Standardization aspects of eBook content formats

This paper presents the necessity and direction of a standard for representing contents of electronic books (eBooks). To identify the current problems of content formats, as a case study, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) and Portable Document Format (PDF) in terms of functional aspects as well as critical standardization issues such as interoperability, openness, applicability, and extensibility. Particularly, this paper suggests an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based improvement of the OEB format as a standard. This paper also describes that PDF can be used together for different aspects of publishing process.