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.
Baldur Bjarnason
Pablo Defendini 🤖
Compton Scatterbrained