EPUB has been around since 2007; EPUB 3 came out in 2011. We’re told we live in an age of digital disruption, but little has changed in ebooks since before the very first ebookcraft. What’s going on? What might the future of ebooks look like? Should we use EPUB 3.2? Will there ever be an EPUB 4? Are Web Publications real? Part history lesson, part unhinged rant, part futile attempt to predict the future, Dave Cramer will shed light, or at least heat, on the big picture. March 19, 2019 ebookcraft.booknetcanada.ca #Ebookcraft

1. WHAT
ARE
EBOOKS
FOR?

2. YESTERDAY

3. 1949
Enciclopedia Mecánica

5. 1971
Project Gutenberg

7. May The Source Be With You. . . .
What I mean by this is that the idea[l] of Project Gutenberg
is to bring the source of all information, and civilization,
to the masses in the same way The Gutenberg Press did in the
middle of The Second Millennium, only in a modern manner.
As our civilization starts off into The Third Millennium the
average person should be able to get to online computers for
the purpose of acquiring knowledge from a million books by a
time when The Third Millennium is only 1% on its way, and by
the time 2% is completed should have access to 10 million of
these books in translation into 100 languages or more.

8. 1995
Patchwork Girl

10. “
I guess you could say I want my fiction
to be more like a world full of things
that you can wander around in, rather
than a record or memory of those
wanderings. The quilt and graveyard
sections where a concrete metaphor
that resonates with the themes of the
work creates a literary structure, satisfy
me in a very corporeal way. I salivate,
my fingers itch.
—Shelly Jackson

12. 1999
OEB 1.0

15. <!DOCTYPE package PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0 Package//EN"
"oebpkg1.dtd">
<package unique-identifier="ident">
<metadata>
<dc-metadata>
<dc:Identifier id="ident" scheme="adhoc">10101010101010101010101
dc:Identifier>
<dc:Title>Frequently Asked Questions about Ebola Hemorrhagic Fev
<dc:Creator role="aut" file-as="Ornstein, David">David Ornstein<
<dc:Creator role="spn">NuvoMedia, Inc.</dc:Creator>
<dc:Rights>Copyright © 1999 David Ornstein. Permission is grante
distribution only in complete, unmodified form accompanying the Open eBook
Structure Specification.</dc:Rights>
<dc:Description>Ebola is a virus named after a river in Zaire, i
of discovery. This document provides answers to common questions about Ebo
dc:Description>
<dc:Publisher>outbreak.org</dc:Publisher>
<dc:Date>1999-09-11</dc:Date>
<dc:Type>FAQ</dc:Type>
<dc:Subject>OEB</dc:Subject>
<dc:Subject>eBook</dc:Subject>
<dc:Subject>Ebola Virus</dc:Subject>
<dc:Source>www.outbreak.org</dc:Source>
<dc:Language>en</dc:Language>
</dc-metadata>
</metadata>
<manifest>
<item id="doc" href="ebola.html" media-type="text/x-oeb1-document" /
</manifest>
<spine>
<itemref idref="doc" />
</spine>
</package>

17. 2007
The world changes

21. 2011
EPUB 3

25. 2016–2019
EPUB 3.1, EPUB 3.0.2, and the rise of the
EPUB 3 Community Group

26. EPUB 3.1 GOALS
- Consolidation of modular specs like indexes, scriptable
components, etc
- Simplification and removal of unused features
- Clarify Scripting and Interactivity
- Open Web Platform Alignment use undated references to
HTML, CSS, SVG instead of static profiles
- New Features?

27. EPUB 3.1 AMBITIONS
- HTML serialization
- BFF (browser-friendly format), unpackaged EPUB that would
be a precursor of web publications
- removal of non-web content features like epub:switch and
epub:bindings
- reorganization of spec to make it easier to read and
understand

28. EPUB 3.1 REALITY
- Lots of opposition to allowing HTML serialization, due to
concerns that reading systems are pre-processing content
using XML toolsets
- The spec was better, simpler, more organized, more clear. But
EPUPCheck was dormant, and was never updated to support
EPUB 3.1. So there was no adoption in the wild.
- EPUB 3.1 used <package version=“3.1”> which meant
that existing content was not officially EPUB 3.1
- The merger with W3C happened just as EPUB 3.1 was final.

29. THE EPUB3 COMMUNITY GROUP TO THE RESCUE*!
- Garth Conboy and Makoto Murata proposed that we,
um,recycle EPUB 3.1, which had never been adopted. We
would take the good stuff, but make it strictly backward-
compatible with EPUB 3.0.1, so every existing EPUB 3.0.1 file
would be a valid EPUB 3.2 file.
- This work was done in the new EPUB 3 Community Group,
which had responsibility for EPUB maintenance after the IDPF
merger.
- In the meantime, Publishing@W3C had done fundraising for
EPUBCheck, so that it could support EPUB 3.2
- An alpha of EPUBCheck supporting EPUB 3.2 came out last
week!
*and, more importantly, Tzviya, Rachel, and Luc, who saved EPUBCheck

30. EPUB 3.2 CHANGES FROM EPUB 3.0.1
- Undated, evolving references to HTML5, CSS, and SVG.
EPUB will improve along with the web. Flex box in EPUB!
- New core media types (WOFF2, SFNT)
- Much cleanup of spec language and organization
- Deprecating bindings, switch, trigger
- Add EPUB Accessibility spec
- No restrictions on epub:type

31. TODAY…

32. JUDGEMENT DAY
What Problems Have We Solved?

33. Books not as heavy ✔
Library in your pocket ✔
Read in the dark ✔
Books accessible to more ✔
Enable new ways of writing ✘
Foster interactivity ✘
Can have as many books as you want ✔
Can have all the books you want ✘
Anyone can make a book ✔
It’s easy to make a good book ✘
sortof

34. WHAT DO I HATE ABOUT EPUB?
- The interoperability problem. What works in one reading system
often fails in another. Some things don't work anywhere. There are
lots of bugs.What new content can be created with web publications?
- The linking problem. How do you link to an ebook? Between
ebooks? I would love to be able to create a URL that points to
something inside an ebook.What new user experiences?
- The origin problem. EPUBs don't really have origins, and so don't fit
into the web's security model. As a result, we often can't use
scripting, local storage is absent or insecure, etc.
- The pagination problem. Browsers don't natively paginate, so
reading systems have to hack multicol or something. This gets buggy,
and also leads to problems if you try to change the DOM with script.

35. WHAT DO I HATE ABOUT EPUB? (CONTINUED)
- The design problem. CSS doesn't yet allow us to do lots of
things that are fundamental for paginated media, like float an
image to the top of a page.
- The overrides problem. Reading systems and publications are
sometimes in conflict, as styles are altered to support pagination,
reader customization, reading system fixes for bad files, etc
- The distance from the web problem. EPUB is almost web stuff,
but not quite. You have to use XHTML. Lots of normal web
things don't work.
- The authoring problem. It's hard to make good EPUBs. Most
available tools are flawed. And what should an authoring tool
create, given the interop problems?

36. TOMORROW
Evolution or Revolution?

37. “A Web Publication is a discoverable
and identifiable collection of resources.
—The W3C Web Publications Spec

38. 001.html
002.html
003.html
004.html
cover.jpg title
author
publisher
pub date
etc.
style.css
fig1.svg

39. 001.html
002.html
003.html
004.html
cover.jpg title
author
publisher
pub date
etc.
style.css
fig1.svg
Sequence
Boundary
Metadata

40. EPUB
ch01.html
ch02.html
ch03.html style.css
img1.jpg
img2.jpg author
title
identifier
datech04.html
spine metadatamanifest
ch01.html
ch02.html
ch03.html
ch04.html

41. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<package xmlns="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf" version="3
xml:lang="en" unique-identifier="q">
<metadata xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<dc:title id=“title”>Mini-Moby-Dick</dc:title>
<dc:language>en</dc:language>
<dc:identifier id="q">NOID</dc:identifier>
<meta property="dcterms:modified">2019-03-19T00:00:01Z
meta>
</metadata>
<manifest>
<item id="chap_001" href="001.xhtml" media-
type=“application/xhtml+xml"/>
<item id="chap_002" href="002.xhtml" media-
type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
<item id="cover" href=“cover.jpg" media-type=“image-jp
properties=“cover-image"/>
</manifest>
<spine>
<itemref idref="chap_001" />
<itemref idref="chap_002" />
</spine>
</package>

42. 001.html
002.html
003.html
004.html
cover.jpg title
author
publisher
pub date
etc.
style.css
fig1.svg
readingOrder
Boundary
metadataresources

44. {
"@context": ["https://schema.org", "https://www.w3.org/
ns/wp-context"],
"type": "Book",
"url": "https://publisher.example.org/mobydick",
"author": "Herman Melville",
"dateModified": "2019-03-18T17:00:00Z",
"readingOrder": [
“html/title.html", “html/copyright.html", “html/
introduction.html", "html/epigraph.html", "html/c001.html",
"html/c002.html", "html/c003.html", "html/c004.html", "html/
c005.html", “html/c006.html" ],
"resources": [
"css/mobydick.css",
{
"type": "PublicationLink",
"rel": "https://www.w3.org/ns/wp#cover-page",
"url": "images/cover.jpg",
"encodingFormat": "image/jpeg"
},{
"type": "PublicationLink",
"url": "html/toc.html",
"rel": "contents"
}
]
}

45. BOOKS WITHOUT
READING SYSTEMS
Two roads diverged…
and I took both

46. WPUB WTF?
In case of conflict, consider theoretical purity
over specifiers over implementors
over authors over users.

47. MANIFESTOS
Extensible & Declarative

48. CUSTOM ELEMENTS

49. HOUDINI

50. A FUTURE FOR EPUB?

51. EPUB 4
- Retain rough compatibility with existing content while
allowing more options
- Allow HTML serialization
- Work towards solutions to the origin problem, which
could also greatly help with scripting
- Continue to advocate for improvements in CSS around
pagination, which would reduce the implementation
load on reading systems and eliminate whole classes of
bugs
- Learn from testing

52. WEB.NEXT
- Better support for pagination
- Page floats
- Better typography, inline layout, hyphenation,
and justification
- Being able to link inside an iframe
- A simpler packaging method than Google’s that
can still solve the origin problem
- Houdini

53. TOOLS FOR
CONVIVIALITY

54. THE MEANING OF LIFE
42

55. SE A CABO / IT’S FINISHED
- Dave Cramer / Hachette Book Group