request: more specific title tags

Hello,

please forgive me, if I addressed the wrong group of people, or if this 
is not a way at all to make suggestions, but browsing all the web sites 
of the w3 organization, I couldn't find a more suitable way.

This mail is a request, to suggest a more specific handling of titles 
within an epub document.

I am a regular reader of ebooks, most of them bought and published in 
the epub format. I also like to organize them, using the calibre 
programme, which some of you might know. The programme reads epub tags, 
displays them and one can sort the books by author, title, etc.

Doing so I always like to gather as much information as possible from a 
book, one being the original book title if it was translated into my 
language (German). Unfortunatelly this is something that can not be 
addressed in the EPUB Open Container Format (OCF). As I understand it, 
there is only the <dc:title></dc:title> tag to define a title in epubs. 
I understand that it is possible to add another <dc:title></dc:title> 
tag to define a sub title, but that's pretty much it for defining a 
title in epubs. Also no ebook device and reader I tried was able to read 
and present a second title tag.

It gets even more complicated, having a book with a collection of texts, 
short stories, etc. from one or more author(s) that were originally not 
ment to be part of that book they were published in. Those books usually 
have titles created by the publisher and not the author(s). Creating 
book chapters as a subtitute for a title for those stories isn't very 
fair to the authors in my oppinion.

So, my request and suggestion is to add more specific title tags to the 
OCF specification. You are more familiar with the formal writing 
structure of xml tags, but it could be something like "original_title", 
"translated_title" (plus the ISO code for the language it was translated 
into), "included_original_title" (for text collections), 
"included_translated_title" (again, for text collections plus the ISO 
code for the laguage it was translated into),...


Thanks for reading! I hope I could make myself understandable. I tried 
to make it as short as possible. I also hope I wasn't wasting too much 
of your time. But it really is something I was rolling in my head for 
quite some time.


All the best,
Bernd

Received on Monday, 27 September 2021 08:34:18 UTC