RE: EPUB usage

Thanks, Luc, this is a great explanation!

Bill Kasdorf

VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage

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From: AUDRAIN LUC [mailto:LAUDRAIN@hachette-livre.fr]
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2017 5:52 AM
To: Cristina Mussinelli
Cc: Bill Kasdorf; Bill McCoy; Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken; Johnson, Rick; public-publishing-sc@w3.org
Subject: Re: EPUB usage

About why EPUB2 have been still produced until recently, I may bring here  my experience at Hachette Livre.

Production requirements are written by me and sent to suppliers by the prod dept who buys the service.

Until end of 2015, we had a technical reason not to ask for EPUB3 : it was the Adobe RMSDK ecosystem! All our distributors using Adobe tools for RS and DRM were not able to ingest EPUB3 files.
It was only with the inclusion of Readium in ARMSDK (release 11 I think) that this was solved. I then checked with all our distributors that they were able to ingest, distribute and read a sample EPUB3 Reflowable file and got all green lights only at fall 2015!

I was then able to setup a call for comments to all suppliers on a draft RFP for Reflowable EPUB3 production for simple books (B&W text).
This RFP was finally officially launched in March 2016 to open EPUB3 production for new titles.
And 16 months later, we are on the verge to forbid any EPUB2 file from our suppliers.
Finally!

Last but not least, this 2016 EPUB3 RFP contains a11y requirements that cover almost all of EPUB a11y 1.0 (I am upgrading it to ask for the metadata bloc).
And these EPUB3 file are accessible in ADE 4.5 even with DRM!

Luc

Le 16 juin 2017 à 11:53, Cristina Mussinelli <cristina.mussinelli@aie.it<mailto:cristina.mussinelli@aie.it>> a écrit :
Hi,
I believe this a very interesting discussion.
I agree with Bill that the lack of all the element of the ecosystem and the fact that most of the trade e-books are sold via one retailer (transforming EPUB in a proprietary format) may be the most relevant reasons.

On the other side when we discuss this topic it seems to me that you all have in mind big publishers with an automated production process. In my experience in Europe lots of digital booka are still produced after the production of the paper version in Indesign in a manual way, outsourcing it to small/medium companies. For example most of the Italian textbook publishers still provide as digital versions PDF because the output from Indesign is easier and do not require changes in the production chain. Where they moved to platforms the format they chose it HTML 5 as the content is provided for streaming consumption and not for download.

I believe a deeper analysis of the real state of the art of the production and distribution process will be very important to be carried out. I think we are making some speculations based on some cases that may not fully represent all the market.

We may discuss it as a point in the agenda of the F2F meeting in NY.

Best
Cristina




Da: Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com<mailto:bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>>
Data: venerdì 16 giugno 2017 00:11
A: Bill McCoy <bmccoy@w3.org<mailto:bmccoy@w3.org>>, "'Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken'" <tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>>, Rick <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com<mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>>, Cristina Mussinelli <cristina.mussinelli@aie.it<mailto:cristina.mussinelli@aie.it>>, "public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>" <public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>>
Oggetto: RE: EPUB usage

I noticed nobody answered your question yet, which implies to me that they don’t want to say “Kasdorf, what rock have you been living under??” Of course I think EPUB 3 is accepted almost everywhere, as I’ve often said in presentations, including that it is the preferred input to Kindlegen.

So where is the persistence of EPUB 2 coming from? Just plain old inertia? Even at Apex, where we always prefer EPUB 3, we do in fact wind up still doing EPUB 2 when requested by customers. I really can’t see the logic of that. I honestly would like to understand this better. (Of course I get the legacy issue.)

And I get Tzviya’s point about publishers that make their own EPUBs and thus need to update their processes. I get that. But an awful lot of EPUBs are created by vendors like Apex and are almost all sold by the main retailers. Why the heck are we still asked to make EPUB 2s?

Bill Kasdorf

VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage

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From: Bill McCoy [mailto:bmccoy@w3.org]
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 2:43 PM
To: Bill Kasdorf; 'Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken'; 'Johnson, Rick'; 'Cristina Mussinelli'; public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: RE: EPUB usage

Are there any significant retailers that still require plain old EPUB 2’s from anyone???

Even KindleGen accepts EPUB 3 files!

I know some retailers require EPUB 3 to have NCX but that is not a “plain old EPUB 2”. And given that millions (?) of reading systems are in customers hands that have EPUB 2 only support baked into their ROM, it’s not shocking to me (and it hasn’t been 7 years since EPUB 3 was approved, it’s only been 5.5 years – that is within the life span that consumers expect their devices to work and of course there was a big delay in EPUB 3 supporting in reading systems after the completion of the spec, and thanks to Adobe DRM and RMSDK issues there are *still* people selling new EPUB 2 only dedicated eReaders, and building new EPUB 2 only mobile apps, today!

In hindsight perhaps the biggest mistake we made in EPUB 3, from a practical perspective in terms of adoption timeline, was to not just stick with NCX, kludgy though it was, at that could have eased the transition and as it seems that most of the proposals for PWP/EPUB4, and Readium’s new Web Pub serialization, have JSON for the document skeleton, inc. navigation, anyway so it may be that the Nav Doc is not only not the past/present but not necessarily the future either (I was beating the drum to double down on the HTML5 <nav> element for PWP/EPUB4 rather than <spine> and friends, but that seems to be a minority opinion and Hadrien ultimately did convince me it wasn’t the best technical solution, albeit it required a very long discussion at a Parisien bar so I’m not sure I can enumurate all his arguments… 😉 ). But this is maybe an object lesson (no pun intended) that going for technically superior solutions or chasing “alignment” for its own sake (the main reason to choose <nav> over NCX) is not necessarily the win, if the real goal is (as I believe it should be) to maximize real-world adoption.

--Bill

From: Bill Kasdorf [mailto:bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 10:23 AM
To: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken <tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>>; Johnson, Rick <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com<mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>>; Cristina Mussinelli <cristina.mussinelli@aie.it<mailto:cristina.mussinelli@aie.it>>; public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: RE: EPUB usage

I would also add that it is hard to imagine that any of the main conversion vendors who produce EPUBs don’t produce EPUB 3 routinely. I’m speculating, of course; at Apex, we not only always recommend EPUB 3s (although customers do spec EPUB 2, in which case we do EPUB 2) but have the generation of EPUB 3s built into prepress workflows for customers for which we provide those services. I can’t imagine the other big conversion/prepress houses don’t do the same.

The only possible justification I can see for sending plain old EPUB 2s out into the world is that there are still retailers requiring it. How hard can it be for them to adapt? I don’t mean that I would expect them to implement every feature of EPUB 3 (though of course I would like them to); I just mean supporting EPUB 3s that have the same functionality and features their current EPUB 2-based systems support, with the one significant functional difference being using the nav instead of the ncx. That describes many thousands of novels and other trade books, and even many scholarly monographs and professional books. What could be holding that back?

Maybe it’s that they’re reluctant to say they accept EPUB 3 without implementing all or most of the things EPUB 3 does that EPUB 2 doesn’t do. But is admitting they can’t do everything EPUB 3 enables any worse than saying they can only accept EPUB 2? This is relevant to our ongoing EPUB Grid / epubtest.org<http://epubtest.org> discussion because it supports the pivot away from emphasizing what RSs _don’t_ do, which the current [old] Grid has had the effect of doing.

Bill Kasdorf

VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage

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From: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken [mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:34 AM
To: Johnson, Rick; Cristina Mussinelli; public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: Re: EPUB usage


It's disheartening for a few reasons. The EPUB 3 spec is now 7 years old (I think). Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and swallow the one time cost of revamping the workflow for the good of the world.  When I did it for Wiley, it cost my time plus a few thousand dollars. It is not that expensive, especially if content is simple. (I am once again realizing that I could go into consulting and make a lot of money).



It matters because those of us who have switched to EPUB 3 are still required to hang on to remnants of EPUB 2, like the ncx file. When I have to troubleshoot, I have to figure out if the retailer is using the nav or still hanging on to the ncx for old time's sake. It also means that the one retailer that isn't EPUB can happily assume that EPUB 2 is forever.


****************************
Tzviya Siegman
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street, MS 5-02
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>
________________________________
From: Johnson, Rick <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com<mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>>
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:17:30 AM
To: Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken; Cristina Mussinelli; public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: Re: EPUB usage

Yeah, we are mostly EPUB 3, with the exception of trade titles used in things like Literature classes.


Rick Johnson | VP of Product Strategy
VitalSource Technologies
rick.johnson@vitalsource.com<mailto:rick.johnson@vitalsource.com>

<image001.png><https://www.vitalsource.com/>

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From: "Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken" <tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>>
Date: Thursday, June 15, 2017 at 8:57 AM
To: Cristina Mussinelli <cristina.mussinelli@aie.it<mailto:cristina.mussinelli@aie.it>>, "Johnson, Rick" <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com<mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>>, "public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>" <public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>>
Subject: RE: EPUB usage

Thanks, Rick. That is really interesting. Do you happen to have info on EPUB 2 vs 3? I seem to recall that VitalSource entered the game after EPUB 3, so I suspect you skew heavily toward EPUB 3.

This article [1] by Ben Dugas of Kobo is related and a little disheartening. (If any of you want to write for EPUBSecrets, contact Laura Brady.)

[1] http://epubsecrets.com/from-inside-the-epub-ingestion-factory.php


Tzviya Siegman
Information Standards Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>

From: Cristina Mussinelli [mailto:cristina.mussinelli@aie.it]
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:41 AM
To: Johnson, Rick; public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>
Subject: Re: EPUB usage

Thank you very interesting!
Cristina





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Da: Rick <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com<mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>>
Data: giovedì 15 giugno 2017 14:23
A: "public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>" <public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>>
Oggetto: EPUB usage
Rinviato da: <public-publishing-sc@w3.org<mailto:public-publishing-sc@w3.org>>
Data rinvio: giovedì 15 giugno 2017 14:23

I’ve shared these numbers with you before (for 2016), but I just ran the 2017 ones, and I thought you would all appreciate them.

-Rick

EPUB vs. PDF usage on the VitalSource platform

In 2016
Top 25 titles: 24 EPUB, 1 PDF
Top 50 titles: 46 EPUB, 4 PDF
Top 100 titles: 77 EPUB, 23 PDF
Top 250 titles: 141 EPUB, 109 PDF
Top 500 titles: 233 EPUB, 267 PDF


In 2017 (to date)
Top 25 titles: 25 EPUB, zero PDF
Top 50 titles: 48 EPUB, 2 PDF
Top 100 titles: 81 EPUB, 19 PDF
Top 250 titles: 159 EPUB, 91 PDF
Top 500 titles: 239 EPUB, 261 PDF