There has been some speculation that Apple might use the iTunes LP format for content in their “latest creation.” We don’t know what Apple intends to show off next week, let alone the content strategy for unsaid device. But let’s just assume for the moment that on Wednesday Apple reveals a tablet, and amongst the festivities they roll out support for electronic books and magazines packaged up into an iTunes LP? What does that mean?

To begin with, it probably won’t be called iTunes LP. The documentation released by Apple some time back shows that iTunes LP (.itlp extension) and iTunes Extras (.ite) are actually two specific incarnations of a general purpose package format. Apple hasn’t named the general format, so I’ll call it the iTunes Media Format. As others have pointed out, it is basically a self contained, mini-website, complete with images, videos, audio, fonts, and of course text content. Given all that, it seems possible that an eBook incarnation of the format might be called iTunes eBook (.iteb?), a magazine incarnation might be iTunes eMag (.item?), or maybe there’s a variant that does both. But will publishers really want to distribute their content in such a way? Why not PDF or EPUB format?

I think publishers will certainly entertain the idea. Although PDF represents an easy migration path right now, it is fundamentally a static page description. Adobe’s Adobe Reader Mobile SDK does support reflow, but the quality depends on the metadata within the document as well as the ability to infer page structure when none is available. EPUB is somewhat at the other end of the spectrum, it has a rich content model that intrinsically supports reflow, but layout is limited to a subset of CSS2. The iTunes media format, on the other hand, is a good compromise between both extremes — it supports HTML5 and CSS3 and can let a publisher decide where on the layout vs reflow line they’d like to be. But how will publishers author content?

That’s a great question for another day.

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