Re: [Minutes] Publishing Community Group Meeting - Aug 10, 2022

On 13/08/2022 20:33, David Herron wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 4:33 PM Colin Pittendrigh <sandy.pittendrigh@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
>> RE> 750mb file size limit.  Bear with me.  I'm a retired database
>> guy. Why can't epubs be text only, with resource URLs to streamed
>> images and video on remote servers?
>> 
>> When I ask this question I'm invariably told "It won't work
>> without a wifi connection!"

As has been pointed out, an Internet connection is not universal.

>> Read now, view video later.  Video is too big to store on a phone.
>> Video should be streamed. No matter what.

I have a lot of sympathy with that view, as I find videos more of an 
annoyance than a help, especially in tech epubs, unless they are REALLY 
SHORT and REALLY NECESSARY. Most are far too long, with seconds or 
minutes of welcome and blather before cutting to the action.

> Uh, right.  EPUB's are ZIP files containing a mini-website (sort of).  
> They rightfully contain HTML, CSS and Images at a minimum.

Again, images are not the problem but they need to be SMALL and LOW 
DENSITY. As Dale Rogers said,

>>> All web designers know to watch download sizes. The same should 
>>> be true with ePub publishers.

The growth of roll-your-own epubs has brought the same problems that 
roll-your-own web sites did: ungoverned use by people unaware of the 
limitations of the medium, and software providers unwilling to upset 
potential users by explaining the circumstances.

> There are lots of low end devices that don't have WiFi.  

And those that do, handle it badly.

> And, if you're talking about a smart phone, what if you're 
> traveling in another country and do not have local cellular service?  

Or you can have it, but at astronomical cost (one of the best actions of 
the EU was to stomp all over the providers and force roaming charges to 
be the same as what you pay at home).

> Or, in the USA, there is lots of remote areas with no cellular service.

Which is why, for things like maintenance engineers travelling to remote 
sites, any electronic documentation MUST work offline, so it's a special 
case in respect of the limitations I expressed above.

> It is quite reasonable to have the option to bundle video etc ...

Making it an option is fine.

> Several years ago Apple made a big splash about iBooks supporting 
> interactivity by bundling JavaScript - which I assume was using
> EPUBv3 features - and video.

There is an ancillary problem with what the web designers and now epub 
designers know about the underlying technology: THEY may know it, but 
Marketing typically doesn't, and Marketing just LOVES to insist on the 
inclusion of bundles of fonts, acres of pretty pictures, introductory 
videos, loads of Javascript which may or may not work, doing all kinds 
of intrusive things. And because it's Marketing, who have the money and 
the ear of the CEO, they get their way over the protests of the doc 
engineers implementing the thing.

> Why should e-books be limited to simple text? 

They shouldn't. But rendering devices are so horribly lacking in 
sometimes the most basic support for XHTML and CSS that unformatted text 
is fundamentally the only thing you can rely on, and not even that, 
sometimes. Novels are really the only thing that works cross-platform: 
the idea of IETMs or complex educational, scientific, or humanities 
books working in e-book format is sadly still well over the horizon.

> We're well into the 2000's.  According to the movies we should have
> had proper space ships circling Jupiter by now.

I'm still waiting for the flying car the 50s promised me :-)

Peter

Received on Saturday, 13 August 2022 20:44:16 UTC