Shinya Takami: Position Paper

Digital manga and digital magazine markets based on EPUB3 are critical and large in Japan. Most of fixed-layout contents are made by image/pdf-dominated EPUB3 and EBPAJ’s creation guide are used as best practice.

EBPAJ’s EPUB3 File Creation Guide (English): http://ebpaj.jp/cmspage/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ebpaj_epub3guide_ver1.1.3-en-1.zip

Although EBPAJ’s fixed-layout EPUB consists of HTML-SVG-CSS, some manga-centric services convert them to their own package by extracting images in order to enhance reading experience, such as faster page transition and vertical scroll and so on.

For such services, current EPUB3 data made in Japan are complicated and inefficient to treat. So I’d like to propose and discuss more simple structure for fixed-layout EPUBs which enables to indicate image/pdf directly in <spine>, and efficient ‘fallback’ specifications considering image-map feature.

Second, I’m interested in dynamic insertion of pages for EPUB because of advertising purpose. Also I’d like to discuss how we should change packaged EPUBs before opened by reading-systems to insert advertisements if we have some time.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Tokyo.

Shinya @ KADOKAWA/BOOKWALKER

eBook evangelist, KADOKAWA CORPORATION
Shinya Takami, Ph.D. takami-s@kadokawa.jp