Despite a TeleBlog poll suggesting that ePub is the fave spelling of our readers, the IDPF board yesterday went for EPUB.
So says board member Garth Conboy (photo), who himself likes ePub—both the spelling and the format, to which he’s been a major contributor.
My own preferences at this point are ePub for regular text and ePUB for an “Intel Inside”-style logo to brand the standard to get it on consumers’ minds. The unofficial logo shown here comes from Travis Alber, who has it just right. The larger letters in this case make the logo easier to read, while at the small e adds a little variety. Is it possible that the IDPF could even adopt her version officially?
Within regular text
But back to issue of usage within regular text. A nice, quiet look with mostly small letters would appeal to book people’s aesthetic sensibilities. Speak up, in a civil way! E-mail Mike Smith, the IDPF’s executive director, while remembering that board members, not Mike, set the policy.
Meanwhile, ahead, I’ll reproduce Garth’s slightly tweaked version of a helpful post he made to the ePub Community list. Also see Mike Cook’s ePub Books blog.
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Hello ePub Community List Folks,
By way of introduction I’m Garth Conboy. I co-chaired the two IDPF groups that developed the standards encapsulated under the EPUB (or .epub, ePub or, ePUB) term — those being OCF, OPS and OPF (respectively, the container format, the markup standard, and the package format). And, yes, I’m also on the IDPF board… they gotta have one geek in the crowd!
First, one comment regarding the previous “flabbergasted” post… Adobe was one of the major technical contributors to both the container and markup standards efforts within the IDPF. However, these efforts both predated (the container standard [OCF], substantially) the advent of the Digital Editions product from Adobe. Digital Editions is a desktop PC-based implementation of EPUB — technically an “EPUB Reading System.” EPUB is not (was not) a moniker applied to Adobe product or format. They are, however, an early adopter and implementer of the standard, and have made quite substantial contributions to the EPUB validator (http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/). You won’t find me being an Adobe apologist very frequently — please don’t count this paragraph as such!
Now getting around to the “name of the beast” discussion. “.epub” was first used as the file extension for publications contained in an OCF container (OEBPS Container Format; hopefully migrating someday to be termed Open Container Format, but that’s another can of worms). The OCF standard is defined at “http://www.idpf.org/ocf/ocf1.0/index.htm”. As it was the first effort, and predated the new markup standard, it is technically targeted at an OEBPS 1.2 publication contained in a standardized ZIP container producing a file with the “.epub” extension.
This effort was following by the OEBPS 2.0 effort — that resulted in the OPS 2.0 markup standard (Open Publication Structure at
“http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/OPS_2.0_final_spec.html”) and the OPF packaging standard (Open Packaging Format at “http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf/OPF_2.0_final_spec.html“). A publication conforming to these standards certainly wants to be contained in, and transported in, an OCF container.
Thus, the term EPUB was created to mean an OPS/OPF publication contained in an OCF container. Trading one four-letter (almost) acronym for three three-letter acronyms. And, for what it’s worth there is expected to the a maintenance effort commenced on OCF such that it refers to containing OPS publications rather than OEBPS 1.2 publications in the fairly near future.
There was a discussion of how the standard should be capitalized this morning [Monday] on the IDPF Board of Directors call — perhaps driven by the discussion on this or the Teleread blog. The IDPF certainly can’t dictate how others or the industry uses “e” “p” “u” “b” in that order, but it has decided how it will use the term.
The soon-to-be-created IDPF style guide will likely use “EPUB” to mean the standard (OPS/OPF in an OCF container) and also the class of documents/publications that so conform. The file extension will, of course, remain “.epub”. This is at least somewhat analogous to HTML documents having the .html or .htm extensions (yes, I know HTML is a true acronym, and EPUB isn’t).
That said, I personally like the look of “ePub” better, and if there were someday to be a logo that denotes EPUB compliance or validity, I’d hope we do something around the camel-caps version.
Sorry — that was way more than I thought I was going to type!
Best,
Garth
