Technical books are often a significant challenge to a publisher when it wants to publish them in e-book form. That’s why it is such good news when a respected technical publisher is able to use the new ePub format for its books.
Hindawi Publishing Corporation is a commercial publisher of STM (Science, Technology, and Medicine) literature. Founded in 1997, Hindawi currently employs more than 250 people, and publishes more than 100 peer-reviewed journals. In February 2007, Hindawi announced its full conversion to Open Access, making it the only publisher with fully developed Open Access journals spanning such a wide range of subjects in science, technology, and medicine.
Hindawi has just announced that it will now be using ePub on all its Open Access publications.
Here is the announcement:
Hindawi is pleased to announce the addition of the ePUB digital format as one of the available formats on its online platform for all of its journal and book publications. ePUB is a modern, industry standard format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, of which Hindawi is a member, as an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications. ePUB is widely supported on computer systems as well as on digital reading devices such as the Sony digital book reader. A number of sample articles that have been released can be found at http://www.hindawi.com/epub.html.
“ePUB allows us to produce and make available a single digital file that combines the benefits of the high fidelity typography typically found in PDFs along with the benefits of XML structured content, high resolution images, scalable vector graphics, and font embedding,” said Fatma Sultan, Hindawi’s Production Manager. “It has gained strong support from a number of book publishers. However, it has not been used before for highly technical materials such as those published in our STM journals and books. We are pleased to be on the forefront of the format adoption wave in these areas.”
Hindawi currently publishes all of its journal articles in PDF and HTML with full MathML support. The integration of ePUB production within Hindawi’s current XML workflow makes the ePUB production seamless. All articles published since the beginning of 2008 shall be reprocessed in order to generate ePUB files. Going forward, all articles and books will be released in ePUB in addition to the other current formats.
