ePub: Must or Bust

Today’s user assistance designer has a lot of format choices available to publish their content to a digitized audience. ePub is just one format  used to publish electronic books, magazines and newspapers. The difference between ePub and other document file formats is a  fluid format allowing content to flow with the many display dimensions of table devices.  But do you need to have a tablet device in order to view the content? Well, not exactly. Both Firefox EPUBReader and Chrome MagicScroll offer extensions for readers to view ebooks directly from their computers albeit with minimalistic ebook functionality.

According to the latest statistics from W3Schools, Firefox and Chrome are leading the way in the battle for top browser:

January 2013
Internet Explorer	14.3 %
Firefox	30.2%
Chrome	48.4%
Safari	4.2%
Opera	1.9%

Just because we can publish to this format doesn’t mean that we should. I plan to let my readers dictate the format that I used to deliver content. Judging from the usage analytics for my sites, ePub is in the distant future.