The Future of Books on the Web

David Hyland-Wood, The University of Queensland & Ephox, on behalf of W3C

CAUL Publishing-X, Sydney, Australia, 2017-07-12

The Future of
Books on the Web

David Hyland-Wood, UQ & Ephox, on behalf of W3C

CAUL Publishing-X, Sydney, Australia

2017-07-12

These Slides are Available on the Web

See: https://prototypo.github.io/2017/CAUL-20170712/slides/index.html

(Slides are in HTML)

What do we want a book
to be?

Andrew Dai, Flickr

Content or Form or Both?

Cover of Galileo Galilei's 1613 book on sunspots, Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno alle Macchie Solari
Christies

Books

Value Purpose Theorist
use to gain knowledge Karl Marx
exchange to sell or give
sign to gain prestige Jean Baudrillard
spiritual to empower belief Paraskevaidis et al
archival to retain knowledge von Rammingen

Books

Value Purpose Web? Soon
use knowledge ~ (access, updates)
exchange benefit ~ (appropriate copy) ?
sign prestige ~ (bookshelves)
spiritual empowerment ~ (no physical object)
archival retention ~ (ability to copy, updates)

Which of these can we do on the Web?

Digital books can more than print books

Gonzalo Malpartida, Flickr

A format to represent digital publications: EPUB 3.1

Cloned Milkmen, Flickr

EPUB 3.1 is a very mature specification

A wide variety of books have been created

Books with lots of illustrations…

An extract of the 'Petit Prince' with a typical drawing
Antoine de Sain-Exupéry: “Le Petit Prince”, Ebooks libres et gratuits
An extract of Winnie the Pooh with a typical drawing
A.A. Milne: “Winnie-the-Pooh”, Egmont UK Ltd.

Scientific presentations

Slide-like page with lots of mathematical equations
David Mao: “Calculus”

Art books

Page with an annotated high quality reproduction of a Dutch painting
Ingrid Koenen: “Dutch Golden Age”

Mangas

Page of a typical Japanese manga
“ハルコさんの彼氏”, IDPF EPUB3 Sample

Technical books

Extract of a CSS book, with codes and figures
Lea Verou: “CSS Secrets”, O'Reilly
Extract of a Javascript book with figure and code
Michael Fogus: “Functional Programming”, O'Reilly

Books with different character sets and writing directions

An extract of a text in hindi
“The Mahabharata in Devanāgarī (देवनागरी)”, IDPF EPUB3 Sample
A book with hebrew characters
“Israel sailing”, IDPF EPUB3 Sample

It is not only for books!
It can be…

…conference proceedings

Cover of a Springer Proceedings of an LOD conference
Article from a Springer Proceedings of an LOD conference

…journals or magazines (articles)

Cover of the JEP journal
Table of content of the JEP journal

…official reports of all kinds

EU brochure in English
European Commission — General Report 2015
EU brochure in Bulgarian
European Commission — General Report 2015

In fact, just about anything!

Screendump of gdrive saving a document as EPUB
Screendump of Apple Pages saving a document as EPUB

What is the secret?

James Arboghast, flickr

Well, at least one of the secrets…

Rough structure of an EPUB file

EPUB Packaging structure diagram

A good example

Figure with a complex image processing done, in fact, in CSS
Lea Verou: “CSS Secrets”, O'Reilly

Bottom line:
EPUB and OWP are
fundamentally related

Are we done?
The Web does it all!

Not quite…
EPUB is "of the Web", but not completely on the Web

The Web can learn from publishers

Publishers can learn from the Web

There are two major areas that need work:

  1. Allow access anywhere: books should be able to be read offline or online
  2. Treat books as books: books are packages of content, not just a list of components

The current Web is bad at both of those. We can fix that.

Packaging a digital book

What we get today… format conversions

EU report in EPUB
Dump from EU publications' page in EPUB
EU report page with nice outlook, TOC, etc
Dump from EU publications' page on the Web

How to do better:
scholarly publishing example

Screen dump of an article on F1000
Jullien Colomb et. al: “Sub-strains of Drosophila Canton-S…”, F1000Research

Need for the concept of a “publication” of many resources

What would a "Web Publication" do for us?

How does that translate to the Web?

a collection of resources with different URL pointer

How does that translate to the Web?

a collection of resources in a 'blob' with one URL pointer

Architectural challenge: handling online/offline

Envisioned architecture:
online

Document consumed through the Web in a traditional way

Envisioned architecture:
offline

Document consumed through a Service Worker, possibly cached

Books

Value Purpose WP
use knowledge ✓ access updates?
exchange benefit appropriate copy?
sign prestige
spiritual empowerment
archival retention ability to copy, updates?

Packaged Web Publications (PWP)

Packaged Web Publications

A layer “on top” of WPs

a collection of resources in a 'blob' in a rectangle with one URL pointer

Structure of an EPUB3 file

EPUB Packaging structure diagram

A Packaging of a Web Publication

PWP packaging structure

PWP Packaging structure diagram with admin file in JSON

A PWP Processor

A PWP Processor

Document consumed through a Service Worker, possibly unpacked

Books

Value Purpose PWP
use knowledge ✓ access, updates
exchange benefit appropriate copy?
sign prestige
spiritual empowerment
archival retention ✓ ability to copy, updates

But what about
EPUB???

Most things are the same!

Development process

W3C and IDPF Merger

W3C/IDPF merger

Now that IDPF and W3C have merged:

Some references

Latest WP Editors' draft:
https://w3c.github.io/wpub/
Latest PWP Use Cases and Requirements draft:
https://w3c.github.io/dpub-pwp-ucr/
Latest PWP Editors’ draft:
https://w3c.github.io/dpub-pwp/
PWP Issue list:
https://github.com/w3c/dpub-pwp/issues

Thank you for your attention!

This presentation:
https://prototypo.github.io/2017/CAUL-20170712/slides/index.html
To contact me:
Dr. David Hyland-Wood
UQ School of ITEE
d.hylandwood@uq.edu.au

One more thing…

This is not how Web development works at W3C…

Ed Ritger, Flickr

…it is more like this!

Paul Downey, Flickr

You can help build a better Web

Paul Downey, Flickr

Technical challenge: addressing, identification

“addressing” vs. “identification”

Is it “addressing” or “identification”?

What does a Web request return for a locator?

Design challenge:
Ergonomic differences

Book reading needs a different approach to ergonomy

Front page of the War and Peace ebook
Lev Tolstoy: “War and Peace”, feedbooks

Personalization

Other synergy effects of convergence

Advantage for the publishers‘ community

Photo of a bookshelf with lots of technical books
Jeffrey Zeldman, Flickr

Advantage for the publishers‘ community

Photo of a bookshelf with lots of technical books
Jeffrey Zeldman, Flickr

Advantage for the Web community

image of a medieval manuscript
Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid, University of British Columbia

To conclude:
Let's create better books
on the Web!