Tomorrow (the 16th) is the last day for the public and IDPF members to provide feedback on the draft OPS 2.0 standard (the XML-based framework behind the upcoming “epub” e-book open standard). OPS 2.0 is currently in its last public review stage before moving on to final tweaking and approval by the IDPF membership.
Speak now or forever hold your peace!
Thus, it is important that anyone planning to use OPS 2.0 in any manner — from authoring to presentation — should go over the OPS 2.0 draft spec (and the auxiliary OPF 2.0 draft spec) and provide feedback. Your feedback is easy to provide: post your reply to Nick Bogaty’s IDPF forum announcement. A few people, including yours truly, have already provided feedback to this forum topic. (Note, if you do provide feedback, click on the “post reply” button, not the “new topic” button.)
Importantly note you need not be an IDPF member for your input to be considered. All input will be considered on an equal basis.
Once the OPS 2.0 spec is finalized and approved by the IDPF membership (which it likely will), it will be etched in stone, and future changes or improvements to the spec will be somewhat restricted to maintain compatibility. This is all the more reason to provide feedback if you are concerned about any aspect of OPS 2.0.
Why should anyone care about the “epub” open standard?
The obvious question is if epub has any chance of becoming an important (or even the dominant) reflowable e-book standard in the marketplace?
In my estimation it has a great chance. First, the OPS 2.0 spec (which, as noted previously, forms the underlying framework for epub) is an update to OEBPS 1.2. Almost exactly four years ago I argued that OEBPS is an excellent framework upon which to build a next-generation e-book format enabling a rich reading experience. (I believe OpenReader, a similar and next-generation XML-based framework, is superior, but OPS 2.0 is, from my perspective, reasonably acceptable — something I will address in a long-promised blog article.)
Second, I see a critical mass of interest both by application developers and by publishers. This has always been the fundamental requirement for any format to succeed in the marketplace.
On the application (reading system) side we notably have Adobe and OSoft which plan to soon release epub-capable reading systems: Adobe’s Digital Editions, and OSoft’s dotReader. In addition, it appears like others (maybe even Sony?) will support tools to auto-convert the quite rich epub format into many of the currently used e-book formats (I see it relatively easy to auto-generate LIT and Mobipocket from epub.)
Thus, for both these reasons publishers are expected to recast a lot of their publications into the new epub format. (OPS 2.0 was designed to make it relatively easy to upgrade most existing OEBPS 1.0.1 and 1.2 Publications into OPS 2.0, thereby reducing the burden on publishers who already have a lot of existing OEBPS content.)
The author of this article, Jon Noring, is VP of Development for DigitalPulp Publishing, a member of IDPF. He also technically contributed to the development of OPS 2.0 as well as all prior versions of OEBPS.
