The End of Ebooks?
Packaged Web
Publications and the
future of digital
publishing
Simon Rowberry

Competing
factions of digital
publishing
Ebooks:
Trade (non)fiction
Very ‘bookish’
PDFs:
Documents
Scholarly publishing
Websites:
Short form
& Journalism

Format
“If there is such a thing as media theory,
there should be format theory.
Writers have too often collapsed
discussions of format into their analyses
of what is important about a given
medium. Format denotes a whole range
of decisions that affect the look, feel,
experience, and workings of a medium.
It is also names a set of rules according
to which a technology can operate”
(p. 12)

Formats as media
technology

A brief history of
(open) ebook
standards
1969: General Mark-up Language
1981: Standardized General Mark-up Language
1989: HTML
1994: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
1996: Daisy Consortium Digital Talking Books
1998: NIST conference
Book Industry Standards Group WG
1999: Open eBook Publishing Standard
(OEBPS)
2006: International Digital Publishing Forum
(IDPF) and EPUB 2.0

February 2017
“The mission of the Publishing Working
Group is to enable all publications—with all
their specificities and traditions—to become
first-class entities on the Web.”

“We can look at it
as a cleanup of
epub to make it
web compatible”
Tzviya Siegman
Publishing @ W3C Chair
16 Apr 2017

Who’s in charge?
PUBLISHERS
(69%)
TECHNOLOGY
(31%)

Who’s in charge?

Core challenges
• DISCOVERABILITY:
How does ISBN interface with the Web?
• COMPRESSION:
ZIP or MIME?
• PROVENANCE:
Version control and authorship?
• LAYOUT:
Scroll or pages?
• ONTOLOGY:
Can standards be PWP-compliant?
e.g. Next Generation PDF

Opportunities
• Citations/locators
Canonical Fragment Identifiers:
epubcfi(/6/4[chap01ref]!/4[body01]
/10[para05]/3:10)
• Time-based textual media
Synchronizing audio and text across the
Web

Working group 11 June 2018
Resolution 4: readingOrder
preferable to spine
• Does integration with the
Web diminish EPUB’s
‘bookishness’?

A place for books?
N.B. PWP might never be implemented –
most publishers still use EPUB 2.0
Reducing all publications to a single meta-
specification will have casualties
Will this decision strengthen Amazon’s
stranglehold on linear digital
publications?

The End of Ebooks?
Packaged Web
Publications and the
future of digital
publishing
Simon Rowberry