As a proud, although specwise so far inactive, IDPF member I stumbled across the first editor’s draft of EPUB 3.0. There are many features in the current early draft that are important to educational content, such as annotations or MathML3. I think that, beside other important roles that it will play, EPUB 3.0 has the potential to become the dominant school textbook format. The primary reasons are in my view:
- HW/SW vendor neutrality, open standards:
- A broader installed base of reading systems means economies of scale for the textbook vendor
- Neutrality is especially important for markets where public procurement and/or public curriculum definition dominates, as in the German school textbook market
- EPUB’s design metaprinciple of embracing and packaging mainstream user agent technologies: a promise that interactive applications may be developed more cost-effectively than traditional learning applications