EPUB 3 Best Practices

Introduction

Before jumping right into the best practices, let’s take a brief moment to answer the question: what exactly is an EPUB?

If you’re already familiar with the inner workings of the format, whether from creating EPUB 2 content or experimenting with EPUB 3, you can safely skip ahead to Chapter 1, but this introduction will take everyone else through a quick tour of the format (at the macro level, instead of the micro level to come) to see how the pieces fit together.

Since you’re reading a book about EPUB, you must already be familiar with the term, but you may have seen or heard it incorrectly being used as a synonym for ebook (as a shorthand for talking about electronic books). Although the two terms share a common relation in electronic book production, they aren’t interchangeable. EPUB is a format for representing documents in electronic form. Ebook, on the other hand, is just an abstract term used to encompass any electronic representation of a book, including formats such as PDF, HTML, ASCII text, Word, and a host of others, in addition to EPUB.

EPUB is designed to be a general-purpose document format, and it can be used to represent many kinds of publications other than just books: from magazines to newspapers to journals, and on through office documents and policies and beyond. Just about any document type you want to distribute electronically can be represented as an EPUB. Likewise, this book is not just about how to create books in electronic form, but how to optimally ...