Well, kind of. Mac Rumors confirms that iBooks will use the open ePub format, which means that this page will get popular with publishers pretty quickly, and that more than a million free books will be available from Google Books immediately, with a few clicks and a drag into iTunes. Book publishers should also take a look at the eBook Zen Garden for inspiration, though it’s not yet clear if the iBooks application will overrule formatting and font tags.
In theory, ePub allows metadata, CSS and JPEG/PNG/GIF embedding (so no TIFFs) but it’s not perfect – graphic novel publishers have been reporting problems with the format over the last few years.
Though nothing’s certain yet on how they’ll display in the app, if you want something to do while you wait for your own iPad, and you’re thinking of selling a simple version of your magazine through iTunes, there’s no harm in reading up on the format, and outputting some spreads to Stanza on the iPhone, to see how it looks.
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