The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is basically a one-man show put on by its executive director, Michael Smith, who works from his Toronto home. Amid the comings and goings of his family, Smith spearheads important developments in the world of digital publishing, helping to guide the book business toward the future. Most notably, IDPF developed and maintains the EPub standard for e-books. “Many of the publishers who are providing the content, not just in the U.S., have been adopting EPub as the format to put into the supply chain,” says Smith, who is proud of the standard’s speedy and wide adoption throughout the world.

Michael Smith

Beyond EPub, Smith is excited about the most recent statistics on e-book sales coming from the Association of American Publishers, which detail sales in the month of July and a 213% growth in e-book sales. “It’s obviously great news that while other areas are struggling, at least e-book sales are still growing. And that’s a huge amount of growth,” Smith notes. “After the sales figures for The Lost Symbol come in, we’ll have higher numbers again.”

Smith, who had worked on digital publishing at Harlequin before joining IDPF in October 2007, has a practical take on why the numbers keep climbing: “The key is to get e-books into somebody’s hands so they can try them. People say they like the look and feel of paper, but once they try the e-book, despite whatever preconceptions of what an e-book is they may have, they find it’s an immersive experience,” he says. Smith also credits “more and more media reports” in places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and PW, which are communicating to consumers that e-books are here to stay. The release of several new e-reader devices doesn’t hurt either: “I certainly believe it helps that the consumers have more options to choose from,” Smith says.

He sees the skirmishes over standards and formats as an industry—and consumer base—finding its footing in a new technological world, with a little help from IDPF. Smith is very pleased with how publishing and device companies are opening up to standards. “More and more of the new devices that have been coming out are accepting the EPub format. I also see publishers making more and more content available in digital formats,” he says. To Smith, this last point is crucial to the development of a healthy e-book economy. “As adoption is taking place,” Smith continues, “we really need to have a critical mass of content. When a reader goes looking for a particular title as an e-book, we need to have that book ready for them. So the fact that the publishers are releasing more and more titles as digital and doing their frontlist as digital—all this is leading to the growth in numbers.”

Smith doesn’t think the format wars are over, though. “I think in terms of publishers, they’re choosing EPub, but I don’t expect that in the next month or two there’ll be an immediate end to fighting over e-book formats,” he says. He does, however, see other countries that are just now establishing their e-book markets missing some of the snags the U.S. has had. “In the U.K.,” Smith says, “they avoided many of the format wars; they started later and didn’t have many of the business relationships in place. The U.K. publishers got together and decided on EPub, so it’s not a big format war in the U.K., and even less so in Germany. My hope is that the publishers in countries just starting up will band around EPub as well.”

So what’s next for Smith and IDPF? Now, the focus is on the EPub Maintenance Working Group, composed of different industry players, “tightening up the specs a bit” on EPub. After that, he says, “there’s a whole new evolution of EPub” on the way to meet publishers’ demands for all kinds of e-book enhancements. “The next [EPub] evolution needs additional functionality such as annotations and footnotes. Currently, Flash can be embedded, but I’d say now there’s more experimentation from the publishers.” That experimentation will push Smith, and IDPF, toward new ventures.