In hopes of staying ahead of the curve of e-reader development, industry groups are working to craft better magazine standardization in the ePUB format.
Speaking yesterday at the Magazine Publishers of America's Dimensional to Digital conference, Dianne Kennedy, vice president of Media Technologies at IDEAlliance, said a standardized ePUB format, which is based on XML, will be the key to staying versatile across different mediums. “XML is going to be―if it's not already at your organization―at the heart of your ability to be very nimble and deliver content to many platforms, including print,” she told attendees.
ePUB is displayable by e-readers such as the Kindle and iPad, but is based more on books rather than magazines. In 2001, the IDEAlliance introduced PRISM XML as a standard for the magazine industry, and then addressed publishing across media platforms with PRISM 2.0 in 2008. Now the group hopes to build upon PRISM with ePUB Next, through an alliance with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The goal is to bring magazines and rich content to the e-reader channel encoded with ePUB XML, allowing for inclusion of style sheets, scripting and rich media, Kennedy said.
Furthermore, the new standards are being developed “with an eye toward advertising,” which will be critical for the magazine business going forward. New standards allowing for the delivery of content across a variety of devices will be "an on-ramp for all of us," she said.
The group is planning to have a working draft of the standards by September and final standards to follow, “so that manufactures of the next generation devices will understand what form the content will be in when it's delivered to their devices,” she said.
In order to monetize new platforms, the alliance is also looking at new standards for XML syndication. ICE (Information and Content Exchange), an XML content syndication program, was launched in 2001 but never took off because it competed with free technologies such as RSS and ATOM. But free is no longer the goal. “Our minds have changed now; we don't want to deliver content free of charge,” Kennedy said.
