The convergence between EPUB and the Open Web Platform

Disclaimer

• This material is based on a detailed presentation from Markus Gylling and Ivan Herman
  http://w3c.github.io/epubweb/presentation/
• This talk also follows on from sessions by Liam Quin at previous conferences
• Here we provide a short summary and are looking forward to your feedback!

Background: why? (1/2)

• The vision: Portable documents as native citizens of the Open Web Platform
• Separation between documents offline and on the Web goes away
  • Using offline content online
  • Saving online content offline
  • For the user: easy to change between online and offline
  • For publishers: use either or both publishing modes

Background: why? (2/2)

• EPUB perspective
  • EPUB 3 gets adoption by publishers
  • Rendering: requires browser extensions or development on top of browser cores
• Web Platform Perspective
  • EPUB development needs are in parallel with general issues: packaging, metadata, offline support

Selected use cases of EPUB-Web

• Book in the browser
  • Follow links, create bookmarks in pages, read (large) books on many devices
• Scholarly publishing
  • Adapt format to reading environment, allow offline-use, provide multimedia + data + software

Selected use cases of EPUB-Web

• In-House publishing
  • Delivery for online and offline of the same content
• Archival and preservation
  • Archival of complete Web pages + interdependencies, produce a complete version of a page
• Educational material
  • Borderline between book and interactive Web applications is becoming blurred

Communities affected

(Trade publishers), Browser vendors, Governmental bodies, Consumers of ebooks, Web designers, Web developers, STM publishers, Large companies, International institutions, Scholarly authors, Archivists, Developers of Publishing workflows, ...

Technical steps to achieve the goals

• Archival format
  • Packaging format
• Overall document structure
  • Current EPUB: XML structure
  • Use JSON instead?
  • Define (CSS etc.) default structure for Web pages

Technical steps to achieve the goals

• Identification
  • Unique identifiers for the work (= the book)
  • Fragment identifiers, cf. W3C annotation model work
• Metadata
  • RDFa, JSON, microdata in EPUB-Web
  • External metadata
  • Attaching metadata to fragments

Technical steps to achieve the goals

• Improvement on Styling
  • High quality typesetting needed
  • Example requirements: Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination
  • Requirements from international layout communities: see
    Improving text layout and typography on the Web and in eBooks
    (chinese version)

Technical steps to achieve the goals

• Pagination, Numbering, Indexing
  • Need to define a page (In CSS? In the DOM?)
  • Linked regions and robust reference handling
• Security and Privacy
  • Consensus needed: strict DRM, watermarking, social DRM etc.
• Presentation control – traditions need to change
  • Browser: page author decides fonts, CSS etc.
  • eBook reader: user can switch fonts etc.

Some pointers

White paper:

http://w3c.github.io/epubweb/

Issue list:

https://github.com/w3c/epubweb/issues

These slides:

http://www.w3.org/Talks/2015/0214-digipub-xml-prague/

Direct contacts:

Markus Gylling, IDPF

mgylling@idpf.org

Ivan Herman, W3C

ivan@w3.org