Publishing Business Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2018-03-27

Attendees

Present: Avneesh Singh, Mateus Teixeira, Rachel Comerford, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Karen Myers, Dave Cramer, Brian O’Leary, Dan Sanicola, Tzviya Siegman, George Kerscher, Bill Kasdorf, Luc Audrain, Jun-ichi Yoshii, Bill McCoy

Regrets: Cristina Mussinelli, Laurent Le Meurs, Ric Wright, Junko Kamata, Wolfgang Schindler

Guests:

Chair: Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Scribe(s): Rachel Comerford

1. epub 3.2

2. EPUB 3.2 update

Dave Cramer: matt garish has been hard at work on 3.2 and multiple issues have been opened in github
… we plan to have a community group call a week from thursday

Dave Cramer: https://github.com/w3c/publ-epub-revision/issues

Dave Cramer: in the meantime, file and comment on issues!

Karen Myers: would it be appropriate to do a followup blog post to encourage ebookcrafters to take a look?

Dave Cramer: I already promised to write one

3. PR strategy for 3.2

Dave Cramer: we’re going to write a blog post about what 3.2 is, why we’re doing it, and who it impacts

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we can send a link to the business group but there are other ways to get it out there

Luc Audrain: do we still need to explain why we are doing it? Now is the time to do it.

Dave Cramer: we’re talking about sharing those reasons with a larger group of people (not revisiting if we should)

Tzviya Siegman: I was going to suggest (not sure of cross posting policies at w3c) that we cross post with blogs like epubsecrets

Ivan Herman: we have no problem doing that

Karen Myers: +1 EPUB Secrets

Tzviya Siegman: dauwhe and I can follow up with Laura Brady

Bill McCoy: I think for the broader audience we could push to publishers weekly, etc. since this is the CG delivering on the first update to epub in a while

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: this leads us into promoting epub3 in general
… we need to be clear that you shouldn’t wait for 3.2 if you’re not making epub3 now

Bill Kasdorf: +1 to not waiting for 3.2

Dave Cramer: the idea is if you’re making 3.0.1, you’re making 3.2

Bill McCoy: … or even worse people may think “Web Publications is on the way so we won’t do EPUB 3 at all”

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I’m more concerned about people still using epub2 that might wait to switch

George Kerscher: there is a BISG group working on promoting epub3

Bill McCoy: we need to promote the message that EPUB 3 is alive and well and thriving under W3C custodianship

Brian O’Leary: what George said
… our efforts are largely focused on north america

Karen Myers: +1 use external coordination group to help with outreach communications

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: BillK can we use the external coordination effort to push this forward as well

Dave Cramer: we should keep the focus on epub3 and not consider the impact of the numbers after the decimal

Luc Audrain: +1 to Dave

Rachel Comerford: +1 to epub3 (rather than epub3.145…)

Karen Myers: livre book canada offered to assist in outreach to more canadian pubs

Bill Kasdorf: I also got a good response from booknet canada in that regard

Karen Myers: https://livrescanadabooks.com/en/canadian-publishers/publishers-associations-and-related-organizations/

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: sounds as though we are in agreement that this is the right direction
… a second step would be short and sweet talking points to share

Brian O’Leary: it is important to have booknet canada because they are working more within canada while livre focuses on international sale of canadian books
… the push is similar to our push with Onix3 in the BISG

Bill Kasdorf: joshua tallent is leading the charge and we’re getting a good response from trading partners

4. epubcheck

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: let’s talk about crowdsourcing funding
… it might be a good idea to put out an RFP for doing the work on epubcheck
… how it would be build, cost, etc
… this gives us greater transparency
… in the meantime while we put out the RFP, we can also put out a request for issues especially from bigger partners that use it

Rachel Comerford: +1 to bidding out

Bill McCoy: we might want to word the RFP to suggest that we can provide promotional credit on the tool to keep costs down on development

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we did also discuss that that could be an offer in crowdsourcing the funding

Tzviya Siegman: I love the idea of the RFP. I received an email from one of the devs at Kobo offering to help. I have a lot of trouble asking a developer for a cut rate - I would like to offer them the money their time is worth

Bill McCoy: I was thinking more about asking companies to offer us a discount while the dev gets paid market rate

Bill Kasdorf: is this meant to be ongoing, or just fix and done

Tzviya Siegman: I think we need to hammer out the details of the fundraising
… we’re lose on the structure… last week we told conference members if you do want to contribute, tell Bill

5. external coordination

Bill Kasdorf: we have gotten several good responses but we would like more people to sign on in terms of external coordination with other organizations
… the list is quickly getting pretty large
… we need either a blanket communication to various organizations or if we want ‘real’ engagement which involves someone saying I will manage xyz coordination
… if we do the latter, we need more people on the task force
… it would be ideal if each member coordinated with one org
… but that may not be practical
… what I’d like is more input and participation
… but membership remains an issue
… this isn’t simply publicizing what we’re doing but also making sure we’re not creating problems for anyone else
… ie Japan’s issue with the versioning

Brian O’Leary: i’m empathetic with the overview from Bill_Kasdorf - one thing I would suggest for the task force is to operationalize it with input on a timed basis
… the time can be difficult to manager

Avneesh Singh: this is largely outreach and marketing. putting this in the BG provides restrictions to the number of people that can get involved
… should we have a CG focused on this?

Ivan Herman: I’m not sure our business people will be happy with that
… on a larger scale it is fairly easy to do

George Kerscher: one of the focus of the communication is adoption without fragmentation (like having companies do their own accessibility guidelines) - having everyone work together will be important

Bill Kasdorf: on the subject ivan raise, when the task force chairs gathered we decided to focus on communication not recruitment to avoid undermining BillM efforts for recruitment

Ivan Herman: are you in favor or not of a CG?

Bill Kasdorf: I need time to consider

Bill McCoy: whether we need a new community group or putting this work under the existing CG aside, the question about recruiting new members is geared more toward working on CSS, web fonts etc - areas outside of the publishing groups

Bill Kasdorf: another thing to keep in mind for the task force is not companies that might join the task force, we’re talking about organization that have members

6. epub requirements

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I apologize that the grid in drive had limited permissions

Rachel Comerford: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hsd6-d2gac5QFHw7lM927hjRV1CEh_80qcaTO3ddBbE/edit#gid=0

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Please encourage people who have suggestions to contribute

7. next meetings

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we are sending out revised calendar invites to meet the international scheduling needs

Ivan Herman: we need to make sure go to meeting is available

Ivan Herman: proposal is to have a meeting at 7pm ET for the second meetings of the month

Rachel Comerford: next call is April 10th

12: 00 eastern

Rachel Comerford: pm