Re: Documenting EPUB feature requests

On Wed, 2019-08-07 at 16:00 -0400, Dave Cramer wrote:
> I've started a wiki page (
> https://github.com/w3c/publ-cg/wiki/Features-people-have-requested-for-EPUB)
> which documents feature requests for EPUB, old and new.

Cool - and sorry to have missed the call today.

Rather than add this directly, since it might be considered out of
scope, i'll ask here...

Seems to me a big incentive to offer implementors and publishers is
making more money.

I'd love to see a standard way to mark up links to other books, such
that if the reader does not have the book, they get directed back to
the channel that distributed the book containing the link, to buy or
download the target book. This means e.g. on a Kobo reader the Kobo
search app probably opens.

Yes, part of this is up to the ebook makers, but part is what exactly
to put in the ebook to make it happen everywhere, with the same link
URL (or whatever) in the same epub file on different systems.

Why not link to the publisher's sites? First because most publishers
sites at aimed at wholesalers, not readers. Second, because reading
systems are often closed worlds, and it's 1,000 times mor elikely
someone will click on "buy now with one click" or "add to my library"
than that they'll get out their wallet, register on a nwe site, read
their emil, validate the account, download the book, then figure out
how to sideload it.


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Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
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Received on Thursday, 15 August 2019 19:39:30 UTC