ePUB

Updated: 09/12/2023 by Computer Hope

Short for electronic publication, ePUB is a free and open e-book standard created by the IPDF (International Digital Publishing Forum). The file extension for an ePUB file is .epub.

ePUB is designed for "reflowable" content, which indicates the layout of an ePUB publication can be adjusted for a particular display mode or device. For compatibility, ePUB also supports fixed-layout content.

ePUB uses XHTML 1.1 to represent the content of the book. Styling and layout are performed using style sheets which conform to the CSS 2.0 (cascading style sheets) standard, with some additional custom properties. PNG (portable network graphics), JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), GIF (graphics interchange format), and SVG (Scalar Vector Graphic) formats are supported for images.

An example ePUB book might contain the following skeleton XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
 <head>
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />
   <title>Pride and Prejudice</title>
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="/jargon/e/css/main.css" type="text/css" />
 </head>
 <body>
   ...
 </body>
</html>

Note

ePUB books support DRM (digital rights management) components, but do not require it.

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