Announcing WebBook Level 1

Dear EPUB3 CG, Publishing WG and Publishing BG,

As some of you already know, I started collecting ideas about what could
be a more Web-centric future for ebooks quite a while ago, under the E0
name, following years of advocating in favour of W3C/IDPF joint efforts
and even merger. A week ago, I have decided to materialize that effort
into a spec proposal called WebBook.

WebBook is at the same time fully Web-centric *AND* compatible with
EPUB3 since it's almost trivial to turn a given EPUB3 package into a
WebBook instance compatible with EPUB3. I am contributing a
Node.js script able to automagically convert a EPUB3 package into a
EPUB3-compatible WebBook instance.

I think such a way of doing represents a workable path towards a real
Web-centric ebook ecosystem at a speed the industry can cope with, and
with a slow but clear replacement strategy.
It would also finally enable the emergence of a large software ecosystem
for electronic books, ecosystem that is currently totally anemic given
the complexity of EPUB.

Last but not least, no more XML, no more JSON, no more formats that
browsers cannot natively deal with without programmatic layer. Greater
convergence with CSS (pagination, cross-document counters and
references, multi-doc rendering using Houdini), html (metadata) and
more.

We can do it and we can do it now. We don't have to ditch EPUB now to
make it happen. We can build a VERY different future preserving
compat with EPUB3.

  http://is.gd/cIaB99

Best regards,

</Daniel>

Received on Thursday, 18 January 2018 15:23:53 UTC