From the course: InDesign CC to EPUB (2018)

Choose EPUB2 or EPUB3

From the course: InDesign CC to EPUB (2018)

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Choose EPUB2 or EPUB3

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- [instructor] In this chapter, I wanna go through all the panels in the Export 2 EPUB dialog box. I know that we've seen them many times throughout the course, but I wanted one chapter devoted just to those different panels and the choices that you can make there. So, with this blank document, I'm going to export to a reflowable EPUB. And let's talk about the very first choice here. Just gonna spend a couple minutes on this. For some reason, InDesign defaults to exporting an EPUB to EPUB 2.01 format, which is wrong. It should default to 3.0. There's no reason ever, really, to export to EPUB 2. And a little bit of history about EPUB 2 versus EPUB 3. EPUB 2 was the first major specification ever written for ebooks. If I come over here to the International Digital Publishing forum, I've shown this a couple times in the earlier videos, IDPF is a group of volunteers who got together and came up with a set of standards for ebooks. And you can see they have older versions of EPUB, EPUB 2, and EPUB 3.0, this came out in 2007. This was before the iPad, before iBooks. And then, when Apple came along with the iBooks, they decided to catch up and create a new spec for EPUB, EPUB 3.0 in 2011. EPUB 3.0 uses HTML5 and CSS3, it supports JavaScript, supports accessibility, world languages like Arabic, and Hebrew, and Japanese, MathML, lots of forward thinking components go into EPUB 3. But another requirement of EPUB 3 is that it should be able to be opened and navigated in a device that only reads EPUB 2. And I honestly don't know of any device like that. But the kind of export that InDesign does when you export to EPUB 3, is it always includes that special file. It's a navigational TOC. You may have remembered, when I was talking about how to create a nav TOC, there's two of them. There's one based on HTML, and there's another one. Well, the other is in case somebody's opening it up with a EPUB 2 only reader. I have another course here in the online training library called Ebook Foundations, and I did about five minutes on EPUB 2 versus EPUB 3, and I'm just trying to recreate it right now. But you might wanna take a look at that as well, where I go over the same information. And I mention that a couple years ago, the idpf.org merged into the W3C, the Word Wide Web Consortium. These are the people who volunteer to come up with standards for websites. So, of course, it makes sense for them to also be in charge of EPUB stuff, because an EPUB is very similar to a website zipped up. If you want to learn more about EPUB 3 and you wanna participate in the current standards, or moving onto 3.1, 3.2, go ahead and join up. It's volunteers, they're looking for them. There's also a very good article that you may wanna read on epubsecrets.com, which is a sister site to indesignsecrets.com. My friend, Laura Brady, who's the editor of this site, wrote this up in late 2017, explaining the difference between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, and why, really, you shouldn't bother using EPUB 2 anymore. All right, so are we all agreed that is the answer to the question which one to choose. Please always choose EPUB 3.

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