The End of Ebooks? Packaged Web Publications and the future of digital publishing

1. The End of Ebooks?
Packaged Web
Publications and the
future of digital
publishing
Simon Rowberry

2. Competing
factions of digital
publishing
Ebooks:
Trade (non)fiction
Very ‘bookish’
PDFs:
Documents
Scholarly publishing
Websites:
Short form
& Journalism

3. Format
“If there is such a thing as media theory,
there should be format theory.
Writers have too often collapsed
discussions of format into their analyses
of what is important about a given
medium. Format denotes a whole range
of decisions that affect the look, feel,
experience, and workings of a medium.
It is also names a set of rules according
to which a technology can operate”
(p. 12)

4. Formats as media
technology

5. A brief history of
(open) ebook
standards
1969: General Mark-up Language
1981: Standardized General Mark-up Language
1989: HTML
1994: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
1996: Daisy Consortium Digital Talking Books
1998: NIST conference
Book Industry Standards Group WG
1999: Open eBook Publishing Standard
(OEBPS)
2006: International Digital Publishing Forum
(IDPF) and EPUB 2.0

6. February 2017
“The mission of the Publishing Working
Group is to enable all publications—with all
their specificities and traditions—to become
first-class entities on the Web.”

7. “We can look at it
as a cleanup of
epub to make it
web compatible”
Tzviya Siegman
Publishing @ W3C Chair
16 Apr 2017

8. Who’s in charge?
PUBLISHERS
(69%)
TECHNOLOGY
(31%)

9. Who’s in charge?

10. Core challenges
• DISCOVERABILITY:
How does ISBN interface with the Web?
• COMPRESSION:
ZIP or MIME?
• PROVENANCE:
Version control and authorship?
• LAYOUT:
Scroll or pages?
• ONTOLOGY:
Can standards be PWP-compliant?
e.g. Next Generation PDF

11. Opportunities
• Citations/locators
Canonical Fragment Identifiers:
epubcfi(/6/4[chap01ref]!/4[body01]
/10[para05]/3:10)
• Time-based textual media
Synchronizing audio and text across the
Web

12. Working group 11 June 2018
Resolution 4: readingOrder
preferable to spine
• Does integration with the
Web diminish EPUB’s
‘bookishness’?

13. A place for books?
N.B. PWP might never be implemented –
most publishers still use EPUB 2.0
Reducing all publications to a single meta-
specification will have casualties
Will this decision strengthen Amazon’s
stranglehold on linear digital
publications?

14. The End of Ebooks?
Packaged Web
Publications and the
future of digital
publishing
Simon Rowberry