The business of international standards is not normally the most exciting story in the world. But there was an infectious buzz at the meeting where the latest version of Epub was being discussed at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010.

Epub is the standard file-format for ebooks. The old standard is barely 2 years old but there has been so much progress in the technology that it is already time to start work on a major revision. The second motive is the perception by many big players that an upgraded format is demanded by the market.

Amazon have adopted their own proprietary standard so they are making a big marketing-push to have their format accepted as the de facto standard. Most of those, outside Amazon, do not want them to have control of the ebook and an effective monopoly on the standard. Other manufacturers of ereaders have welcomed, and are conforming, to the Epub2 standard. Epub files can be read by Adobe Digital Editions, which is the equivalent of Adobe’s Acrobat for reading PDFs, and most of the handheld readers.

There was a real sense of urgency from all those contributing to this discussion. Publishers, distributors and hardware makers need a standard so they can operate across many platforms and compete with Amazon, which has a good start in this race. Machines without content are just as pointless as lots of content without any outlets. So these very powerful competitive forces have promoted a remarkable cooperative venture. The ‘big beasts’ in the publishing jungle have all recognised that a superior standard should be agreed quickly if they were to gain acceptance by consumers.

Even though their backs are against the wall, it was encouraging to see so many bodies working around the world and quite literally around-the-clock in a very open and co-operative fashion which can be followed on the web.

A great deal has changed in the last few years: first there is HTML5 which will be the new language for browsers. This has brought with it much greater ability to use video. There is also much better support for different human language scripts and indeed support for that strange language of mathematics with all its special symbols.

The need to be able to deal with complex page formats has also hampered the roll-out of version 2. It handles plain text and images well. But it is not so good when it comes to arranging items in columns. So it was particularly interesting to see that the magazine and newspaper publishers were playing a very active role in the new standard. The complex layouts encountered in these formats will be something that people want to view on any new ereader alongside their ebooks.

The timetable for this new version would see it being approved, probably in the third quarter of 2011, although the new draft standard will be published soon so that developers can get to work on it at the beginning of 2011.

One key feature of version 3 is that it will be able to accommodate anything written in version 2 i.e. there is backward compatibility. So items already produced will not become unreadable on existing machines and software. Any past investment in books is safe. There is a commitment that the e-book will be as transportable as the printed book.

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