Tag Archive for: digital publishing

Digital Publishing Summit Program Announced!

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Logo for EDRLab the organizers of this conferenceEDRLab has announced the program for their annual Digital Publishing Summit (DPUB) which will take place in Berlin May 16-17, 2018. As ever the program is an exciting mix of tech presentations and high level sessions from the production of natively accessible ebooks to the spread of highly interoperable EPUB 3 reading applications on all platforms, with Readium LCP.  Delegates can expect plenty of practical demo sessions as EDRLab encourages adoption of open standards and software by the European publishing industry.

The program is of huge interest to accessible publishing, in particular the session on EPUB 3 as an accessible and mainstream format. Early bird pricing is available until February 28 and full information is online at the EDRLab website.

Understanding ebooks, London

April 25th, 2018
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Join publishing industry expert Ken Jones (@circularKen) for this one day Book Machine course to help you understand the ebook market and to gain some of the practical skills required to produce your own digital content. Accessibility plays an intrinsic part in successful ebook publishing and Ken will be looking at this as part of this fascinating insight.

Date:

April 25th, 2018

Venue:

London, U.K.

Learn More:

Understanding Ebooks

Publishing Markup Mysteries: Bill Kasdorf’s Take

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In his Apex Content Solutions blog post, Bill Kasdorf clears up confusion around publishing markup mysteries. He admits that some people may find the concept or “markup” confusing. Let’s take a look at two of his examples below.

Isn’t EPUB just a form of XML?

Well, yes and no. The content documents in an EPUB are XML—the words you’re reading on your ereader or phone. But EPUB itself is a file format. It’s a package that contains lots of components that make up a publication. Not just the content documents, but the images and media and other features that together comprise a given publication, the CSS stylesheets and fonts that govern how they look, and metadata and navigation files that make it all work. All this good stuff is gathered up in a systematic package called an EPUB.

Because its current packaging is a .zip file, an EPUB looks like—and is—a single file. Which leads people to think it’s just a file like an XML file. Nope. It’s way more than that.

HTML is not the same as XML. Except when it is.

Those XML content documents in an EPUB aren’t just any XML. They’re XML using a very specific vocabulary: HTML5. Or, to say that the other way around, they’re HTML5 using XML syntax. That’s often referred to as XHTML; but it’s not the old XHTML 1.1 of a few years back.

If you want to learn more about markup for publishers, go read the Apex Content Solutions blog.