Books in Browsers event in San Francisco, 23-25 October
Author(s) and publish date
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Ivan Herman
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The goal of the W3C’s Digital Publishing Activity is to help make the Open Web Platform perfectly suitable for the needs of the Publishing industry, which also means helping to build the necessary bridges between that community and the Web Community at large. As such, the call for papers for the “Books in Browsers: Advancing Open Web Standards and Digital Publishing” event has a great interest for W3C.
Books in Browsers is a summit for the new generation of internet publishing companies, focusing on developers and designers who are building and launching tools for online storytelling, expression, and art. From the announcement:
Over the last four years, Books in Browsers has advanced from a discussion of how startups might optimize existing publisher workflows to an exploration of the concept of “craft” in digital-native authoring and reading environments. This focus is bumping up squarely against the current limitations of web browsers to author, display, and link page elements together in ways that liberate the next generation of digital publishing.
Simultaneously, there is a burst of interest in how evolving web standards can advance publishing, and reciprocally how the frontiers of design, user interaction, and narrative can inform the objectives for web standards, common open source tools, and widely deployed services. One of the most obvious signposts of this engagement is the emergence of the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group (DigPub IG).
The event will take place in San Francisco, on the 23-25 October, at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. W3C is pleased to contribute to the event, co-hosted by by the Hypothes.is Project and the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF).
I hope that when the W3C creates standards for the publication of books in the Internet, will be considered the possibility of creating and storing notes directly on the page. Any lover of books would have liked to keep their own online library, with the possibility of entering and editing notes.
I think what you refer to is the possibility for (portable) annotations. And yes, W3C is definitely interested in annotations, they are part of things that we are considering as part of future work.
Ivan
Ivan, what do you think about to standardize the "Google Books" with w3c? Google Books is a best info resource for me and many other internet users.
We can find many books in archive.org and google books, but these books are only "scan of fax copies", which are not standardized and used as an html...
I think that new w3c standard for "Google books" or, may be, "scanned PDF" could be a very good progress in the nearest Internet future.
Alex,
this has never come up. I am actually doubtful whether we would standardize that. After all, as you say, these are PDF files or images bound as such; I have not checked the details but I presume Google exports those as ePub, with a fixed layout (or they can very well do that), and ePUB is already an existing standard. (And is not defined by W3C but by IDPF.)
Whether there may be future work on ePub, together with IDPF, is unknown at the moment.
Thanks!
Ivan