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Hi, epub is a great format and being reflowable means it can easily be read and displayed on a variety devices, and things like upping the font size for legibility are trivial. It's great for born digital documents that will only ever be digital. The problem really comes where one wants to preserve the structure of the document, perhaps because the printed document is in some way considered to be the true version. Page numbers, positioning of foot notes - any other structural information suddenly becomes difficult to reproduce. TEI anyone ? -Doug On 01/08/2012, at 08:30 , Richard M. Davis wrote: > Hi Tim > > On 27/07/2012 10:42, Tim Brody wrote: >> Of course the most successful format, available on by far the most >> platforms and most vendors, is HTML. As the Semantic Web/schema.org gain >> traction the amount of information stored in HTML will dwarf that in >> dead-tree formats like Word and PDF (if it doesn't already). > > Not only that, but e-book formats are essentially HTML too, EPub > particularly. I'm optimistic that, as tablets and e-book readers > continue to gain traction, it will be successful, flexible and hopefully > semantically rich rendering on those devices, that will become the > benchmark for most publications, rather than pseudo-A4. Much like what > we've been striving for on the Web for 20 years, but this time as a real > substitute for print, not an adjunct. > > Not that preserving *everything* someone might choose to package up in > an EPUB3 file is necessarily going to be a picnic, but at least we're in > familiar web archiving territory ;) > > Best > > Richard > > > -- > Richard M. Davis > Manager, Research Technologies Group > University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) > Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU > > t: +44 (0) 20 7863 1350 > m: +44 (0) 79 3040 6197 > e: [log in to unmask] > w: http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/ > b: http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/ > c: http://tinyurl.com/richardscalendar > > *Save electrons* "When replying to a message, include enough original > material to be understood but no more." (RFC 1855) > > The University of London is an exempt charity in England and Wales > and a charity registered in Scotland (reg. no. SC041194) -- Doug Moncur Repository Manager Division of Information Level 4, RG Menzies Building (Building #2) The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 t: +61 2 6125 0977 m: +61 402 395 211 w: http://information.anu.edu.au/information/