UKSG Insights | By Bill Kasdorf, VP & Principal Consultant, Apex CoVantage

EPUB – the non-proprietary format for the distribution and interchange of digital publications using web standards – has matured significantly in the past few years. Originating in 1999 as the Open E-Book standard (OEB), it was officially renamed as EPUB with the release of EPUB 1.0 by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)¹in 2007 – virtually simultaneously with Amazon’s release of the first Kindle, which ironically (and, to many publishers and readers, unfortunately) was not based on EPUB. For the balance of that decade, EPUB was fine-tuned but was basically stable – EPUB 2.0.1, released in 2010, improved but did not significantly expand what EPUB could do – and the e-book landscape grew rapidly: Google digitized millions of books as EPUBs, Amazon sold millions of Kindles, academic libraries rapidly increased their holdings of e-books (although still mainly as PDFs or even in the old OEB format), and publishers began to realize that e-books were becoming a big opportunity (if, then, still a small part of their sales). By 2010, US publishers were selling US$500 million worth of e-books (a number that doubled to a billion dollars less than a year later).

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