Those wise and fortunate enough to attend this meeting left appreciating a learning experience one likely would have to travel to an STC conference to obtain. Again, Scott Prentice shared his considerable depth of understanding of the technical details underlying the words we read on the surface, and in the case of EPUB, we got to look under the hood and see how the various components of a document are related and stitched together.

(For the what, why, and how of EPUB — yes, ALLCAPS are back in fashion now — see Scott’s previous presentation.)

For the deconstruction process, we downloaded an ebook of one of my favorite authors, one E. A. Poe, and proceeded to deconstruct it with the oXygen XML editor. (Ever see the decoder table in “The Gold Bug” in XML?) A trial license is free for a month, and anyone interested in seeing how an EPUB document is constructed is encouraged to do the same.

With more and more existing information likely to be repurposed for mobile appliances, it will not hurt to become more familiar with this evolving publishing technology, perhaps the hottest thing since movable type. Standards are still evolving, with the powerful HTML5 standard still more or less on the horizon, and EPUB2 more reliable than EPUB 3. (You can download for free some great resource ebooks from oreilly.com: look for “What is EPUB3” and “HTML5 for Publishers.” You can inspect the mysterious workings of these well-formed publications with oXygen, or even the free Sigil, which is also a ebook good reader.

As for ebook readers, Scott provides a good list in his meeting notes. There are many other goodies in those slides, so take a look. If you are interested in this growing area of doc expertise, Scott will be glad to explain.