The fact that Spring offers integration with JPA is a good indicator that JPA works without EJB.
JPA was initially developed within the EJB 3.0 expert group and released as a separate document but as part of the EJB 3.0 spec (that is why the previous book was called "Pro EJB 3:
Java Persistence API"). Although JPA could always be used independent of EJB, when JPA 2.0 work began it was as a completely separate expert group, making its independence from EJB more obvious. Think of it as a portable persistence API equivalent to Hibernate, but that has additional integration support built right into all of the existing Java EE components, plus Spring, Google App Engine, or any other popular Java container/framework.
Every popular persistence implementation implements it, with 3 major open source products among them: Hibernate, EclipseLink and OpenJPA. EclipseLink is the only one that is currently compliant with JPA 2.0, but the others will definitely follow. The key advantage of using JPA is that your application is not bound to a particular implementation because the JPA spec defines a way for the implementations to be transparently plugged in under the covers.