EPUB 3.1

Kevin Callahan February 3, 2016 EPUB 3 Comments

  • Sumo

You saw that right! There’s a revision of EPUB 3 in the works. It’s still a working document, but makes for fascinating reading. Among the changes:

  • Metadata: only title, identifier, creator, publisher, and type will be allowed in the .opf. The Refines elements is dropped, with a file-as attribute added.
  •  The toc.ncx will not be supported. That’s a legacy EPUB2 navigation file, used only by Nook at the moment.
  • Similarly, the guide element is gone from the content.opf

Read it all here: http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-changes.html

3 Responses to “EPUB 3.1”

  1. Michael W. Perry says:
    February 3, 2016 at 5:22 pm

    Yes, but is there, like, better and more powerful ways to format ebooks. That’s, like, the purpose of ebook standards, you know. Like, so we can create better looking, more complex ebooks, after all.

    Section 5.1, Addition of Support for HTML Syntax of HTML5, offers some hope in that area, but I don’t understand enough about HTML to know if that’s true. I just want to be able to create ebooks with attractive, webpage-type features, particularly accordion text. It’s far better for supplemental material than pop-up notes, particularly the ugly, too-big numbers of pop-ups in the iBooks app.

    I mean. like, could you give us hope that epub 3.1 is, you know, a tiny bit better than 3.0. Like, just a tiny bit better and such for ebooks and things like them. An ebook is, you know, more than that metadata and TOC stuff and things. It includes text that needs formatting and laying out in varied ways and all that.

    You know….

  2. Russell says:
    February 15, 2016 at 7:25 pm

    Woots, this might be the one point that I’m most excited about:

    – The restriction on the use of position: absolute is removed.

    It has caused me great pain trying to find workarounds just because the epub checker throws a warning that position: absolute cannot be used. Finally designing an interactive ePub made that much more sense! 🙂

  3. ali haririan says:
    August 16, 2017 at 2:30 am

    i hope it supportes more html codes . for example in fixed layout you can have a photo gallery . but in reflowable epub 3 you cant make a simple photo enlargment . and you have no control in text layout . and photos only floating in left or right . i hope we have more control on text layout and media