EPUB 3 Best Practices

Preface

When I first wrote What Is EPUB 3? in the summer of 2011, it was envisioned as both a brief standalone piece that would orient people to the new EPUB 3.0 revision the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) was about to release and also as an introduction to what we hoped would evolve into a larger best practices guide—the one you’re reading now.

You’ll find that book distilled down to its bare essentials in this book’s introduction, but if you are new to EPUB, there is much information put into that original guide that is helpful to know before tackling this one, so if I can recommend some advance reading, it would be to grab a copy of that ebook and give it a skim. If you’re not familiar with EPUBs generally, or what’s changed from 2 to 3, it’ll help give you a general view of the big picture before launching into the details that we’ll be covering here. It’s only a small-chapter-length in size, too (and free!), so it won’t take you long to get through, and it will give you a condensed perspective on what an EPUB is.

This guide instead delves right into the EPUB container and walks you through best practices as they relate to production of your publications; you’ll find a bit of a mixture of practices and guidance on how to use EPUB technologies. You don’t necessarily have to know the technology of publishing EPUBs inside and out to find value here, nor do you have to be a programmer or tech geek, but this book is for the ebook practitioner.

In planning out this guide, ...