Publishing Business Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2019-10-29

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Ivan Herman, Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平), Dave Cramer, Ralph Swick, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Karen Myers, Bill Kasdorf, Jeff Jaffe, Julie Blair, David Stroup, Dan Sanicola, Jonathan Greenberg, Mateus Teixeira, Rachel Comerford

Regrets: Avneesh Singh, Luc Audrain, George Kerscher

Guests:

Chair: Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Scribe(s): Dave Cramer, Ralph Swick, Rachel Comerford

Content:


1. Epubcheck funding

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: let’s get started
… I wanted to talk about epubcheck fundraising
… the page has been updated to talk about the phase 2 work

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

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we do not have enough to get us to the milestones in January and February
… so we need to make a push to get contributions
… and to explain the importance of the next phase
… Daihei, you’ve talked to people in japan?

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): yes, I’m waiting to hear from APL?
… before the end of the year
… still waiting for authorization

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I’ve heard there have been conversations with Apple

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): I’m asking people to contribute and to use EPUBCheck 4.2

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we wanted to have a broader discussion of epub adoption

2. epub adoption

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: what are we hearing about epub 3.2 and epubcheck 4.2?

dave: EPUB 3.2 adoption happens automatically when you move to EPUBcheck 4.2
… that happens soon at Hachette

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: PRH has worked through most of our 4.2 validation
… so we’ve been making 3.2 since then
… and we’re bringing up backlist titles to 3.2
… anyone having trouble?

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): speaking of trouble, there were issues in Japan, but epubcheck was amended
… everyone is using 3.0.1
… I want to make sure the adoption is happening
… so during the next Asia call I’ll call for adoption in Asia

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: any other questions about this?

David Stroup: Pearson is adopting this as well
… we’ll be using latest epubcheck by end of the year

Ralph Swick: Have there been any issues, small or not small, with reading systems?
… in 3.2?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: from the publishers perspective not all reading systems are using 4.2 on ingestion
… the kinds of things were causing errors for us, there was a little bit of forgiveness
… that’s starting to shift
… and we had to figure out issues with older files

Jeff Jaffe: I don’t have comments on 3.2 adoption
… I see that in the agenda, there’s a question about the epub roadmap
… if that’s part of the current discussion I have a question for Dave
… I went to a CG call
… I don’t recall a lot of tangible, we need to add these features to 3.2
… I went to the last BG call a couple of weeks ago, and there was a direct Q about road map
… and there was nothing added
… so the Q is are there any road map items?

Dave Cramer: in general we don’t have urgent and glaring missing features in EPUB to my knowledge
… given the kinds of people currently doing EPUB and who are part of the conversation
… there are directions we want to go, largely to prepare for better alignment in the future with Web specs and how the Web works
… but I don’t see anything that must happen in the next 6 months
… EPUB is quite a mature spec; EPUB 3 is 8 or 9 years old at this point

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: Jeff, I think it’s going to take some time for people to stop and think about this
… most of the things missing from epub have been missing forever, and people gave up on trying to get there
… there were workarounds, or you just didn’t put some content in ebooks
… and we wondered if there was an app space for this content
… and now it’s a question of what we haven’t done, and what are the business opportunities
… I have books that need local storage for journaling, etc.
… but it doesn’t necessarily have to happen in the next six months because we haven’t had it for five years
… how do we encourage more people to get involved in the CG? Do people want to take something back to their own organizations?

Dave Cramer: some of the commonly requested features are CSS which we can’t directly influence
… others are js but reading systems have largely chosen not to implement those

Jeff Jaffe: I want to address your q on encouraging CG participation
… we took it to the japanese firms, we’re talking today with pearson, prh, and hachette
… and if no one is saying they had these requirements, if no one’s market is telling them they need something, it might be a mistake to dredge it out of them
… it’s reminiscent of web publications, something the market isn’t asking for
… if we had a company chomping at the bit for local storage, we could see if there’s a need from others
… if no one has business needs, I’d rather just say 3.2 is gonna be EPUB for the next three years.
… the road map should match what people need. And I”m hearing that people don’t need very much.

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): q+

Bill Kasdorf: it’s not just books
… I’ve been talking to Josh Pyle at Atypon
… they’re building an epub reader for journal articles
… and at the end of the year there will be millions of journal articles in epub
… Atypon seems happy with epub of journal articles, as is Sage
… Atypon’s intention is that they would be consumed in their own reader based on Readium
… they can only make epubs that make use of waht the publisher included in the XML, such as MathML or tables
… I was wondering why Josh wasn’t pushing more for WP, but it seems EPUB works for him.
… oh, and Atypon is not charging the publisher for converting XML to EPUB

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): in response to Jeff’s question
… and the TPAC PBG discussion
… we talked aobut next stage of digital publishing
… or whether it’s epub 3.2 or 3.5 or 4
… I’m going to have meeting with the people I met at TPAC
… including immersive web people
… and I can bring this information to PBG, and invite the people
… I’ve also talked to traditional publishers
… they are interested in extending css, and in digital magazines
… what would they like to see?
… most of the other publishers are members of APL…
… even if it is not an immediate need, what might make digital publishing more attractive to the audiences?
… with new devices, 5G, etc
… and we could talk more about the EPUB road map with these people

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: some of the business stuff is relative to the fact that when these questions came up, we always had reasons to put thing to the side
… we needed readium, or epubcheck, or reading systems
… people need time to think about this. I gave up on these books three years ago.
… I haven’t looked at what books we don’t do in a long time
… i think the biggest hole is the illustrated coffee table books
… anyone else?

Jeff Jaffe: it’s a great perspective
… for years we’ve been so busy with today we haven’t thought about tomorrow
… and maybe we have some breathing space now that we have 3.2
… so maybe it would be useful for pbg chairs to create a memo to the main users of EPUB 3
… describing where we are now, and we’re trying to decide whether there is interest and value in doing the next turn of the crank on EPUB
… and they could study and return with an opinion
… there are probably hundreds of publishers out there
… and we could learn what they think

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: that’s a great suggestion
… we talked about a11y a few weeks ago
… Luc and Daihei talked to people at Frankfurt
… and it seems there are some issues around a11y around the world
… how can we help people with this?

Jeff Jaffe: I would like to learn more about what the problems are
… around the world
… you’ve mentioned new EU laws
… I don’t know the scope of the issues

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I think it’s two-fold
… Luc was telling us that the new laws in europe mandate that all content and everything has to be a11y by 2025
… so your website and epubs will need to be accessible
… so we need to make people aware of that

Karen Myers: I sent a note to the co-chairs
… that EBSCO has joined W3C
… and they are very interested in a11y

Bill Kasdorf: Great to get EBSCO on board!!!!

Dave Cramer: .. and they want to help participate in educating people

Dave Cramer: .., we could work with WAI on outreach and educational materials

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: the other piece… we’ve heard vague things about struggles with a11y
… I spent a lot of the summer on one particular book
… and how hard it is to test pre-publication
… there’s something we can and should be doing to help around a11y testing
… info that’s hard to come by
… comments? questions?

Jeff Jaffe: http://library.ifla.org/2526/7/081-martinezcalvo-en.pdf

Jeff Jaffe: I said earlier I didn’t know what this was about and you mentioned 2025
… and I found this PDF (link above)
… this article makes it clear there is a thing, EU directive NNNN.N
… so we should, at a minimum, that if you create an EPUB 3,2 doc does that automatically fulfil the requirements
… if the answer is no, but the way you fix it is orthogonal to EPUB, like WCAG
… or maybe we need to fix something in EPUB

Ivan Herman: if someone produced html 5, is it accessible? No. This is the same thing.
… epub provides all the facilities to create a fully accessible epub

Jeff Jaffe: the analogy to html is interesting
… if you do html that’s wcag-compliant than we know the EU will say that is sufficiently accessible
… the question becomes, what do we recommend for the EPUB world
… maybe if you do WCAG in the EPUB, you’re done

Bill Kasdorf: it depends on what the EU directive says
… what do they mean by accessible
… WCAG itself has 3 levels of compliance
… epub a11y calls for WCAG AA
… the reason I got on the queue was to pick up on ivan’s comments
… it’s convenient that epubcheck work is done by DAISY, who also created Ace, the epub a11y checker?
… if there’s anyone who could put messages in epubcheck about a11y, it’s DAISY

Dave Cramer: as Bill hinted, there are formal a11y guidelines for EPUB
… these point to WCAG for the HTML consituents
… and there’s a formal a11y checking tool that is necessary but not sufficient
… fully automated a11y checking isn’t possible
… but we do have guidance and infrastructure around this topic

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: any other comments?

Jeff Jaffe: I think that what dave said is good news
… it sounds like we might believe that if you do epub 3.2 with some additional pointers to wcag or EPUB a11y guidelines
… that we meet 2025 regulations
… it probably would be a good idea if someone could write a one-pager on how, if you’re writing an ebook, and want to comply with the EU directives, do this.
… it would be useful and not a lot of effort.
… we could share it with our amazon colleagues
… I don’t know who the expert is, but it doesn’t sound like a large task

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I think it could be interesting to see what the EU says is the right validation
… and to Bill’s point there are some warnings there that could be scary and hard to parse
… but we learned over the summer with both links and footnotes and with indexes that were actually not at all functional in most reading systems from a11y perspective but didn’t fail the checkers
… so we haven’t worked through all of that

Bill Kasdorf: on jeff’s suggestion, I might be a candidate to write that
… I have a column in publishers weekly

Jeff Jaffe: Bill++

3. short/long term business issues

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: any short term/long term business issues that need to be discussed?

Karen Myers: +1 Bill’s action on accessibility

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: sounds like our actions are Bill: writing on a11y, and are there things to fix in epub a11y?
… and go raise money for epubcheck!
… thanks everyone