Artificial intelligence in EPUB digital publications: Developing new standards for e-books and textbooks

The author examines the trends in the EPUB regulations on the level of international standardization in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies explosion. He demonstrates the advantages of EPUB as a digital publication format, and reviews the key innovative trends in EPUB standardization aimed at the better user experience with digital publications in academic libraries. The higher learning efficiency can be achieved through implementing AI tools into e-textbooks content, while the regulations in this area are needed both on the national and international levels. To make the AI-generated content trusted, the problems of confidentiality of information in the digital publications and observation of ethical norms have to be addressed. The author discusses the key vectors of AI implementation into digital publications for their semantic retrieval markup automation, content expansion with multimedia and multimodal access arrangement. The potential and advantages of new technologies are discussed, along with the risks and challenges, including the ethical aspects of digital textbooks with AI, are discussed. The article is based on the conclusions of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/JWG 7 “EPUB” joint expert group meeting of September 2025. It is intended for librarians, information specialists and educationalists interested in further development of digital publication technologies and digital educational resources. 

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