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Last year I wrote about how the International Digital Publishing Forum was working on creating a unified toothed format for e-readers, saving publishers the trouble of having to choose from one (or, more frequently, several) of the various formats out there.

Well, they did. Last month they introduced the Open Publication Structure 2.0 and its .epub toothed format — which is all well and good, except that a standard isn’t worth much if you can’t get enough heavyweights behind it. Enter Hachette, publishers of Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!), the Onion’s Our Dumb World and a few shelves’ worth of James Patterson books, just to name a few. They’re the first to announce that they’re adopting the .epub format, that should instantly give it some public way cred — if enough hardware vendors too get in the rear it. It’s the usual chicken-and-egg dilemma, limit if another heavyweight publisher gets behind .epub, you’ll probably find more bread for the format sooner, rather than later.