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SURVEY: EPUB and Future Direction of Publishing on the Web

SURVEY: EPUB and Future Direction of Publishing on the Web

February 2020

The Publishing Business Group and the EPUB 3 Community Group within the Publishing@W3C activity have put together an EPUB and Digital Publishing Survey to gather information about the current use and future needs for the EPUB standard and other publishing interests to help guide our work.

The Publishing@W3C activity includes the work of the Publishing Working Group, the EPUB 3 Community Group, and the Publishing Business Group.

Over the past two years, our community has gotten EPUB to a good stable place with the release of EPUB 3.2 and we have worked to fund the update and stabilization of EPUBCheck with the release of EPUBCheck 4.2.2. We are working this spring toward the release of an audiobook standard that will help ease file management and distribution in that growing part of the publishing world.

As we look toward the future, we are hoping to engage more people for ideas about how the publishing business may expand and what kinds of technology standards may be needed. Our groups are looking to better understand how we can continue to develop standards that help publishers of all kinds and solve problems for today, tomorrow, and beyond.


We are reaching out to you to ask that you participate by answering our EPUB and Digital Publishing Survey and that you share the survey with your colleagues and anyone you can think of who may have input. We are looking for as wide and detailed a response as we can get from publishing activities around the world, so please forward this email to share widely and feel free to have many people in your organization respond. The questions are at a variety of levels and any individual survey participant can answer just the sections they feel comfortable with.

You can access the survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TTPB3GB.

The survey has eight sections:

   - Section 1 for Publishers and Authors
   - Section 2 for EPUB Creators and Developers
   - Section 3 for Retailers and Reading Systems
   - Section 4 for People who Read Ebooks
   - Section 5 for Educators
   - Section 6 for Governmental and Corporate Documents
   - Section 7 on Information and Communication
   - Section 8 on Final Thoughts

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at member-publishing-survey@w3.org if there are questions or comments about the survey.