Publishing Business Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2019-12-17

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Luc Audrain, Ivan Herman, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平), Dave Cramer, Bill Kasdorf, Jeff Jaffe, Avneesh Singh, Garth Conboy, David Stroup, Jonathan Greenberg

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: Luc Audrain

Scribe(s): Luc Audrain, Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Content:


1. EPUBcheck fundraising

Luc Audrain: haven’t raised enough, have received 3 pledges
… from Firebrand and two small suppliers in France
… personal mails have some success
… have to pay DAISY in end of Feb and hope to reach the amount about $30K
… need to keep up momentum to raise funds
… hope people will contribute with new 2020 budgets
… we all need to keep spreading the word

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): has reached out to industry organizations in Japan
… some have put money in already, asking to have members consider amounts for companies
… no favorable response yet

Luc Audrain: no news from Apple yet

2. validator.idpf.org website

Luc Audrain: site was setup a long time ago, beta version
… it is really used, nearly 4000 unique IPs per month
… thousands of EPUBs are checked
… hosted on the DAISY server and is not reliable, needs maintenance
… don’t know who uses it and why
… had discussions on the steering committee and think it is a place used for convenience
… maybe people are not in our main conversation, may be a way to message about the next versions
… only running 4.1.1 EPUBcheck
… it is not running 4.2 EPUBcheck
… DAISY thinks it is not a big effort to update to 4.2.2.
… do we know who uses it and why?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: maybe we can put it in the survey to find out where people validate

Garth Conboy: would like to see it working and think that a disclaimer about unencryption on the site is good

Luc Audrain: average 4000 unique IPs per month and 10s of thousands checked
… needs to be hosted somewhere

Jeff Jaffe: related point, is there a way to include them in the survey?

Avneesh Singh: it is not a server problem, the code needs refactoring
… cpu cycles are quite high and needs to be refactored and more efficient

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: maybe add language to point to fundraising and a disclaimer is a good start

Luc Audrain: will followup with Romain about that

3. survey

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: survey being worked on, draft circulated

Avneesh Singh: needs an objective statement

dave: objective of the survey is to find out what we don’t know
… same group of people working for 20 years
… we are clear on our problems, but we want to reach outside the group
… is what we think the same as others
… that is broad because we want to hear out there what people want

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: will try to write an intro statement and think that we have to be mindful that people don’t always know what they want

Luc Audrain: we don’t know why people don’t go to digital and there is a lot to be fueled by the survey and take 2020 as a re-launch for a new era

Avneesh Singh: good idea to find out what we don’t know, need fresh ideas from outside
… some cautions
… are they people who only use EPUB and how do we get to people beyond that
… want broad coverage, but there will be human labor involved to interpret and want to make the survey efficient for analysis

Bill Kasdorf: casting a wide net is fundamental
… what kind of issues popup and even one respondent with a point that resonates will be helpful
… ambiguity about EPUB and when does it morph into web publications
… EU might say that people just want information online
… want publications that work online in browsers and don’t want to give up on that
… also valid to want to know what EPUB should provide

Jeff Jaffe: fan of futuristic everything is online, but this particular survey may need to be firmly grounded in evolution of EPUB
… worry if we aren’t grounded we’ll get nowhere

dave: would appreciate anybody who reads the questions, proposes new questions, and contribute
… may be comfortable is the scope is ebooks
… not just EPUB
… PDFs are still accessibility problems and understand what it would take for people to actually use EPUB

Bill Kasdorf: +1 to focusing. I wasn’t advocating broadening the perspective but pointing out that we were verging that way.

Luc Audrain: intro to survey should explain this point

Avneesh Singh: I like Liisa’proposal of writing an introduction, defining the objective and scope

Bill Kasdorf: George is not on the call but he was interested in corporate publications. Are we including those as “ebooks”?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: launch before end of january

Luc Audrain: timing is to launch in January with smaller group and expand in early Feb for some responses

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): should we add directly to the draft?
… I will do that

dave: wary of focusing on corporate publications
… we say it is a good idea, but we don’t have people driving the idea from that part of the world
… we need to interact with them before going far down that road

Ivan Herman: ebook on the one side and the European docs/corp docs on the other
… completely different business models
… trying to drag ourselves into a different business model may take us down the wrong path
… tech and business is important to remember

Bill Kasdorf: Channeling George again, he would probably mention the imminent “Save as EPUB” in Word. . . .

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: the tools to make EPUB did not make so efficiently
… with business doc that is an issue
… what do they do for navigation in « Save as EPUB”

Jonathan Greenberg: As more scholarly books are being published open access, they’re not being sold either. Here corporate publishing and academic publishing are perhaps moving nearer each other.

Bill Kasdorf: +1 to Jonathan_Greenberg

4. EPUB 3.2 adoption

Luc Audrain: probably related to EPUBcheck 4.2
… many people have made EPUBcheck 4.2 running in production and either upstream in publishing houses or at suppliers
… also has been adopted in distributed/sales channels, Google and Kobo are using

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: luc- we can hear you and each other

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: moving backlist epub to epubcheck 4.2.2
… has anyone else planned for backlist?

Luc Audrain: have planned to work on backlist
… want to add accessibility features so all EPUB3 from 2016 forward are accessible, but a long list

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): almost like a launch in Japan from EPUB3
… lately discussion with some major publishers and they feel strongly they may have to go back to make more accessible
… concerned about cost and practical questions of where to start
… EPUB 3.2 for new files and EPUB 3.0.1 files are compatible and looking into accessibility
… hear from Taiwan that TDPF has been educating local publishers for EPUB 3.2, but not easy
… no Korea and Chinese on the Asia call and we don’t know the status of these markets

5. Concerns about Adobe DRM and ACS

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: hearing that a lot of concern that Adobe not focused on their platform
… issues with their code base, ARM Sdk
… some are trying to find a alternative soon
… impact on business?

Luc Audrain: know there is not much work on the adobe mobile RMSDK
… for android platform it is not possible to publish a valid adobe mobile application
… it’s time to stop working with adobe RMSDK for mobile apps
… may be time to work with Readium and look at LCP for replacing adobe DRM
… Luc hopes that LCP and Readium be considered as alternative

dave: concerned about topic

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: discussion on that topic
… want people to consider whether we should invite Adobe back for open discussion