The Digital Reader

You might recall that last week the IDPF held a meeting last week and finalized the Epub3 spec, moving us one step forward to seeing commercially available Epub3 ebooks.

When I heard the news I didn’t expect it to matter much; I thought it would be months before we saw any apps or e-readers that supported the new format. Apparently I was wrong.

Access announced on Thursday (a day after the spec was finalized) that they had a compatible reading app available for license. NetFront BookReader is boasted as being fully compliant with the new standard. It’s based on the webKit browser and supports HTML5, javascript, and complex formatting like ” logographic kanji characters incorporating furigana annotation”.

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A couple days ago I wrote a post asking for an Epub file that had content which was made to the Epub3 standard. Now, the standard hasn’t been enacted yet, so basically I was asking if anyone had made one by hand. An ebook turned up almost immediately, and I updated my old post with a link. I also made sure to pass it around on twitter.

As I watched that ebook get passed around on twitter I got the impression that i wasn’t the only one who wanted to try the new content. So here is that ebook again, just in case you didn’t see my updated post. I’m also going to go a step better with a bunch of demo videos. If the ebooks demoed in the videos are released I will of course post them.

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