Publishing Business Group — Minutes

Date: 15/16 October 2019

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Junko Kamata, Yu-Wei Chang (Yanni), Murata Makoto, Jeff Jaffe

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: liisa mccloy-kelley

Scribe(s): Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Content:

Murata Makoto: I will have to leave in 30 minutes.

Murata Makoto: Dates and new format for the meeting. Daihei emailed about them.

1. meeting dates

Murata Makoto: Our Asian meeting schedule.
… 1 hour earlier from next month

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: meetings on Nov. 13th and Dec. 11th at earlier time is ok

Shinya Takami: Meeting time will be the same (9:00 AM) in Japan, right?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: not earlier in Japan- apologies!

Murata Makoto: 1 hour earlier in EDT, but no changes in JST

2. TPAC F2F - enjoyed and happy to hear about the writing mode recommendations

Murata Makoto: PR for CSS Writing Modes was good news

3. EPUB Roadmap

Murata Makoto: have not heard the discussion from the CG about the EPUB roadmap, want us to send links

Murata Makoto: Liisa will provide references to the roadmap discussion.

Murata Makoto: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mAqdj2HTN7p8cgncToA7yRCKmz5trLTZ4ATI7trl7KM/edit#heading=h.eszf0tmwgc6u

Jeff Jaffe: exciting to see the CG go to the roadmapping effort, would like to see more participation from Asia and find some way to enable
… if there are enhancements to talk about now is a great time to discuss

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Takami has noted that Images in spine for Digital Sequential Art is important

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: is that something you are doing now that you want to maintain?

Shinya Takami: addressed the same thing at TPAC

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: possible good news, amazon may take EPUB manga

Murata Makoto: EPUB reading systems do not have good performance for page turn for Manga

Murata Makoto: Takami said that Amazon is one of the big players but there are other key players.

Shinya Takami: in Japan new services for manga were born in recent years, and they are using some EPUB and some images in spine
… The new eBook services will extract just images from EPUB files we (publisher) provide, and it’s too simple to say the format.
… But we have some indication like page spread or ordering in EPUB (OPF) but they will tend to omit to understand such features.

Jeff Jaffe: Sounds like a suboptimal approach. Can we do better with enhancements to EPUB?
… maybe there are kluges and we could do better

Shinya Takami: I think we should simplify the EPUB file for Manga content.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: are there other enhancements that might help? or is it an implementation problem?
… what would you simplify in the EPUB?

Shinya Takami: XHTML and CSS will not be necessary for display images, especially for Manga.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: so it gets back to images in spine and an OPF file with instructions

Shinya Takami: Yes.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Do you ever have navigation from page to page to link to stories on pages?
… will send a visual example of what I mean

Shinya Takami: OK, thanks.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: would it be helpful to have community group calls sometimes in good hours for Asia?

Shinya Takami: Yes.
… It’s not easy to join CG meeting from Japan.

4. Accessibility needs and expectations for readers across different territories

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: is it an interesting topic to think about?
… are there things for your territory that are not well addressed?

5. EPUBcheck fundraising

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: https://www.w3.org/publishing/epubcheck_fundraising

6. Business Issues on the Horizon for Digital Publications

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I see reports that graphic novels in North America are about 9% digital, but at the same time am starting to see
… interest in settling out panelization and best practices for experiences across comics, manga, graphic novels

Shinya Takami: New GoToMeeting app of iOS was unstable…

7. Books That Can’t Be Made or Not Well

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: will start to gather in emails and sheets notes of types of publications we cannot make or are not well implemented
… please get involved with this work and with the CG work on the EPUB roadmap