EPUB: an industry standard ebook format

24 November 2009

For many years the ebook world has been fighting within itself due to the huge variety of different formats; from Mobipocket to eReader and from PDF to Amazon Kindle. But now there is a new format that’s set to dominate them all.

Over the last 12 months there has been a huge shift in digital publishing with the introduction of a brand new ebook format called EPUB. It’s based on the open standards, XHTML, XML, CSS and the ZIP archive container. As a result almost every publisher has adopted this format, which means that when you buy an ebook, you’ll be able to read it on many different devices and for sure this means many new ones in the future - good news for everyone.

If you’re interested in trying out some of these ebooks then you should head over to a new site that’s launched that deals only in EPUB ebooks; epubBooks.com, and they have lots of books to download for free. The site also has technical resources on how understand and create your own EPUB books along with lots of information on where you can buy EPUB books from. There are also a number of eReader reviews, including Sony Reader, Apple iPhone and the Bookeen Cybook Opus.

If you’ve been putting off trying ebooks then there’s never been a better time than now.