This week’s release of iBooks Author by Apple has web standards community members upset. The iBooks app allows users to create multitouch books for the iPad, which is fine except that it is extending an existing standard in conjunction with proprietary e-books, and has veered far off course from the CSS standard it originally came from.
The W3C CSS Working Group co-chairman, Daniel Glazman, recently discussed the issues he sees with the iBooks Author app, stating that “The *.ibooks format is based on EPUB3 but it’s not a profile of it – it extends it, and so it’s not EPUB3! This fragments the market, places a burden on the publishing industry, and creates a trap for customers, who can be sure their purchases through the iBooks Store will never be exportable to an EPUB3 reader.”
The problem, or end result of Apple’s move, is that they are now using two incompatible types of documents for the web, both of which use HTML, but use different standards for the iBook Author and a standard web browser.
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