Barnes and Noble
has announced today that they have implemented a number of enhancements to their EPUBCheck tool to help solve common eBook errors. This will assist indie authors and publishers to insure that their EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 titles don’t have anything wrong with them, before they are put on sale.
New features of the tool include tests for content accessibility markup, CSS issues that might affect presentation quality, and tests for specific script usage patterns that require security consideration that will help publishers create exceptional, accessible, EPUB 3 content. In addition, an output option was added to EPUBCheck that makes all of the program’s output available as data which can be easily consumed by other programs, making the tool more easily integrated into automated document processing workflows.
As part of our ongoing commitment to innovate in digital education, NOOK has added significant functionality to the EPUBCheck tool that will make it more powerful and manageable for the entire industry,” said Steve Antoch, Senior Software Engineer at NOOK Media. Arwen Pond, Software Engineer at NOOK Media, adds, “The new features we added will help publishers create exceptional EPUB 3 content, while successfully implementing this new industry standard. This has taken a significant effort from our digital education development team.”
“NOOK is one of the leading players in the digital education industry and the work they have done on the EPUBCheck tool is of great value to the industry as a whole,” said Bill McCoy, Executive Director at IDPF. “The IDPF is dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing and content consumption and we are grateful to have innovative teams like the one at NOOK to help the industry move forward.”
The updated EPUBCheck tool is available now and can be found at http://validator.idpf.org/.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
