Re: Minutes of our telco meeting, 2012-04006

Thanks Ivan, sorry I wasn’t able to make the meeting.  

Reading through the minutes I see a lot of talk about making epub better but am actually concerned with the way the epub format is fracturing content distribution and consumption.

Instead I would like to see pagination (see Opera Reader: http://people.opera.com/howcome/2011/reader/) and other tools implemented on the web as standards to extend out from there. This way people don’t have to rely on epub readers to consume content and books can be read in any browser instead of dedicated epub readers. This fractures the landscape of publishing to either web or epub and creates barriers to entry for those without ebook readers.

This concern extends to the future of epub publishing. While epub is great for books, it is difficult to apply its form of pagination to magazines, newspapers, textbooks, and other publications that might require more advanced layouts. I know epub now supports JavaScript but simply supporting JS doesn’t change the inherent layout methods epub readers impose on content.

I think as a bundler of HTML for distribution epub is fantastic. But I am worried it relies too much on the device or reader for layout and would like to see layout standards developed that will work outside of publications.

I may be out of line and epub can do a lot more than I think it can. I create adaptive magazine style layouts for the web with Treesaver and I wish digital publishing efforts would be more web focused.

Thanks!
- Scott

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Scott Kellum
scott@scottkellum.com (mailto:scott@scottkellum.com)
(347) 422-7572

www.scottkellum.com (http://www.scottkellum.com)


On Friday, April 6, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Ivan Herman wrote:

> ... are here:
>  
> http://www.w3.org/2012/04/06-publ-minutes.html
>  
> Thank you all for coming
>  
> Ivan
>  
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
> mobile: +31-641044153
> FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf
>  
>  
>  
>  
> Attachments:  
> - smime.p7s
>