Bridging the Web and Digital Publishing

Abstract

htmlabstractAlthough using advanced Web technologies at their core, e-books represent a parallel universe to everyday Web documents. Their production workflows, user interfaces, their security, access, or privacy models, etc, are all distinct. There is a lack of a vision on how to unify Digital Publishing and the Web. Conceptually, what is important is the *content* for Web documents that should be unique. Whether that content is portable (offline) or online should merely be a particular *state* at a point it time and it should be easy for the user to provide a portable state of the same document, synchronize it with the online version when possible, etc. To achieve this vision the community has to define a general, portable Web document format based on current Web technologies. EPUB3 has already made a huge step in this direction. But technical challenges remain. This includes the usage of a general packaging format both to Web browsers and ebooks; unification of security, privacy, and access control models; general and portable annotation systems; defining general linking and anchoring structures. This presentation will outline the vision and address some of the relevant technical issues: the goal is to set a direction for a work that the overall Web and publishing community has to solve jointly.