W3C Publishing Summit 2017
/Guest blog by Evan Owens
The first-ever W3C Publishing Summit took place in San Francisco, November 9 to 10, to discuss how web technologies are shaping publishing today, tomorrow, and beyond. Publishing and the web interact in innumerable ways. The Open Web Platform and its technologies have become essential to how content is created, developed, enhanced, discovered, disseminated, and consumed online and offline.
Background on IDPF and W3C
During February 2017, the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) merged into the W3C. IDPF members are now joining W3C with new committees formed, including the W3C Publishing Working Group, EPUB Community Group, and others.
Keynote: The Future of Content by Abhay Parasnis – CTO, Adobe
The internet is wide open to all world communications. “Content publication” has expanded to a very broad level via the Internet. Businesses are trying to reach out in personalized fashion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are important for content location & delivery and personalization. W3C does important standards development, but as technology is moving fast how should we coordinate successfully?
A major goal of the W3C is to define a new Portal Web Publication (PWP) content format that will merge HTML and EPUB and replace PDF. EPUB 4.0 is likely to become a subset of that new PWP standard.
Following are some of my observations from the various presentations and discussions from the conference. Feel free to add your thoughts and takeaways in the comments section!
Content Platforms and Publishers
Majority of eBook content is still in EPUB2
EPUB3 is big in Japan and China but not common in English-language publications yet
Most failed EPUB content is from USA publishers
Publishers tend to overuse fixed layout, especially academic or instructional content
Future will be CSS, interactivity, and accessibility
Digital Publishing in Asia, Europe,and Latin America
UK the biggest eBook market with 575K new eBooks per year
Amazon is leading EU bookseller (90% of UK sales)
Japan produces approximately 500K eBooks
Japan has been using EPUB 3.0 since 2011; 100% of old files were migrated to the new format
The market is growing in Korea and China
In Latin America ebooks are primarily EPUB 2.0; 3.0 hasn’t been adopted yet
55% of publishers in Latin America have not yet started digital content production
Accessibility in Publishing and W3C
Accessibility in digital publishing is a key issue that was included in EPUB
W3C implementation goals include supporting EPUB3 accessibility and collaborating with the W3C WCAG
DAISY has built a checking tool called “ACE”; it is now in beta and available for testing
Cenveo Publisher Services provides accessibility services and testing
Educational Publishing
Personalized learning challenges include the learning platform and the metrics
There is now a major move from books to digital e-learning platforms
Learning is now subject to data-driven insights: analytics add value by these tools
Creating EPUB Content that Looks and Works Great Everywhere
Microsoft added an EPUB reader into Windows 10 MS Edge web browser
Almost 90% of ebooks are EPUB2 and recent content in 2017 is only 62% EPUB3
Issues for EPUB content creation and rendition include
Many different screen sizes and orientations (e.g. phone, table, computer)
Reader requirements: mobility, classroom usage, accessibility
Pagination works differently in different reading systems
Tables and anything with fixed width is risky
Captions not staying with images due to page breaks
Background images break when flowing across pages
CSS layout for colored text failures
Supporting audio reader software by language metadata
Fixed layout never 100% perfect
Don’t use SVG for text layout
Test content in several epub reader devices, etc.
Publication Metadata
Consumer metadata versus academic metadata remains a key challenge
Standards are only slowly adopted; e.g. ONIX 3 published 2009 but by 2017 only about 50% adopted
Autotagging versus human tagging; machines more consistent
Cenveo Publisher Services is a proud member of the W3C Publishing Working Group. The issues discussed at the W3C Publishing Summit are ones we address everyday with academic, scholarly, and education publishers. We look forward to working with you in 2018 on innovative publishing solutions that improve editorial quality and streamline production while continuously addressing costs. Let us know how we can help.