[LINK] Ebooks for government reports?

[Ivan Trundle]

On 09/02/2010, at 9:32 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:

> EPUB uses HTML and other common web formats, such as CSS and PNG.

True, but it's more than this, as I specified in an earlier post. It's XHTML, with data containers better-aligned for books.

> EPUB specifies a way to Zip all the needed components up in one file, so the 
> "book" is self contained, not needing an Internet connection to be read. 
> This can then be used in place of PDF.

Except that it will never replace PDFs in either the Public Service or elsewhere.

It's an orphaned format designed for a niche which is too small to worry about for most content creators. Annual reports and many other documents produced by people don't suit the ePub format, and the ease of making PDFs simply outweighs (by a country mile) the difficulty in making and distributing ePubs.

My view? Books, on the other hand, are perfect for ePubs, and will continue to grow, with or without the iPad and Kindle et al.

--
Ivan Trundle
http://itrundle.com ivan at itrundle.com
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