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I need help on epub files if it can communicate with a server. Epub files are for making e-books. We are having an issue where a client needs to know if we can push updated material to an epub file. I need to know if its possible or not. Thanks in advance!

Kara
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user2751492
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3 Answers3

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Epub files don’t do anything. They are just data. What matters is what programs that process them, commonly called e-book readers, are capable of doing. There is a large variety of such programs, with different characteristics. But mostly they are oriented towards rendering the content in a book-like manner, with little interaction beyond moving around the book in different ways.

Epub files are zipped files containing XHTML and other files, and the XHTML files may contain links. Epub readers may or may not allow following a link to a resource in a server (provided that there is Internet connection, of course). But this means request-based access, i.e. the client (e-book reader) asks for something from the server, instead push access, where the server initiates transfer.

In practice, you should not expect e-book readers to be able to receive any material from a server via push. Request-based access is often possible, but it usually just means that the reader can launch a web server and pass a URL to it. Even if the reader is capable of directly showing the linked resource, this does not mean any automatic update of the e-book.

Jukka K. Korpela
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No, they can't. E-books are e-books, not live documents.

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What I understand in EPub2 it is not possible, but in EPub3 you do the same using JavaScript. You can create an XMLHttp request and play with it.

Vinay
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    Depending on the reading system rendering the EPUB, your JS code might not be able to use certain services (e.g., iBooks does not allow JS code to access the network connection) or even run at all. – Alberto Pettarin Jan 30 '14 at 22:30