: What are the differences between EPUB2 and EPUB3? What are the differences between EPUB2 and EPUB3? Which is most popular?

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

From a production standpoint, there aren't really that many differences at a bare-bones level--there's the switch from toc.ncx to toc.xhtml to provide navigational information, a few new metadata elements required in the content.opf file (like dc:terms modified, which indicates when the file was last modified), and a new header to use. While you can leave out the old toc.ncx and still get a valid epub 3.0 file, for backwards compatability it's best practice to include both toc files--epub 3 readers will ignore the old one, and epub 2 readers will ignore the new one.

As far as bells and whistles go, there are some neat new things: HTML 5 support, including things like <canvas> and Javascript support, <video>, and <audio>. Fixed Layout is a pretty big deal, of course. MathML is great if you're doing anything that involves equations, and you can use epub:type to include semantic information that reading systems can do some neat things with (like the popup footnotes in iBooks).

Popularity of the formats is a bit of a non-issue; epub 3.0 files are viewable on every epub 2.0.1 reading system and device that I've tried them on, and I've been making epub 3.0 files for over two years at this point. The new additions that epub 3.0 bring don't work on the older devices, of course, but the books themselves don't break and are perfectly readable, even if the videos and javascript don't show up. Older epub files are, as you would expect, readable on the new reading systems out there. There's no reason not to produce epub 3.0 files--doing so will only add functionality to your books as more reading systems catch up to epub 3.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

According to this page, EPUB3 adds, changes or improves:

Added HTML5 support
SVG documents can now appear in the spine in EPUB 3
Support for MathML
Semantic Inflection
Content switching has been simplified by having its processing model defined so that it does not require document preprocessing
Navigation
Linking
Scripting
Triggers
Bindings
Added modules from CSS3
EPUB 3 requires Reading Systems to support the OpenType and WOFF font formats for embedded fonts in conjunction with the CSS @font -face rules.
Audio and video
Media overlays
Publication Metadata and Identity
Resource Metadata
Text-to-speech
Manifest Fallbacks
Remote Resources
Whitespace in MIMETYPE file
Disallowed characters in OCF list has been extended

Things that have been removed:

DTBook
Out-of-Line XML Islands
Tours
Filesystem Container
Guide
NCX
2.0.1 meta element

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)