Re: Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3

Dave,

First off – great piece, and well written.  Kudos.

What I find interesting is trying to understand the perspective of publishers & publishing.  I have never directly worked for a publisher (I’ve always worked in the publishing services side of things), but my early background is on web-development and web-content development.  Especially with startups.  The mindset was always: “What works, and how can we use that to deliver our content.”  When a cooking website wanted to create a page with recipes, they didn’t wait for or ask for a <recipe> tag – they just formatted something to look like a recipe.  And, from my limited view, only when something really could not be done with existing tools, did they push hard for something while creating workarounds (honestly, Macromedia/Adobe flash feels like a HUGE workaround to a lack of features in HTML/JS/CSS).

Ok – I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll stop.  I just wanted to say that this article helped to give me a new framing for making decisions – What do publishers need to do that they absolutely can’t do today.  That and how can we ensure things are done in a way they are accessible.

-nick

From: Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>
Date: Friday, January 19, 2018 at 12:32 PM
To: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>, "Johnson, Rick" <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>
Cc: "public-epub3@w3.org" <public-epub3@w3.org>, "public-publishingbg@w3.org" <public-publishingbg@w3.org>
Subject: RE: Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3
Resent-From: <public-publishingbg@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Friday, January 19, 2018 at 12:32 PM

I of course defer to Rick for the authoritative response re Higher Ed, but I can confirm from personal experience in working with Higher Ed publishers in my consulting work that EPUB (even EPUB for Education!) is definitely an interchange format more than an end-user format. And in case you’re wondering if that was my doing—i.e. that I’m who got them to do that—nope. I may have been the one to help them figure out _how_ to do it but in almost every case they had already made the decision to do that before they engaged me.

Bill Kasdorf

VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage

p:

734-904-6252  m:   734-904-6252

ISNI: http://isni.org/isni/0000000116490786

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-4786?lang=en>


From: Dave Cramer [mailto:dauwhe@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 11:56 AM
To: Johnson, Rick
Cc: public-epub3@w3.org; public-publishingbg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3

Hi Rick,

Absolutely—my thoughts are certainly influenced by my experience, which is largely in trade. But I think some fundamentals still apply—we need to be conscious of how our actions affect legacy titles and systems; the distance between specification and implementation continues to loom large; perhaps epubcheck could be used differently.

I would love to hear more about these sorts of issues in other contexts. Higher Ed has a very different relationship to backlist than trade does. EPUB seems closer to an interchange format than an end-user format in some segments. As content gets more complex, the limitations of some reading systems loom larger...

Regards,

Dave







On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 11:19 AM, Johnson, Rick <Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com<mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com>> wrote:
Thanks, Dave.  In reading your post, my perspective is obviously centered around textbooks and other educational material/courseware.  I found much of your prose, examples, and arguments centered around the trade book space, and not entirely true for textbooks, journals, and other publishing domains.  Do you think this is true, and the conversation could be segmented, or not?

-Rick

From: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com<mailto:dauwhe@gmail.com>>
Date: Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 8:37 AM
To: "public-epub3@w3.org<mailto:public-epub3@w3.org>" <public-epub3@w3.org<mailto:public-epub3@w3.org>>, "public-publishingbg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingbg@w3.org>" <public-publishingbg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingbg@w3.org>>
Subject: Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3
Resent-From: <public-publishingbg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingbg@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 8:36 AM

Inspired by the recent debate about EPUB 3.1 and backward compatibility, I wrote a blog post on the future of EPUB 3, compatibility, mistakes, and even old versions of EPUB being "good enough." I think there is much we can learn from the web on this subject.

http://epubsecrets.com/good-enough-a-meditation-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-epub.php


Thanks,

Dave