Japan’s book market is said to be worth around $24 billion (it’s the world’s biggest and about 4x the size of the local video game industry), which means it’s not a big surprise that e-publishing is currently one of the “hot” trends in the country’s tech sector.
And yesterday, Japan’s biggest business daily The Nikkei reported that the local industry made quite an important decision: book publishers and electronics companies have agreed to adopt EPUB 3.0, an open e-book standard that’s currently common in the US, Europe and other places.
The Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan was launched in summer 2010 and counts the country’s biggest publishers among its 43 members.
EPUB is supported by the Kindle and the iPad, among others. EPUB 3.0, the next version of the standard, will support text printed vertically (i.e. Japanese) starting May this year.
Update:
Sorry for the mistake: the Kindle does not support EPUB.
Serkan Toto
So…it starts May, but when will ebooks start showing up in Amazon JP?
Serkan, you obviously don’t own a Kindle 🙂 I also don’t own one and that’s exactly because it doesn’t support ePub.
残念ですようね 🙂
Are you sure you don`t buy Kindle because it doesn`t support ePub? 🙂
Great! Finally a non-galapagos decision that makes real sense!! Welcome Japan to the world of global standard! Pretty much happy about this!
ePub is not supported by Kindle. You have to convert epub to mobi format in order to read on Kindle.
It would be nice if Kindle indeed supported EPUB. Unfortunately, IT DOESN’T
Where is the source of the information???
As stated in the article, the Nikkei reported this (in Japanese) on February 21.
-> http://s.nikkei.com/dV3W8b
Sorry readers, the mistake is corrected now.
Kindle doesn’t natively support EPUB but almost all major publishers give Amazon their content in EPUB format, thus the majority of titles sold on the Kindle Store in fact originated as EPUB (Amazon presently converts this content to their proprietary format).