Barnes & Noble announced Thursday that its digital education team had made significant updates to the open source EPUBCheck tool, creating a new way to evaluate EPUB files and ensure they adhered to industry standards.

Originally created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), EPUBCheck is a tool to validate and detect types of errors in IDPF EPUB files. The updates created by the NOOK Digital Education team makes it more manageable and easier to facilitate the tool's integration into publishing workflows and workflow management systems.

"As part of our ongoing commitment to innovate in digital education, NOOK has added significant functionality to the EPUBCheck tool that will make it more powerful and manageable for the entire industry," said Steve Antoch, Senior Software Engineer at NOOK Media. Arwen Pond, Software Engineer at NOOK Media, adds, "The new features we added will help publishers create exceptional EPUB 3 content, while successfully implementing this new industry standard. This has taken a significant effort from our digital education development team."

"NOOK is one of the leading players in the digital education industry and the work they have done on the EPUBCheck tool is of great value to the industry as a whole," said Bill McCoy, Executive Director at IDPF. "The IDPF is dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing and content consumption and we are grateful to have innovative teams like the one at NOOK to help the industry move forward."

New features of the tool include tests for content accessibility markup, CSS issues that might affect presentation quality, and tests for specific script usage patterns that require security codes. In addition, an output option was added to EPUBCheck that makes all of the program's output available as data which can be easily consumed by other programs, making the tool easily integrated into automated document processing workflows.