The ePUB3 hype: I thought we were talking about books?
From the Shatzin files this morning:
“I think the questioner in this case was also trying to pull us into a discussion of video, audio, interaction, and linking, which I resist for two reasons. One is that, so far, the preponderence of ebooks that have sold any appreciable quantities have not had any of those attributes. They’re just the same words as in the printed books made reflowable for a screen. The second is that my world is the world of book publishing. My belief is that if books were to become something heavily dependent on video and audio, they won’t be made by people who today are book publishers. They’ll be made by movie studios and animation houses and digital game creators. In that case, discussion of them belongs on some other blog.”
This has been my point for quite a while. When you add video, sound, and interactivity do you still have a book? My contention, like Mike’s, is that no you do not. You are then talking about a much more wordy type of movie. As Shatzin says, then we are talking an entirely different ball game. This goes beyond apps into multimedia extravaganzas. This goes beyond movies, but it will be done by the movie/gaming people. We’re talking Pixar instead of Apple or Google. We’re talking about watching and not reading. Not better or worse, just different. A whole new species.
Let’s get ePUBs working well!
This takes ePUB2 not ePUB3. We need OpenType features, excellent tables, border controls, paragraph backgrounds, and the like. All of those are in CSS2 and should work in ePUB2.
