Daniel Glazman believes that EPUB has reached a technical dead end.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:30PM
Yes, or there could be a dedicated side car file that keeps track of that along with the other user specific data like some digital cameras do. Making changes to the original file is asking for data corruption issues if you're unfortunate enough to have the device crash, run out of batteries or otherwise be prevented from finishing the write. At least if it's in a separate file, it's a lot easier to prevent corruption of the book which you may or may not have a different copy of. Not to mention that it makes it easier to identify if the backup is the same as the one you're reading.