Luc Audrain: Position paper

Unfix Fixed Layout!

Fixed Layout EPUB, a first step

Visually rich digital publications have been produced in EPUB format since 2011, taking opportunity from the Open Web Platform to build fixed layout HTML files, with the absolute positioning capabilities of CSS. 

In France, Larousse, a subsidiary of Hachette Livre, delivered in 2011 the very first Fixed Layout EPUB (FXL) for “Cocktails avec ou sans alcool”. Bill McCoy used this example in all his following talks to demonstrate the capabilities of EPUB for complex layout titles.

This fixed layout variation was added to the EPUB3 specifications in 2014 and 7 years later, tenth of thousands EPUB3 FXL have been produced all around the world.

But publishers are looking for digital products where visually-rich layout can be combined with responsive presentation. That next step will bring the reader semantically coherent blocs of information all together with accessibility enabled content.

Obstacles to sequential art author’s creativity

On the digital comics side, visual art creation was already at the very beginning of computers. But outside of standards, this creative work will be lost.

The digital comics market is multilocal: in Asia and US mainly, and also but less in Europe. And more recently, besides manga’s digital versions, native digital webtoons are blooming, particularly in Korea. US are also a big market but only through proprietary format.

At the same time, some really interesting, commercially successful and awarded creations have been encoded in Apps. But development costs and app distribution model made publishers give up on these productions and authors are not developers.

All these diverging technologies are hindering author’s creativity and global market development.

A new step

Fixed Layout has been a milestone on the digital publishing path. It’s time for a new step forward.

Today to remove the obstacles to the growth of the market, the community should contribute and adopt standards that would allow global distribution for publishers and would unleash author’s creativity.

It is the goal of this workshop to discuss these subjects between all parties, authors, publishers, distributors and technical experts.

Luc Audrain
Head of digitalization
Hachette Livre