ePub Books Blog

Garth Conboy discusses the ePub moniker

During the last week or so there’s been lots of discussion around the internet regarding how we write the word “epub”. There have been many good reasons for choosing one style over another but if we take the TeleRead Poll as any kind of indication then “ePub” seems to be a favourite.

Of course what we’ve all been waiting for is someone from the IDPF to make an official comment.

Earlier today Garth Conboy, who co-chaired two IDPF groups that developed the standards encapsulated under the “EPUB” term and a current board member, made an interesting post to the EPub Community regarding this subject.

Garth states that “.epub was first used as the file extension for publications contained in an OCF container” and that 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.”

It seems that the IDPF have taken note of the discussions going on at TeleRead and the EPub Community and although the following is not an official statement, it is great to have feedback from someone on the inside.

Garth says,

There was a discussion of how the standard should be capitalized this morning on the IDPF Board of Directors call — perhaps driven by the discussion on this or the Teleread list. 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).

Great news that the IDPF are now thinking about this and who knows, perhaps we’ll seen an official ePub logo in the near future too!

Garth’s personal choice is the same as mine here at epubbooks.com; he personally likes “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.”

Join the new EPub Community mailing list

I’m currently subscribed to a number of mailing lists, though I must confess I don’t really contribute [I hang my head in shame]. As a result of being a member I received an invitation from Jon Noring to his new YahooGroup, EPub Community — I’m starting to believe he is addicted to these lists

In the invitation email he writes,

EPub Community is intended for publication creators, developers, readers, and anyone else interested in all things related to EPub and the IDPF specifications which underlie EPub (OPS/OPF/OCF).

Although the group’s focus is likely to be fairly technical, we certainly invite and encourage non-technical discussions.

To subscribe you’ll need to do one of the follow things;

1. With your YahooID — click on the “Join this Group” button at the group’s homepage
2. Send a blank email to epub-community-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

This group is independent to the IDPF but could become a great place to discuss all things ePub.

At the moment Jon is away travelling so he has switched off the ability to make posts. He informs us that once he returns, allowing ample time for there to be a good number of subscribers, he’ll open the group for posting.

In a personal email to Jon I made a passing reference on how to write the word ePub, perhaps I’ll make my opening post on that very subject.