Publishing Business Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2020-03-03

Attendees

Present: Ralph Swick, Dave Cramer, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Tzviya Siegman, Cristina Mussinelli, Luc Audrain, Wolfgang Schindler, Ivan Herman, Wendy Reid, George Kerscher, Karen Myers, Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平), julie, Bill Kasdorf, Julie Blair

Regrets: Jeff Jaffe, Garth Conboy

Guests:

Chair: Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Scribe(s): Ralph Swick, Dave Cramer

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: let’s get started

1. new chair

Cristina Mussinelli: I think you all know me :)
… I’m very happy to be here; secretary general of Fondazione LIA but I also work for Italian Publishers Association
… thanks for having me as a chair!

Ralph Swick: Welcome!

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): congrats!

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: as we are headed into the new era

2. Survey

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: sent out three weeks ago

Ralph Swick: See Survey results 28 February 2020

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I don’t know what feedback you’ve heard

Wendy Reid: 240 responses as of last friday

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): in Japan, one of the industry orgs replied, and they have two responses?
… I’m supposed to hear from another organization soon

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: at a high level, we got a lot of feedback on what features people want in epub
… there’s still work to be done on epub
… lots of good info on where people are finding things
… and that there is misinformation out there
… there was a feeling that there’s work to be done on epub and on education/outreach
… we have lots of results
… how do people want to see the data? What are your expectations on how it’s shared and used

Tzviya Siegman: when we discussed in a smaller group, you did a summary with key highlights; that was helpful
… and for the non-essay question, seeing the bar charts was useful
… or putting in statistical format
… just seeing the spreadsheet is overwhelming

Wendy Reid: I have been working with mateus on segmenting the data
… we’ve been grouping it relationally
… all the a11y Q’s together, RS vs publisher, etc
… and EPUB today vs EPUB tomorrow
… what are people doing now vs what they’re asking for that we can’t do now
… and what needs to be communicated better

Karen Myers: it’s a great Q
… having done market research before
… I”m a fan of full transparency
… it’s important the data is stored somewhere in case someone wants to do a deep dive
… I’m glad Wendy and Mateus are working on it

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I compiled all the raw data into the report; we can share that
… I stack-ranked the bar charts
… didn’t put in percentages, but that might be helpful

Tzviya Siegman: we do need to strip out some personal info in that doc

Karen Myers: is it anonymous?

Tzviya Siegman: not yet

Wendy Reid: there are a couple of fields that could be identified–IP address and email addresses

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I’ll go check but I don’t think I had personal info?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we have a direction

George Kerscher: there are some things that concern me in the raw data, people saying things that aren’t true
… do we filter those things out?
… a lot of personal opinions stated as fact

Ralph Swick: [a teaching opportunity! ]

George Kerscher: if we have any conclusions about what our takeaways are from this
… I do think this points us in certain directions
… these are important conclusions

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: good point, George
… we probably need to share what we think the key takeaways are
… there are a number of people who self-identified as being interested in further conversations
… so the BG should reach out
… how might we do that?

Karen Myers: can you repeat?

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: 30 people said they’d be willing to have further conversations, and provided email
… we need to enable those conversations?
… do we do interviews? workshops?
… how do we let those people express themselves?

Cristina Mussinelli: are these people we already know, or are they new people?
… we would treat those differently
… maybe we don’t have relationships with them at all

Tzviya Siegman: once we have the summary from Wendy and Mateus, we might share with the BG as well as the people who asked to be informed
… now that you have that info, what do you plan to do?
… as we talk about our next steps, sharing that info would be important
… if we do x, y, z because of the survey, we should let people know
… maybe ask them to join CG

Luc Audrain: could we have the list? are these people European?
… we could try to have more local contact

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we need to be careful about sharing lists
… there’s a separate list of people who wanted further conversation
… do we know them?
… we need to figure that out first

Karen Myers: to build on that

Karen Myers: I can also compare to former TPI and IDPF list and our big contacts list to see if we’ve talked to them before

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: let’s do that

Ralph Swick: in addition to Karen’s comment, and Cristina’s comment about personal outreach
… from personal contacts we might discover themes, and invite some to one of these meetings to discuss

3. PBGSC F2F

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we talked about survey, what we were seeing, identifying there is still work to do on epub
… and a need for backlist compatibility
… so we started to work on a charter for an EPUB 3 Working Group, chaired by dauwhe and wendyreid
… and we talked about the CG as important for incubating ideas
… what else? what questions?

Tzviya Siegman: we did a lot of assessing about how the publishing activity has worked from the start
… and recognized that it has not always gone smoothly
… and we’re open to thoughts on that
… I was surprised about how well the meeting went
… we came away with a desire to make this successful
… we need a place for the community voice
… and leadership from all over
… we need to document all the business and technical cases
… we need better definitions than “aligning with the web”
… and need to be more specific

Ralph Swick: well said, liisamk and tzviya
… and thanks to the host, Wiley
… liisamk, you mentioned the WG charter
… what kind of time frame do we think such a charter might be available for public comment
… there was a desire to communicate clearly

Karen Myers: one of the feedbacks… because I have multiple regions, recently back from Australia, Brazil, Canada
… there’s not enough interaction with those regions
… they feel like they’re ignored
… even by their parent companies
… so there’s a need for more international input

Ivan Herman: to come back to Ralph’s question
… from a content point of view, the work is well underway
… it could go public
… but the whole issue about EPUB going to REC, it won’t be easy
… what would make me more comfortable, but with some public communication in the form of a blog
… that on a very high level gives a summary of a week ago, and how we reached that conclusion
… I think that should go out first
… not the technical text of the charter
… but we should go ahead, but with this blog post first

Dave Cramer: there’s already a lot of work on the charter from the CG
… deliberately designed to be adaptable to a WG charter
… there’s still work to be done, especially figuring out how to digest the information from the survey
… take stuff from the survey that’s appropriate for a Rec-Track EPUB3
… that make be our most technically challenging task for the charter
… agree with Ivan that we need to clearly express our reasoning and goals
… I am willing to draft a blog for the community on why we want to take EPUB to Rec

Tzviya Siegman: I can help Dave

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I can help as well

Ralph Swick: great, thanks Dave and Tzviya and Liisa
… it would help to… we have the community here… but there’s also a wider community
… I would encourage us to start socializing this in the wider community now, so we can incorporate feedback from the larger community in the charter
… publish early, publish often
… we should express why we think this is the right direction, and point to a draft
… and then encourage comments on the draft

Cristina Mussinelli: the goal of the blog post is to get people involved–to create motivation and inclusion
… we want the community to be involved

Ivan Herman: that, but not only that
… the charter text is deliberately a relatively terse text, concise
… so it needs some sort of a background explanation
… to avoid people misunderstanding the charter

Ralph Swick: [that background explainer can be the blog post that Dave is starting, right?!]

Ivan Herman: the charter text is a legal contract, and you need some explanation of the contract

Luc Audrain: high-level comms is very important
… i would be happy to see in that blog post that some very important decisions have been made around backward compatibility
… and that the CG will play a major role
… so that the full publishing community will see this as a well-managed process
… and there is an intention of preserving the existing base

Tzviya Siegman: I agree with Luc

Ralph Swick: +1 to Luc

Tzviya Siegman: we should be talking not just to the existing epub community
… but also to the web community
… maybe we need an explainer

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: anything else?

4. the role of the PBG

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: with new chairs, we wanted to talk about the PBG works
… to determine whether there are business needs that percolate up from the CG
… we talked about outreach, education, webinars…
… how do we address misinformation?
… we talked about guest speakers
… we wanted to open that up for other ideas of how the BG would work

Karen Myers: these are great topics
… to Luc’s point about communication
… there needs to be a more focused collaboration
… not only gathering names, but what is the best vehicle?
… we have a CRM system for contacts
… there needs to be more garden-tending
… who are the people? what do they want?

Ralph Swick: as I skimmed through the comments I was also surprised by misinformation
… there are several classes of them
… it might come out in some 1-on-1 calls
… some broad info like misunderstanding about a11y of PDF and EPUB
… that’s an opportunity for more general blog posts
… we can use the misinformation as a starting point for education
… there’s a range of responses we can give, from general blog posts to 1:1 conversation

Daihei Shiohama (塩濱大平): I feel contradictions between people in the industry and outside of it
… many people are happy with the current ecosystem
… and they want it maintained
… but they want to see more chances of merging with publishing
… The PBG can perform a role of being an entry point for those outside of publishing
… especially from web-related content people

Luc Audrain: webinars are a good idea
… how do we make the connection to the people who answered the survey
… does the webinar require a w3c account?
… how do we reach the largest community possible?

Ralph Swick: [I see no reason to restrict attendance at a webinar]

Luc Audrain: and begin to address the misinformation we’ve seen?

George Kerscher: DAISY has a zoom account with 500 seats
… we’ve done webinars in the US on higher ed about EPUB that have been very effective
… we would be happy to use that Zoom account for webinars
… but we don’t charge people; it should be free and open and available after

Ralph Swick: +1 to George; free and open webinar(s)

George Kerscher: I did one webinar… rumble in publishing jungle, PDF vs EPUB and it was fun and instructive

Wolfgang Schindler: +1 to George - brilliant idea :)

Wendy Reid: +1

George Kerscher: it’s a marketing campaign promoting good info about the publishing standards
… it’s a lot of work but then it’s evergreen

Luc Audrain: +1

Luc Audrain: EDRLab is organizing stuff for members; we can also share through them

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: if you have other ideas for PBG, let us know.
… two other items on the agenda

5. Bug GitHub

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: I have a hundred bugs on reading systems that I would offer to get started

6. The role of audio and video

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: the least supported part of EPUB is audio and video embedding
… which would be useful for education etc

George Kerscher: totally agree

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: accessible audio and video

Luc Audrain: of course

George Kerscher: of course

Karen Myers: I like both topics, especially the 2nd
… I talked about a11y in Australia
… I was surprised that a lot of people were not aware of the accessibility of EPUB
… integrating audio and video is huge

Julie Blair: +1 for accessible audio and video

Karen Myers: and the idea of having guest speakers present? that might be a good area.

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: this topic occurred to me because of amazon
… they were asking about enhanced typesetting for enhanced ebooks
… we haven’t made a lot of these books lately
… at the start it was gratuitous use of tech
… we could maybe do it better now?

Ralph Swick: back on previous topic
… since George mentioned rumble in jungle
… I found announcement but not recording

George Kerscher: it was in a paid webinar which I won’t do again

Ralph Swick: See “announcement of WEBINAR: The Rumble in the Publishing Jungle: PDF and EPUB duke it out!”

Ralph Swick: there’s a member-only list

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we are at the hour

Cristina Mussinelli: thinking about audio and video, it would be useful for educational material

Liisa McCloy-Kelley: we have upcoming meetings
… we should try to have some aus/SA calls
… thanks