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from the documents-definitely-need-javascript dept.
Daniel Glazman believes that EPUB has reached a technical dead end.
- It is impossible to aggregate a set of web pages into a EPUB book through a trivial zip, and it is impossible to unzip an EPUB book and make it readable inside a Web browser even with graceful degradation.
- Despite the International Digital Publishing Forum merging with W3C in January 2017, EPUB continues to diverge from web standards.
- The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.
Mr. Glazman's solution? The WebBook format. From the announcement:
I have then decided to work on a different format for electronic books, called WebBook. A format strictly based on Web technologies and when I say "Web technologies", I mean the most basic ones: html, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and friends; the class of specifications all Web authors use and master on a daily basis. Not all details are decided or even ironed, the proposal is still a work in progress at this point, but I know where I want to go to.
[...] I have started from a list of requirements, something that was never done that way in the EPUB world:
- one URL is enough to retrieve a remote WebBook instance, there is no need to download every resource composing that instance
- the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a Web site's directory and are directly readable by a Web browser using the URL for that directory
- the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a local directory and are directly readable by a Web browser opening its index.html or index.xhtml topmost file
- each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk, is directly readable by a Web browser
- any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction
- any stylesheet, replaced resource (images, audio, video, etc.) or additional resource useable by a html document (JavaScript, manifests, etc.) can be used inside the navigation document or the content documents of a WebBook instance, without restriction
- the navigation document and the content documents inside a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
- the metadata, table of contents contained in the navigation document of a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
- the WebBook specification is backwards-compatible
- the WebBook specification is forwards-compatible, at the potential cost of graceful degradation of some content
- WebBook instances can be recognized without having to detect their MIME type
- it's possible to deliver electronic books in a form that is compatible with both WebBook and EPUB 3.0.1
Compatibility with EPUB 3.0.1 is a good way to start adoption. Now to see if WebBook catches on. The GitHub repository is here.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:45PM (7 children)
If EPUB sucks ass, then plebes like me won't trust that your later version won't also suck donkey balls. Prove your worth or eat a bag of donkey dicks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Apparition on Monday April 23 2018, @12:05AM (2 children)
Why exactly is EPUB "shit?" The most common argument I've seen against EPUB is DRM, but that's not in the EPUB spec. There are plenty of EPUB files available without DRM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:17AM
Looking at who the OP is, I guess it's because it doesn't come with free alcohol. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:21PM
Epub is pretty good, the main problem is that it's a pain to create them for people who don't do so professionally. In many cases it would make more sense to use an ebook formatted document as a manual rather than a PDF, but since creating epubs tends to be rather annoying, you usually get the PDF.
And as stated in the summary, it's hard to create an epub from a web page.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by driverless on Monday April 23 2018, @06:05AM (3 children)
Not even worth writing any text, since there's a pre-made XKCD for this already. [xkcd.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday April 23 2018, @12:42PM (2 children)
You have to take that comic (927) with a grain of salt. The existence of standards doesn't mean you shouldn't try to improve; if the current standards are all total shit, then it's perfectly rational to invent a new standard that attempts to be better. I don't know enough about EPUB to say whether it's shit or not, but there's plenty of places where the dominant standards are garbage.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
But is it a metric or an imperial grain? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday April 23 2018, @08:43PM
Well, it's not metric.
The grain is a unit of mass in the troy, avoirdupois, and apothecaries' systems of mass, but not metric or System International. Luckily, they are all the same.
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