Epub Revision - annotation support

[Nate the great]

Lack of annotation support. There is presently no standard mechanism by which user-generated (aka “post publication”) information such as reading-position, bookmarks, and annotations may be stored and exchanged, which reduces interoperability across Reading Systems. It unclear if annotations should be a separate specification which could “overlay” the other EPUB specs. Note that annotations may wish to be stored and/or transported separately from publication content, and there exist at least two annotation specifications that can work with EPUB as well as other formats (DAISY and Adobe’s).

I think this could be the most important.

[judahis]

Portability of annotation with the document itself is paramount for students and erstwhile students, i. e., those perpetual students, researchers, etc. From what I understand, annotations are sometimes kept in separate files and are not always portable. Please fix this. There is a huge base of users who would need to keep the annotations and the notes together. Also, not sure how annotations are printed out but that needs to be a consideration. Does DRM prevent printing of annotations?

[dmikov]

Originally Posted by judahis

Portability of annotation with the document itself is paramount for students and erstwhile students, i. e., those perpetual students, researchers, etc. From what I understand, annotations are sometimes kept in separate files and are not always portable. Please fix this. There is a huge base of users who would need to keep the annotations and the notes together. Also, not sure how annotations are printed out but that needs to be a consideration. Does DRM prevent printing of annotations?

I don't think editing of DRM document is really possible, so annotation will have to stay separate imho, that is it might be possible to stick it into the same zip container, but not into original xhtmls.
BTW I couldn't find annotation spec in daisy, only encryption schema, do you have link?
I think positional (excluding tags) or xpath location record, along with annotation text in the separate subfile will work just fine. Merging them back should not be a problem.

[pholling]

In the world of textbooks, if a student were reading offline, and got to the end-of-section quiz, would his or her answers be cached as annotation, or by some other means? What becomes of the correct answers or the instructor's comments?
What if the subject material doesn't lend itself to serial reading? A 'last page read' marker isn't versatile enough for that case.
Back in the world of textbooks, it might be nice to have data that says "The instructor will skip this section" or "These sections should be skimmed before 4/15/10".