Open Standards

EDRLab actively participates in the maintenance of the EPUB 3 format, the creation of the W3C Audiobooks format (a profile of the W3C Web Publications format) and is incubating the innovative DiViNa format (for Digital Visual Narratives).

This section describes these publishing standards and offers links to detailed information.

EPUB 3

EPUB, the industry standard for digital publications, is suitable for content authoring, interchange, and distribution of ebooks and long-form articles. EPUB 3 is based on open technologies used on the latest Open Web Platform.

The current version of the standard is EPUB 3.2. EDRLab has been a contributor of this specification and is actively promoting its use in Europe. This version is compatible with the original EPUB 3.0.1, meaning that every publication compliant with the original version is still compliant with EPUB 3.2. You can consider the new version as a better written specification of the same standard.

The EPUB 3.2 specification is found here.

A large list of EPUB resources can also be found on the legacy IDPF website.

More information about EPUB 3
Anatomy of an EPUB 3 file

W3C Audiobooks

What people call an audiobook is usually still a set of MP3 audio files, complemented by an Excel file containing basic metadata and, sometimes, a cover image. A recording studio may also embed a few metadata in MP3 files, which will be difficult to process. Such sets of files are sent to multiple distributors using custom formats. As the number of publishers, distributors, and booksellers is increasing rapidly, the lack of standardization is becoming a real burden.

In 2018, EDRLab decided to extend the Readium Web Publication format to support audiobooks. We wrote a detailed specification for an Audiobook Profile, of the JSON manifest, refined the Readium Packaging format, and implemented its support in the different Readium toolkits and in the Readium LCP Server. Audiobook files have a .audiobook extension. Audiobooks can be downloaded or streamed. Thorium Desktop supports downloaded audiobooks, while Thorium Web supports streamed audiobooks; Thorium Mobile will support both.

Millions of audiobooks in Readium format have already been distributed on publishing platforms, mostly by public libraries that have adopted the LCP DRM.

The W3C Publishing Working Group, in which EDRLab is actively involved, decided in 2019 to develop an equivalent recommendation for audiobooks. Because two different working groups cannot produce identical results, W3C Audiobooks are slightly different from Readium Audiobooks. In particular, there is no way to protect W3C Audiobooks with LCP, but the LCP encrypter can convert a W3C Audiobook to a Readium Audiobook for protection.

Divina – Digital Visual Narratives

Bande dessinée, Comics, Manga, Webtoons: these different variants of the same art (the 9th art in France), that we have decided to call Digital Visual Narratives (DiViNa), are experiencing different market growths: booming in Asia, strong in the US, nascent in Europe.

EDRLab created a working group in 2018, which goal is to create an open interchange format and develop authoring and reading solutions supporting this format, with partners representing the different stages of a publishing production and distribution workflow, i.e. authors, publishers, booksellers and national libraries involved in digital preservation.

The work has reached a first milestone in Q1 2020, with the release of two first “levels” of complexity.

The Divina format is presented in more details here.

The specifications of the DiViNa format are maintained here.

TDM Reservation Protocol (TDMRep)

This specification defines a simple and practical Web protocol, capable of expressing the reservation of rights relative to text & data mining (TDM) applied to lawfully accessible Web content, and to ease the discovery of TDM licensing policies associated with such content.

This initiative is a technical answer to the constraints set by the Article 4 of the European Directive on Copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market.

More information about TDMRep

Articles

In English

The Updated EPUB Is a Brilliant Balancing Act (2023), by Bill Kasdorf, Publishers Weekly

In French

Les formats du livre audio (2020), Agence régionale du livre, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur

Other projects

Readium

The Readium projects provide rock-solid, performant building blocks and applications for processing EPUB3 publications. EDRLab is participating to the Readium codebase maintenance and evolution.

Discover the Readium projects

Accessibility

Support for people with print disabilities is a key part of our mission. We collaborate with European publishers and major inclusive organizations on the creation of a born-accessible ebook market. We also make sure that Readium projects take into account the assistive technologies used by visually-impaired users.

Learn more about our accessibility efforts