Increased engagement and alignment with EPUB by the W3C will facilitate increased adoption of EPUB in other industries, which will lead to more tools, services and vendors ultimately becoming available to the industry, as well as driving down the related technology costs through economies of scale.Ĥ. social media, retail, marketing, advertising, software, hardware, and others)ģ. Beyond influence on the standards themselves, increased engagement with W3C and co-contributors will result in increased knowledge and expertise of digital technologies within the industry, along with building relationships between people in the book industry and people in other industries that are critical to its success (e.g. The merger enables the book industry to have more direct self-interested influence on web standards as a whole through focused participation and engagement with W3C – standards that are, and will continue to be the foundation of EPUB, and that will also drive, shape, and largely power the future of nearly all digital content, marketing, eCommerce, distribution and back office infrastructures used by the book industry.Ģ. But FWIW, here were my thoughts for those that are interested:ġ. Now, I certainly do not claim to have superior insights into the ebook publishing and retail industry as our company is after all, a tech firm only, and I’m still somewhat new to the industry (just 10 years). As such, I decided to share my own prior thoughts on the topic publicly to add my own *personal* perspective to the conversation. The members ultimately voted in favor of it, but since then there has been a fair amount of ongoing conversation in the ebook industry about the merits and potential downsides of the combination. Prior to the IDPF vote on the combination with W3C, I wrote up my thoughts on why I supported the combination to share with interested colleagues.