RE: Minutes of our telco meeting, 2012-04006

Hi Scott,

 

I think you would be plesently surprised at the new EPUB 3 Standard. I too want to see digital publications of all kinds consumed in web browsers; I have no quarel with a dedicated reading system, but I think most people will want to read anywhere, anytime, on anything.

 

I also hope that EPUB 3, with its foundation in HTML5, CSS, MathML, SVG, JS  we will see great interoperability.

 

Best

George, who can late to the call

From: Scott Kellum [mailto:scott@scottkellum.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 12:55 PM
To: Ivan Herman
Cc: public-digipub@w3.org
Subject: 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

 

_________________

 

Scott Kellum

 <mailto:scott@scottkellum.com> scott@scottkellum.com

(347) 422-7572

 

 <http://www.scottkellum.com> 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

 

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