The Open eBook Forum, a group of publishers, software makers and
interest
groups, has advanced a new XML
interoperability among a variety of eBook formats and readers.
Called the Open eBook Publication Structure (OeBPS), the latest version
(1.2) can directly accommodate in-house XML vocabularies with little or no
modification, the group said.
The advances in the latest version also represent an agreement on specifications among software companies that make different-format ebook readers such as Microsoft, Palm’s Digital Media division, Adobe Systems and Gemstar’s eBook group (all of which are involved in the Open eBook Forum).
The latest version of the XML-based format helps publishers and
others involved in digital book creation describe content, structure, and
presentation of electronic books. But now, publishers have greater control with presentation layers in different formats, which has been a major issue for them in advancing interoperable file formats. The latest version is available for downloaded here
OeBPS 1.2 is a tightly constrained update to a prior version (OeBPS
1.0.1), which was largely an effort to remove ambiguities and errors in the
publishing dialect.
The group said version 1.2 provides a great deal of new functionality in
the area of presentation control, including, among other things,
improvements in the basic markup vocabulary (now a pure subset of XHTML 1.1), and greatly expanded
support for CSS (cascading style sheets, which help define how different
elements, such as headers and links, appear in a Web page). The version is
fully compatible with existing OeBPS 1.0.1 content, working group members
said.
Allen Renear, a professor of Library and Information Science at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the chair of the OEBF
Publication Structure Working Group, said the latest spec “allows
publishers
to easily present their content on almost any ebook device.”
As a result, the XML dialects for publishing are ready to be integrated into
major publishers’ production systems. The addition is significant because publishers would no longer have to retro-fit the ebooks, post-publishing, into a wide-ranging number of file formats for different ebook readers such as the Palm reader, or Microsoft’s .lit file extension, said Nick Bogaty, executive director of the New York-based Open eBook Forum.
Some of the companies involved in the forum are Adobe Systems, the Data Conversion Laboratory, Gemstar-TVGuide, GlobalMentor, the Library of
Congress, McGraw-Hill, Microsoft, Nokia, Overdrive, and Random House.
Next up for the Publication Structure Working Group: Version 2.0 of the
specification. The goals, members said, include
enhancements in navigation and linking, “internationalization” and metadata, and further support for more advanced formatting that is common in textbooks and
educational materials.
