Rediscovered Talks, Part 2: Kobo, EPUB, and DRM
This second batch of unearthed slides comes from my years at Kobo, where I led the team that created the Kobo iOS app, then went on to work on standards conformance issues. I wound up taking part in working groups at the IDPF and the W3C, helping stitch together EPUB standards and tried (mostly failed) to get web browsers to properly implement the things that page-layout eBooks would need, rather than dynamically-sized websites.
I wound up involved in the DRM conversation after the IDPF put out a Request for Proposals looking for implementations of ‘lightweight’ DRM that would provide some sort of standard for managing library loans in the digital age. As someone with a personal interest in not having DRM get in the way of All The Things, I promptly designed a system that I felt would satisfy everyone involved. It was well-enough received that I wound up becoming intrinsically linked to eBook DRM, moderating a panel at a W3C workshop, and giving talks to the National Information Standards Organization and others. By this time the Readium SDK project had been announced, and we were looking at providing all the infrastructure necessary for anyone to build on top of the ePub3 standard.
W3C Digital Publishing Workshop 2013 — DRM panel moderation
In February 2013 the W3C hosted a digital publishing workshop in New York, bringing together publishers, tech companies, and standards folks to figure out how ebooks should behave on the open web. I moderated a session on DRM, guiding a panel through the tension between protecting content and keeping it interoperable. The deck I used to frame that discussion is now archived here, in a version that actually includes the presenter notes. I’ve also included a direct link to the minutes of the discussion, as there was some interesting conversation happening during the Q&A portion.
I wrote about this back when it happened, and wrote a lot more about the ideas behind the proposal. You can find that post here. I’m also now hosting the position paper locally here rather than on Dropbox.
NISO Webinar 2013 — EPUB3 and interoperability
A couple of months later, NISO invited me to speak about what libraries needed to know as EPub3 adoption ramped up. The talk dug into practical questions I was hearing from librarians and vendors: how DRM wrapped around EPUB files, what interoperability really meant, and where Kobo saw the format heading. I’ve included the slides below along with the still-live event page for context.
If you’ve ever worked on ebook distribution you’ll recognise many of the sticking points captured in these decks. It’s a nice reminder of how much of that discussion is still relevant today, even as the tooling has matured.