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Re: PDF and ePub Formats

for

From: Joshue O Connor
Date: May 13, 2010 3:18AM

Hi y'all,

Denis and I received a response from George Kersher about ePub and I am
forwarding Georges reply to the list as it is informative, (thanks to
Varju for passing it onto George).

George is one of the authors of the EPUB specification and is currently
President
of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which maintains the
EPUB standard. He is also one of the authors of the DAISY specifications.

<Georges response>

PDF and EPUB are fundamentally different. EPUB has been designed to be fully
accessible from the beginning. In the latest release of the standard, there
are two allowed formats inside the publication, XHTML or DAISY XML. The
standard has also adopted the DAISY navigation model.

The problem that we have seen is that many of the EPUB documents are
encrypted and only particular reading systems can open the encrypted books.
These reading systems are not accessible. Many of the companies have
promised to make their systems accessible.

Unprotected EPUB can use any conforming reading system. Emerson, which is
open source, EaseReader from Dolphin, will read EPUB publications. Other
DAISY reading systems are moving towards reading EPUB as well.

To take a look inside an unprotected EPUB, you can rename the .epub to .zip
and unzip the container. Inside you would find the HTML or the DAISY XML.

The DAISY standard is currently under a revision. EPUB is about to start a
revision as well. The plan is to move these standards closer together.

</response>

Cheers

Josh



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