useful to ebooks. Or, say an endnote that pops up on the screen, rather than taking you to a different page.

These hold the promise of simple, self-creating navigation pages, easier accessibility for disabled folks, and more — in the future. But most of that functionality is current un-utilized. The CSS too is much more sophisticated — and like the HTML can be used to make the ebook easier to read for the disabled, for example, or to display much niftier layout and typographic effects. This page provides the drop-down navigation menu:.

And you can and probably should generate an NCX anyway for backward compatibility see below. Imagine dropping in background music that enhances the reading experience. I still love this as an idea. Unfortunately, it has continued to be just an idea for most independent publishers for three reasons:.

And all of it follows the bibliographic Dublin Core standard. As eBooks started to gain mainstream acceptance, many companies started to manufacture and market their own eBook readers.

The problem with this is that the lack of a unified standard means that many of them created their own. The advent of ePub aims to create a unified standard for eBooks. As ePub is a format for eBooks, an ePub file is also an eBook. The main thing that differentiates ePub from many of the other eBook format is that it is an open standard.

It is not proprietary in nature and just about anyone can use it without having to pay fees or fear getting sued. Although there some eBook formats that are also open, many are not. One of the biggest draws that ePub has over other eBook formats is that it is governed by an independent body and not by a company that may have a vested interest. It is not locked tied to products within the same company; thus the same file can be used on a multitude of devices.

This is very convenient for publishers as using vendor specific formats would mean that the same eBook needs to be converted to multiple formats in order to make it available for everyone. What PDF lacks that ePub has is the ability to reflow text in order to fit the size of the screen where it is being viewed. Small screen users benefit from not having to keep zooming in and out and scrolling around while large screen users have the benefit of having more words on-screen at the same time.