Re: Pursuing the wrong goal? (was Re: A followup/writeup on our Monday discussions (was Re: Continuing discussion on Polyfills))

I guess I am very much in agreement with Nick and Dave here ­ what ARE we
trying to do in this WG?  If we look at what the WG is chartered for and is
apparently trying to do, one has to wonderŠ why?  If we were a proposed
startup and came up with all this (e.g. FPWD) etc.  and went before a bunch
of venture capitalists and said ³here¹s what we propose spending your money
on² they might very well come back with the question:  "What is the value
proposition?  What are you proposing spending a lot of time and money on
that EPUB and the existing Web don¹t provide?²

Personally, I would have a hard time answering that question, but that may
just reflect my limitations (which are legend).  But I come from a  long
line of ³show me the bits² type of engineering and product development.  For
example, consider two examples, both based on a fully deployed, production
version of the Readium CloudReader:

https://readium.firebaseapp.com/?epub=epub_content%2FHales-Motivic-Measure&g
oto=epubcfi(/6/8!/0)

https://readium.firebaseapp.com/?epub=epub_content%2FNeHe-EPUB-17-32&goto=ep
ubcfi(/6/2!/4/2/2) 

The first is an EPUB with a LOT of math in it (which is why it is a bit
slow).  The second has a lot of WebGL in it (ditto).  Note that the
CloudReader also supports shared annotations via the Hypothes.is plugin.  So
one has a full EPUB 3 compliant reading experience (including
media-overlays), annotations, even WebGL.  These same publications can be
unzipped onto a server as-is and would work.  As Hadrien pointed out, the
work on Readium 2 has developed a ³better OPF² (Web Pub Manifest) but is
that what we¹re trying to achieve? If so, are we done?

I¹m probably way over-simplifying this but it seems like we¹re making this
far more complicated than it needs to be, but I am probably just
misunderstanding what it IS we are trying to achieve.  But if so, then to
echo Baldur, I don¹t think I am alone.

Thanks
Ric




From:  "Ruffilo, Nick" <Nick.Ruffilo@ingramcontent.com>
Date:  Friday, February 9, 2018 at 8:56 AM
To:  Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
Cc:  "daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com"
<daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>, "public-publ-wg@w3.org"
<public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Subject:  Re: Pursuing the wrong goal? (was Re: A followup/writeup on our
Monday discussions (was Re: Continuing discussion on Polyfills))
Resent-From:  <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Resent-Date:  Fri, 09 Feb 2018 14:57:14 +0000

Dave,
 
This was beautifully put.  Along with Baldur¹s amazing comments earlier ­
this sums up how I feel as well.  My perspective coming into this is as an
entrepreneur, and an author.  I worked at Vook putting audio/video into
ebooks, and worked on experimental features that only worked in ibooks.  I
worked with Aerbook, creating award winning book-apps as well as
javascript-powered ebooks that ­ again ­ only worked in iBooks.  I built an
interactive ebook creation tool that would output apps, epubs and
interactive webpages.
 
After 5 years of developing bleeding-edge things and hacking the ibooks
platform to create content (only to later have ibooks Œpatch¹ out and
prevent the use of that) I checked the #eprdctn hashtag only to see people
still complaining that dropcaps still don¹t display correctlyŠ
 
That¹s why I joined this group ­ because I feel like the web is a really
good solution to publisher¹s needs, but it just needs a bit extra.  Beyond
the display issue, having run an ebook retail website, the amount of
customer service I¹ve had to deal with to try to help people read an epub
file is insane.  Some people are just not tech savvy, some refuse to install
apps, some are on work PCs and don¹t have admin rights, so they can¹t
install apps.  There is a business solution around this ­ to provide a
web-based reading platform like Readium JS, so I guess there is a solution.
 
I think about the basic use-case of people who are buying ebooks from my
service.  (We sell e-textbooks, trade, and pretty much anything else).  At
it¹s core, they want to read the content.  Literally, they want to just open
the book, and read it¹s content in the order it would be presented in a
printed book while being able to jump around easily from chapter-to-chapter.
If the web were able to deliver those basics ­ and I was able to offer some
sort of reading app solution that provided all the bells-and-whistles ­ my
customer service requests would fall by nearly 80%!
 
But I struggle (now more than every) with where the line draws.  I currently
unzip epubs that are distributed to my system, then sort the files into
directories (for security reasons) and serve them up with a custom UI that
provides basic user needs for the purpose of sampling.  There¹s only time
stopping me from being able to make that a reading experience and solving my
own problems without needing standards or expecting browsers to change.
What if epub is good enough ­ because it is HTML/CSS inside, and any service
like mine can simply do what it needs fairly easily to make the ebook a
web-based citizenŠ
 
Part of the exercise I¹m going through with my code right now is to create
something I can share (sadly code I do for work must remain private) and
provide as an example to help me answer that question ­ what is the real
problem we¹re needing to solve?  Maybe all we need to do is push for better
display of math, better support for accessibility within a multi-document
structure, and better handling of annotations.  Maybe all the rest is up to
the industry to solveŠ
 
-Nick
 

From: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, February 9, 2018 at 9:06 AM
To: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
Cc: "daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com"
<daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>, "public-publ-wg@w3.org"
<public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Pursuing the wrong goal? (was Re: A followup/writeup on our
Monday discussions (was Re: Continuing discussion on Polyfills))
Resent-From: <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Friday, February 9, 2018 at 9:07 AM

 

(Note: written for a different email chain, but this rant describes some of
my concerns with WP)
 
At least this is the conversation we should have been having for the last
four years!
 
What problems are we trying to solve?
 
EPUB works, more or less. My company has sold a billion dollars' worth of
ebooks. Our industry gets people to pay for digital content‹we make HTML
without advertisements. It's a miracle. At the most basic level, EPUB does
what it needs to do‹it gets (some kinds of) books to the people, and they
can read them without worrying too much about technology.
 
Books are not apps. Books are not websites. Oh, we can do both of those
things. We have done both of those things, and it didn't work‹nobody cared.
Web Application Manifest solves a particular problem‹being able to save a
web site to the home screen of your mobile device. WAM is for making web
apps more like native apps. But our problem is not that web books are
lacking capabilities of native book apps.
 
I think the fundamental issue is that books are a separate category of
media, their own thing. Our expectations of user interface and affordances
is very specific to books, not generally shared with other web stuff, and
much closer to how we think about other specialized media, like music and
movies. I don't have five thousand separate album apps on my computer or my
phone. I have one app, which accepts a certain kind of content and provides
an identical interface for each discrete creative work. That's what reading
systems are, too. That's how people think about books.
 
What problems are we trying to solve?
 
We want a web publications spec. Are web publications actually a thing we
need? What do we actually mean by web publications? I share Garth and
Benjamin's concern about providing the interface along with the content. The
strength of the web stack is separation of concerns, although the script
kiddies seem to be forgetting that. Content is HTML. Design is CSS.
Interaction is JS. And what we forget is that browser itself provides much
of the user experience, handling links, bookmarks, history, search,
personalization, and so on.
 
What are some real problems? Nothing works everywhere‹some things work
nowhere. We mostly can't make books with scripting. We can't link from book
to book. We don't know what the heck to do with math. ebooks still look like
crap compared to print, or most websites. Making and editing EPUBs is a
bitch. Everybody complains about walled gardens, but the gardens are more
like vacant lots with broken glass and burned-out cars. The ebook ecosystem
is more like gang territories‹don't try to bring your Kindle books to Google
Play or you might get beat up. What we need more than anything else is
interoperability. Does the road we're going down in PWG get us closer to
that, or further? I don't know.
 
I think the very nature of how we relate to books means that packaging is
our key concept. Maybe we need PWP without WP. Maybe the trouble we're
having with WP is not accidental, but intrinsic. Books are more permanent
than web sites, we feel more ownership of them, they are more a "thing". We
don't travel through the intertubes to visit the one copy of a book on a
server somewhere. We each have our own copy, so the book has to travel, has
to be a thing, has to be packaged. Maybe the packaging itself can provide
the structure we're struggling with.
 
Dave

 

On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 7:41 AM, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
wrote:
> Daniel - I think you hit the nail on the head there, but perhaps not in the
> way that you meant.
> 
> I believe that this group - for obvious reasons - is too focused about finding
> a replacement for EPUB and *not* focused on building the future of
> publications for the web.  And yes, I very strongly believe those are two
> completely different things.  As you have said so well in other threads -
> let's go ahead and fix EPUB and address the concerns of *that* industry...but
> do that completely separately from solving what is needed to enhance the web
> for publications (of all types).
> 
> I believe that it can be accomplished - even with our current charter - but it
> will require everyone to *want* to work in this fashion....
> 
> Leonard
> 
> On 2/9/18, 1:05 AM, "Daniel Glazman"
> <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:
> 
>     Le 08/02/2018 à 22:15, Romain Deltour a écrit :
> 
>>     > +1000. Can't agree more.
> 
>     I wish I had Baldur's eloquence (I'm serious) but I'm only a frog.
>     I could not have written this better, and I am in full agreement
>     with everything Baldur said. With all my tech background, I wonder
>     where this WG is heading at and, worse, why... And the WG is voting
>     on that.
> 
>     We're still in the "Deep concerns about the future of EPUB" that were,
>     after all the denials, apparently spot-on.
> 
>     </Daniel>
> 
>