Itâs important to realize that this is not just designed to make it easy to create EPUBs equally important is that it is designed to make it easy for reading systems to process EPUBs. VoilÃ¡, the âwebsite in a boxââbut one with a complete packing list and indispensable assembly instructions that ensure that an EPUB 3âcompliant reading system will deliver the publication properly to the end user.īefore we take the lid off the box, letâs look at the basic building blocks of EPUB 3 metadata.Ī basic default vocabulary that all EPUB 3 reading systems are required to understand Ī short list of reserved vocabularies that can be used with their standard prefixes without declaration andĪ mechanism by which any other vocabulary and its prefix can be declared, along with a pointer to where the authoritative definition of that vocabulary (in either human-readable or machine-readable form) can be found. All of this is then literally âzipped upâ in a single-file container, the. opf stands for Open Package Format, which was the precursor to the new Publications specification.) In addition to containing most of the EPUBâs metadata, the package document serves as a hub that associates that metadata with the other resources comprising the EPUB. The place where all this information is organized is the package document, an XML file that is one of the fundamental components of an EPUB, the. While it doesnât require much more than EPUB 2 did (in the interest of backward compatibility), it accommodates the much richer metadata that makes publications so much more discoverable and dynamic, so much more usable and useful. EPUB 3 accommodates much richer metadata than EPUB 2 did, and it enables that metadata to be associated not just with the publication as a whole, but also with individual components of the publication and even with elements within the content documents themselves. This, of course, is what metadata is for: itâs not the content, itâs information about the content. And it enables publishers to provide that information in one clear, consistent form that all reading systems should understand, rather than in different, proprietary ways for each recipient system. Itâs designed to enable reading systems to easily and reliably know, up front, whatâs contained in a given publication, where to find each thing, what to do with it, how the parts relate to each other.

What is arguably the most important thing about it is this: it organizes all the stuff in the box.

In fact, EPUB is sometimes thought of as âa website in a box,â though it is actually much more than that.

It is a publication format, and as such it specifies and documents a host of things that publications need to includeâcontent documents, style sheets, images, media, scripts, fonts, and more, as discussed in detail in the other chapters of this book. epub, people sometimes fail to realize that EPUB is not just, and not mainly, a specification for the markup of content documents. (âShould I use EPUB or DocBook?â or, even worse, âShould I use EPUB or HTML5?â Hint: EPUB (pretty much) = HTML5.) Due partly to the convenient single-file format provided as. One of the most common misconceptions about EPUB is that it is a âflavorâ of XML.

Epub metadata editor open source