The name makes me think of uranium and radiation, the proprietary DRM issue remains, and Apple isn’t a supporter. But the Readium initiative, announced this morning, is a still big step forward for the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main e-book industry trade group. A demo reader mixes ePub 3 e-book format, XML, HTML5 standards and the WebKit rendering engine used in many Web browsers. Aided by this “reference implementation, developers will more easily be able to create ePub reading software with “support for video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements” (link added). Demos already exist as extensions for Chromium...

From the press release: ACCESS, Adobe, Barnes & Noble, Copia, Google, Kobo/Rakuten, O’Reilly, Samsung, Sony, others support project to advance universal digital publishing format The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced the Readium Project, a new open source initiative to develop a comprehensive reference implementation of the IDPF EPUB® 3 standard. This vision will be achieved by building on WebKit, the widely adopted open source HTML5 rendering engine. EPUB, an XML and Web Standards based format developed by the IDPF, has become a key global standard in the rapidly developing digital publishing industry, enabling digital books and publications to be portable...

From the IPDF Web Site: The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced the completion of a major revision to EPUB, the global standard interchange and delivery format for eBooks and other digital publications. The IDPF membership unanimously voted to elevate EPUB 3.0 to a final IDPF Recommended Specification, publicly available at: http://idpf.org/epub/30. EPUB 3 was chartered in May 2010 and developed by a global working group of over 100 contributors, reaching Proposed Recommendation status in May, 2011. Based on HTML5, EPUB 3 adds support for rich media (audio, video), interactivity (JavaScript), global language support (including vertical writing), styling and layout enhancements, SVG,...

This presentation was one of the biggest disapointments I've had in a long time - especially since I am a tremendous fan of both and have real all their books. Bear/Stephenson were at the conference solely to drum up investment for their new venture - they said this was the reason they came - and not to impart any real information.  To make it worse their presentation was boring.  They proceded to read from a prepared script with little, if any, enthusiasm.  On top of that they alternated reading lines from the slides in a juvenile way.  At lease Baer smiled...

One of the banes of going to events like this is that the same speakers get recycled from event to event.  It's a small group.  So who were the best speakers at the IDPF event?  This makes them, by the way, the best speakers at ToC, Digital Book World, etc., so you might want to remember them and be sure to glom onto them at the next conference you go to.  Here they are, in alphabetical order: Peter Balis, John Wiley & Sons:  Peter always tells the truth, be it good or bad.  No corporate-apeak for him. Not only that he...

Masaaki Hagino and Daihei Shiohama, Voyager Japan: experimenting with interactive media for 30 years.  Voyager japan is a digital publisher.  As a digital publisher it is important to have an alternative point of view it is only through digital publishing that this can be done.  First ebook we did was Jurassic Park which was recorded on a 3.5 inch floppy disk. Can find all the elements of current ebooks (annotations, etc.) back in the Jurassic Park book.  Used Hypercard on Macs to publish ebooks even though they had no programming skills. Epub 3 will make a big difference in publishing...

Ken Brooks, Cengage: digital products are breaking the steady state model between revenue, product investment and cash.  The lower prices that products are being sold at generates far less revenue than the costs of producing them.  Need to use savings from current operations to fund new products.  Have to do this in process management, vendor management and technology management. which can no longer be considered as a back-office operation. Each new product tends to create a new process and if allow this to happen then will die a death by a thousand cuts. Bob Young, Lulu: self-publishing makes up 1% of...

Bill McCoy, IDPF: Epub=XHTML content with navigational structure and metatadats, in a zip-based package.  Content paginated on the fly based on screen size, resolution and user font size preferences. Amazon has been accepting Epub for some time and then converting it to their format.  The general "on-ramp" to Amazon is Epub. Goals: expand Epub applicability for global content; improvement for complex, interactive, media-rich titles, increase web standards alignment (HTML5), improve Epub conformance and accessibility.  Proposed specification of Epub 3.0 approved today. Enhancements: video and audio support, audio can be synchronized with text, embedded font support a baseline requirement, improved SVG support, sJavaScript...

Neal Stephenson: is an investigation into the future of publishing. The intent is to start a new publishing ideal called Pulp.  Mongoliad won't be finished until we can hold a physical copy in our hands.  Way to beat piracy is to create content that can't be duplicated.  Plan is to build website into Pulp 2.0, which will support more ebooks than just the one that we are writing. Incorporates fan fiction - some of which is surprisingly good.  Can't ignore fan fiction because it is there and will never go away.  Have great respect for publishers and not trying to...

Evan Schnittman, Bloomsbury: ebooks as a market share in immersive, narrative format will get a huge share.  But in other formats where pictures and pedagogic tools are paramount ebooks have a small percentage and now indication yet is that it will get bigger.  On pricing, still have to pay authors and so the cost of content still has to be maintained.  Will see a bifurcation as authors work towards the decision point between self-publishing and going with a publisher.  Publishers will maintain their price structures.  Found that customers are not terribly interested in enhanced ebooks. Four mouths to feed: author,...

Michael Tamblyn, Kobo Books: Launched December, 2009.  David vs. Goliath story: ecommerce, bricks and mortar, search.  10 months to get 1st million users, 70 days tyo get second million users.  Delivered books to 200 countries, 200 employees.  Year past: 5 things learned - 1. happening faster than we ever thought;  2. price landscape has changed, price tolerance has changed, two peaks $8 and $10 and "agencyland" is much lower in sales, new is price points at $1.99 and $2.99.  Half of low prices are publisher experimentation and the other half is from self-publishing; 3. self-publishing exploded, represents 7% of their...

  There are three events coming up that I hope to cover for you: May 23 - 24 IDPF Digital Book 2011 in New York.  Held in conjunction with BEA May 23 - 26 Book Expo America June 28 - July 1 Romance Writers of America annual conference in New York  ...