The Web Publications work over at the W3C remains utterly depressing to me. Mainly because I remain convinced that the IDPF/W3C merger guarantees that it will devolve into a reimplementation of ePub, which isn't really what browser vendors want (who want nicer ways for making the regular web publication-friendly).
So browser vendors will ignore it.
And Amazon will ignore it.
And it'll just be a rehash of the current, limited ePub ecosystem nobody likes.
@pablod My guess is that it'll largely be irrelevant either way. The Readium group is charting its own course and don't need the W3C to confer with the few reading system implementors that actually care about compatibility.
And web devs who want to make book-like things on the web will be helped more by improvements to regular web-stuff like Service Workers and CSS than by any of what comes out of the Digital Publishing groups at the W3C.
If I had to guess. 🙂
@StommePoes @pablod
Varies a lot. For most, ebooks are whatever Amazon supports.
Hachette and Oreilly uses HTML/CSS to do a lot of print layouts so they care about improving CSS layout and typography in general. Some publishers have an HTML to ePub workflow in place already so they don't really care if another output format appears.
Wiley is hedging its bets that the web might be a big part of education publishing but I don't know if they back that up with a product strategy.
@pablod @StommePoes Most publishers deliver their books in multiple formats and the only format that they're set up to pay special attention to is print. Everything else is geared for the lowest common denominator: Amazon.
Creating a new, more capable, ebook format for publishers is kind of meaningless. They don't even have the staff to do the Kindle -> ePub progressive enhancements they could be doing. (Publishers _drastically_ underpay as a rule.)
The money just isn't there.
@pablod Well, they are committed to ePub-compatibility and to whatever its successors are.
But they also seem to be focusing instead on having open source implementations first and leaving it up to other W3C members whether they want it to standardise whatever they come up with.
Like Hadrien Gardeur's work with putting together a json-based manifest for publications. It's designed to be an internal format for Readium but they seem also open to it being standardised.
@pablod Most of the interesting Readium stuff is over at https://github.com/readium/readium-2
The JSON manifest/web publications stuff being made by Readium: https://github.com/HadrienGardeur/webpub-manifest
This isn't in the W3C process, AFAICT, but that's largely because the digital publishing groups at the W3C are stuck in busywork mode ATM. (Writing a charter that appeases the IDPF and browser crowd. Putting together an excessively complicated requirements doc, etc.)
Baldur Bjarnason
Pablo Defendini 🤖
Compton Scatterbrained