Association of American Publishers, Inc.

To our colleagues at the IDPF:         

The EPUB subcommittee of AAP’s Digital Issues Working Group1 has been working to provide support to the publishing community on the EPUB initiative.  We are therefore writing to express our support for the use of EPUB as an e-book file type for reflowable texts from which any e-book delivery format can be rendered.  Many publishers already want to begin a transition process toward this use of the EPUB file format and hope that such a transition can be completed by October 2008.  Of course, each individual publisher will make decisions about adopting the EPUB file format on its own timeline. 

For books with text that can be reflowed, many publishers would like to create and deliver to retailers and/or wholesalers EPUB files. If a proprietary e-book format is then needed, it is expected that the retailer and/or wholesaler will take on the effort to convert the EPUB file in a scalable, high-fidelity way that either preserves the layout and design of the original or otherwise delivers the content in a rendering acceptable to the publisher. (For books that do not have reflowable text, publishers may still send another proprietary file format, most likely a PDF, in order to preserve pagination and layout.)   

As the next step in the process, we invite retailers and wholesalers to reach out to publishers with additional information on their own individual transition plans.  To that end, we would like to support your efforts to facilitate use of the EPUB file format by the retailers and wholesalers and work with you to help ensure an efficient transition by those publishers, retailers, and wholesalers that wish to use this format.   

We encourage the IDPF to provide support to facilitate implementation industry-wide.  We recognize that a number of issues remain, and we encourage the IDPF to work with its member organizations to develop guidelines/plans for addressing: