Amazon

This week the W3C Advisory Board is meeting in Seattle. Accordingly, we 
arranged an evening meetup with Amazon.  From the Kindle team there was 
Giorgio Natili (Software Development Manager), Stanton (engineer), and 
JoAnna Hunt (Manager, Kindle Accessibility).  Avneesh, Florian, and I 
discussed Kindle/EPUB interoperability and collaboration.  As 
background, both Giorgio and Stanton have recently joined CSS and plan 
to attend TPAC.

All three of the Amazon folks expressed a strong interest in looking at 
better interoperability between Kindle and EPUB.  This includes:

  * Immediate term issues to improve how Kindle supports EPUB content. 
    It was noted, for example, that often when Kindle displays an EPUB
    book the accessibility information from EPUB is lost.  There was
    great interest on Amazon's side to improve interop in general.
  * Longer-term issues - to have a greater common view on the evolution
    of ebook technologies; technology sharing, and interop.

Of these two choices, there was agreement that it would be useful to 
focus on the first (immediate issues) during TPAC.  First, JoAnna (who 
would work on the longer term issues) will probably not be at TPAC.  
Second, with immediate issues, we may get some early successes which 
would build momentum for the future.

Avneesh also reported to me that Amazon may join the EPUB CG.

I believe that it would be useful to dedicate an hour of the WP WG 
meeting to this topic.  We would invite Giorgio and Stanton to that 
session and work through issues and create a plan for improvement.

If the WG Chairs are willing to accept this proposal and dedicate an 
hour to this discussion, then it would be useful for one person to 
engage with Giorgio to build a strong agenda of potential joint work for 
this one hour.  Once we choose that person, I'm happy to make intros to 
Giorgio.

Comments?

Jeff