TY - JOUR AU - Leonetti, Francesco PY - 2019 TI - The Semantic Challenge of Digital Publishing: An Essay That Knows What It Is About JF - DigitCult - Scientific Journal on Digital Cultures; Vol 4 No 1 (2019) DO - 10.4399/97888255263181 KW - N2 - An ebook in EPUB3 format can express behaviors and contents that exploit the digital status, without limiting itself to digitally replicating the contents and behaviors of the paper version. Among the peculiar characteristics of the digital state, in addition to the multicodicality and interactivity, there is the semantic representation. In EPUB3 you can formally represent what you are talking about in a text portion. For example, in a passage of a history book it is possible to represent the fact that we talk about a given historical event, the period in which the event took place, the characters involved, the place where it happened, and so on , so that it is the book itself that knows it and not just the reader. Semantic marking can enable various functions, from a semantic search engine to "artificial intelligence" behaviors. The semantic search engine, for example, allows queries like: "show me all the historical characters mentioned", "let me see the places where historical events took place", "let me see the characters involved in historical events in a given period of time", etc. We show here a concrete example, in an ebook in EPUB3 format created with ePubEditor, an authoring tool that allows you to write actual digital ebooks, ie ebooks that besides having multimedia contents and interactive behaviors, include semantic markings and a search engine that exploits. The resulting file is a conforming and validated EPUB3 ebook. UR - https://digitcult.lim.di.unimi.it/index.php/dc/article/view/119