Readium Open Source Initiative Launched to Accelerate Adoption of EPUB 3 | International Digital Publishing Forum

13 Feb 2012 in ePublishing

The IDPF has got together a who’s-who of people and companies in the eBook world to work on an open-source implementation of a reference ePub3 reading system and container library. And of course Kobo is putting a ton of weight behind it. Also, me: I’m going to be working on this project full-time here very shortly.

Looking through the project’s goals, you’ll see a good amount of overlap with the goals I’d previously stated for the ePub Author project. The core aims are all there:

• A browser of ‘ePub3-flavoured HTML’ content.
• A library encapsulating the correct parsing and generation of all forms of structured content described in the ePub3 standard.
• Best-in-class support for non-Roman scripts, particularly vertically-flowing ones.
• No limits on its use as the core of a larger project, even commercial ones.
• Lots of industry know-how being funneled into a single output.

So yeah: I’m rather excited about this one. Expect to hear more from me as it all progresses.

Now I’ll just go back to writing ePub3 structured content handling code…