Re: Thoughts on the future of EPUB 3

That's an interesting read - as the others have said.  There is a value in
maintaining backward compatibility so long as that doesn't become a heavy
albatross around your neck dragging you under.

To me the post misses the big 800 pound gorilla issue - namely that a huge
player in the eBook market is not using EPUB at all, but sticking with a
proprietarized version of MOBI, and their very popular eBook reader does
not support EPUB.  That means the eBook market is being held back by
inadequacies of the technology supported by that huge player.

By adopting HTML5 and modern JavaScript and CSS techniques, EPUB has the
potential to deliver a truly remarkable reading experience with interactive
books and more.  Those Harry-Potter-like newspapers with moving video and
whatnot could be a reality and not limited to magical people.

But I suspect the eBook market is overly focused on the limited
capabilities of the eBook platform mentioned earlier.

I'd seen a blog post by someone a few months ago claiming that eBook Reader
Innovation has "stalled".  I wrote two blog posts in response along the
lines of what I just said.  The market hasn't stalled, it's being held back.

   - https://techsparx.com/blog/2017/10/kindle-epub.html
   - https://techsparx.com/blog/2017/10/e-reader-innovation.html

FWIW I write this as the implementor of a toolchain that can take a bundle
of Markdown/CSS/etc files as input and produce either an EPUB3 or website
representation of an eBook.  https://akashacms.com/ if you're interested.
An example eBook I've published that way is at
https://greentransportation.info/ev-charging/toc.html

+ David Herron





On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 7:36 AM, Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>