EPUB-sourced submissions create a better experience for users on mobile devices – the text and images re-flow to fit the smaller screen size – which is why EPUB is Safari’s preferred file format. Here is all the information you need to get your EPUBs in order.
The Safari EPUB process requires a valid EPUB 2.x or 3.x file for each title. The system will use this EPUB for:
- HTML-view in the browser and on mobile devices. EPUBs are converted to HTML pages for display on Safari.
- Generating the Safari TOC.
- 508 compliance.
Safari supports EPUB 2.x and 3.0. The submitted EPUB must be valid; in other words, it must pass a validation check by a utility such as EPUBCHECK prior to uploading to the Safari staging server. Additionally:
- All navpoint IDs must be unique within a given EPUB.
- There can be no missing or empty navPoint IDs.
- All TOCs (including a toc.html that is a page in the EPUB) must reference content in the order it appears in the book or EPUB.
- At minimum, the TOC should include part titles (if parts are used) and chapter titles. The structure should be hierarchical, i.e., section titles should be nested within chapter titles, and chapter titles should be nested within part titles (if they exist).
- In the EPUB 3.0 specs, the toc.ncx file has been superseded by the “EPUB Navigation Document.” Specs can be found here: http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-contentdocs.html#sec-xhtml-nav. A toc.ncx can still be included in an EPUB 3.0 file for compatibility with EPUB 2.0 reading systems.
Safari recognizes that publishers have spent time and effort designing their EPUB files; we therefore ingest the EPUB CSS as well as the content, for display in our reader.
PDF Submissions (FPID.pdf)
If an EPUB is not available, we accept PDF-sourced titles.
- PDFs should contain no crop or printer’s marks.
- The PDF must contain bookmarks representing the book’s table of contents.
- At minimum, the bookmarks should include part titles (if parts are used) and chapter titles. The bookmark structure should be hierarchical, i.e., section titles should be nested within chapter titles, and chapter titles should be nested within part titles (if they exist).
- Bookmarks cannot reference pages out of order of the TOC. They need to fall sequentially; for example, Bookmark 2 cannot point to a page before Bookmark 1 or after Bookmark 3.
- All fonts must be embedded.
- The recommended resolution for the PDF is 150 DPI with a JPEG compression level of 80.
- We do not recommend submitting scanned PDFs. Usually the quality of scanned PDFs is too low, and it’s likely that Safari would reject a scanned PDF during our new-title QA process.
- For dual-format titles, the text in the PDF bookmarks must be an exact match of the text in the EPUB TOC. (See the Single-Format section for more information about dual-format titles.)
- The PDF must contain page labels (i.e., page numbers that show up in the status bar in the PDF file). These must match the page numbers on the printed pages. Missing page labels will result in loading failures and may result in the promotion being rejected. Colons or other non-alphanumeric characters are not supported in PDF page labels. Dashes may be used instead of colons.
- The PDF may contain blank pages. If blank pages have been removed, page labels still need to match the page numbering showing on the pages.
- Note that some PDFs use “glyph codes,” and text from these cannot be extracted. The system will not support these.