Alan Quatermain

The Tumblog of one Jim Dovey, iOS Software Chief Architect at Kobo in Toronto, Ontario.
He Twitters, he has an , and can occasionally be found on LinkedIn or Facebook.
If you have a query, you can ask it here.

This blog contains personal opinions, and is not endorsed by any company.

17559799426

Readium Open Source Initiative Launched to Accelerate Adoption of EPUB 3 | International Digital Publishing Forum

So here’s the Big News to which I’d earlier alluded. The IDPF has got together a who’s-who of people and companies in the eBook world to work on an open-source implementation of a reference ePub3 reading system and container library. And of course Kobo is putting a ton of weight behind it. Also, me: I’m going to be working on this project full-time here very shortly.

Looking through the project’s goals, you’ll see a good amount of overlap with the goals I’d previously stated for the ePub Author project. The core aims are all there:

A browser of ‘ePub3-flavoured HTML’ content.
A library encapsulating the correct parsing and generation of all forms of structured content described in the ePub3 standard.
Best-in-class support for non-Roman scripts, particularly vertically-flowing ones.
No limits on its use as the core of a larger project, even commercial ones.
Lots of industry know-how being funnelled into a single output.

So yeah: I’m rather excited about this one. Expect to hear more from me as it all progresses.

Now I’ll just go back to writing ePub3 structured content handling code…

16383759593

More on ePub Author

In the few days since I suggested it there has been a lot of interest in pursuing the initiative. I’ve had contacts from a few companies looking to invest money, expertise, or people, and I’ve heard from a great many people who would love to see just such an application in the wild.

16180894422

ePub Author Coalition

So a few minutes ago I wrote:

I think there’s enough know-how in the industry outside of Apple to make a competitor to iBooks Author, by which desktop publishing in the eBook age can be as limitless in possibility as we can make it, yet not be restricted to a single target platform. I want to hear from experienced OS X software engineers who are interested in tackling such a project on a commercial (or possibly open-source, or both) scale, and from people companies who can contribute expertise or code to the effort.

I’m already getting a few good ping backs on this, which is fantastic. However, I’d like to enumerate a little more of what I have on my mind:

Engineers

We need engineers who can crank out top-notch OS X code. While I’d normally want to include anyone who’d like to cut their teeth on such an app, this time I think getting something of the highest quality out of the gate takes priority.

Software Development Companies

Apple has a head-start on us. Even if we started coding at the same time they did, they would still have a head-start. This is because iBooks Author is built on the same components used in the iWorks suite of apps, and those components go back to the mid-90s I believe (they were based upon apps originally written for NeXTStep). In order to avoid the ramp-up time in recreating those components, we would be interested in anyone who could either donate or license similar components to us. I’m visualizing the Omni Group’s apps here, for example.

Publishers, Retailers, Distributors, Oh My!

Anyone with an interest in eBooks and a budget to throw around. Particularly those who need to produce, validate, or tweak ePub3 content. How would you like to assist in funding such an effort? What would you like to see? What sort of terms would you like/accept— i.e. open-source free app only, n number of free copies, volume discounts, etc.

For the record: I’ve made overtures to my employer about the above. Although the guy who would likely be able to make anything happen is away in the UK next week, so don’t expect any announcements.

As before:

16179111286

iBooks Author vs. ePub Author

iBooks Author at the App Store

So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:

A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.

In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.