W3C

PM Working Group annotation task force meeting

12 June 2025

Attendees

Present
DaleRogers Brady Duga, George Kerscher, Hadrien Gardeur, Laurent Le Meur, Leonard Rosenthol
Regrets
Ivan Herman
Chair
-
Scribe
Laurent Le Meur

Meeting minutes

<Brady Duga> +1

Hadrien Gardeur: wiki are not great on github. GDoc is usable. Discussions and issues are best.

Laurent Le Meur: w3c/epub-specs contains old stuff, we can add a section.

Laurent Le Meur: will come back to the WG chairs

George Kerscher: embed in the content doc or ?

Laurent Le Meur: in the package

Leonard Rosenthol: it is tbd.

Leonard Rosenthol: is it only when they reference an EPUB?

Laurent Le Meur: yes

Brady Duga: this is what I'd like to see from a cross-platform annotation feature. Who is implementing this? we need 2 implementations.

Brady Duga: people at Google would only be intersted if there is a good business case behing it. There are not so interested for now.

Hadrien Gardeur: Readium Mobile toolkits (100+ apps) will include it. Readium Web also. Users iclude libraries, retailers .... And there there are apps developed by EDRLab: Thorium Desktop, Thorium Web, Thorium iOS, Thorium Android.

Laurent Le Meur: Readwise is ok, they will implement a new export/import.

Brady Duga: implementations count even if they are from the same organization. It would be better if there are different organizations.

George Kerscher: the Daisy requirements and RFP of a Scandivanivan org will call for a reader with annotations.

George Kerscher: I'd like to add to the scope, for education: exercices in books / workbooks (filling info, give to the teacher). A class of annotation could be such answers to exercices.

Dale Rogers: in the education sphere, LMS are more apps than ebooks. Answers are sent to a store. The technology is already there.

<Leonard Rosenthol> https://xapi.com/

Dale Rogers: this is a replacement for scorm, xapi.

<Leonard Rosenthol> xAPI is actually maintained by a US Gov't agency (https://www.adlnet.gov/)

<Leonard Rosenthol> however, standardized by IEEE - https://www.adlnet.gov/projects/xapi/

Dale Rogers: having worked on LMS, to engage with students, and the annotation is in the EPUB, the teacher will receive the book + annotations. It is different from personal annotations for personal use. We have to talk about security...

Laurent Le Meur: it can be seen as a sequence: a- annotation in the reading system b- exported as a file c- exported in the EPUB and maybe d- sent to a server. At point d, maybe xapi will be the answer.

George Kerscher: possible use case, people selling their annotations.

Brady Duga: if annotation selectors contain bit of the text, there will be IP issues.

Leonard Rosenthol: the W3C annotation addresses such issues with different selectors.

Brady Duga: publishers may not appreciate people making money with annotations if they contain bits of the text.

Dale Rogers: In the education domain, going though an LMS is required to log / document and secure exchanges between teachers and students.

George Kerscher: in home education, there is no LMS. Simpler exports / imports are useful.

Hadrien Gardeur: a clear requirement from end users: switch between reading systems and get their annotations back (and bookmarks and reading location). Another example in education, PhD student, lots of citations and annotations. If I use a specialized platform, I want to keep it for later.

Hadrien Gardeur: about keeping annotations between book version, using EPUB URI schemes was difficult. I would be worried if we try to go too deep in this direction. We can recommand selectors that are stable enough to survive modifications, but trying to identifiy version of an ebooks will be impossible. If the annotation is "un-anchored" but has some contect, it is still valuable.

Leonard Rosenthol: are annotation version-specific or publication-specific? There is no consensus in the community. We must take a stand. We'll have a great conversation

George Kerscher: usually, there is not enough metadata in an epub to make proper citation. We'll need to give recommendations for EPUB metadata.

Brady Duga: it is not strictly in our TF goals.

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).