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Apparition writes:

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• The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.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:

1. one URL is enough to retrieve a remote WebBook instance, there is no need to download every resource composing that instance
2. 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
3. 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
4. each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk, is directly readable by a Web browser
5. any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction
6. 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
7. the navigation document and the content documents inside a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
8. the metadata, table of contents contained in the navigation document of a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
9. the WebBook specification is backwards-compatible
10. the WebBook specification is forwards-compatible, at the potential cost of graceful degradation of some content
11. WebBook instances can be recognized without having to detect their MIME type
12. 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.

Original Submission

1. "Apparition" - https://soylentnews.org/~Apparition/
2. "Daniel Glazman" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Glazman
3. "technical dead end" - https://medium.com/@daniel.glazman/web-period-4472fbfac90b
4. "WebBook format" - http://glazman.org/e0/webbook.html
5. "the announcement" - http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2018/01/18/WebBook-Level-1
6. "here" - https://github.com/therealglazou/webbook
7. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=26143

printed from SoylentNews, New Electronic Book Format Unveiled: WebBook on 2024-05-04 13:46:22