Epub 3

[kame18]

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012...re-for-epub-3/

check this link what do you think?

[DuckieTigger]

Exactly what does this have to do with a book anymore? It is wrong in so many ways. What if you don't have internet access - does your book fail to work any more? Let's make this book subscription-only - you have to pay this much every month to read this book, but rest assured, you will always have the latest words in your book. Oh, sorry, you did not pay enough to read this book again, since you like the book so much you have to pay since you are clearly abusing your once is ok, twice is pushing it, nobody wants you to read this 3 times go buy a new book instead ....

The end of writers as we know them today. Let's make it instead a whole production team.

A: this book was awesome to read.
B: really? the end of it really sucked.
A: did you upgrade your book yet? its only $0.99 and unlocks the extended writers cut.

[Katsunami]

This is ridiculous... Normal markup and some links for a table of contents should be enough. You can see clearly that Adobe is one of the bigger companies behind epub. It's becoming some sort of ebook version of pdf with way too many features.

I don't want my ereader or book to execute any code. I don't want any Twitter or Facebook stuff in my books. I find it irritating enough that I'm harassed by them as they seem to have become a "feature" of every device I buy. It will be in televisions soon; maybe already is. (edit: I have noticed that the Kindle harasses me EACH AND EVERY TIME to sign into Twitter and Facebook when I put in a rating after finishing a book. I don't even have those accounts, and the harassment cannot be disabled. Therefore I don't put in any ratings anymore.)

Why does everything need to be "socially connected" all the time nowadays, even ereaders (using browsers), and now even books?

Mark my words: these features will have you watching personalized ads in the middle of your books. If this gets out of hand, I'll sell my ereader again, but this time not of lack of content, but because of unwanted content.

I am starting to hate (and fear) Adobe. They hold too many standards. Pdf for documents, epub for ebooks, dng for pictures, postscript for printers, Flash for the Web, and Type1 for fonts. Truetype by Apple has largely been superseded by Opentype, by.... Yes, Adobe. Even many of their programs, Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Indesign and Premiere are the unquestioned defaults in the media industry nowadays.

Bah. Humbug!

[bgalbrecht]

I can see examples of where these epub3 features might be useful, like in a textbook where it's demonstrating something that might occur in a lab experiment, or animation to elaborate on a point, but I don't believe the average book will be well served by any of the ideas in the articles. If I thought there would be any possiblity of the ebooks phoning home to the publisher and/or downloading and displaying ads from either the retailer or publisher, I would never enable the wifi, ever. I'd also probably strip the DRM and clean out the javascript and css. I find the idea of a twitter feed embedded in my book appalling, and when I want to look up a map when I'm reading a book, I'll do it myself, thank you very much.

I find it especially upsetting at how excited Rick Johson, CTO of VitalSource got over the prospect of live advertising in ebooks.

[fjtorres]

Hmm, suddenly it's easy to see why Amazon's KF8 only implements part of the epub3 toolkit. Books that "phone home" to report on what we do?
Ohh, yeah; that's going to be fun to see happen.

To others...

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

I find it especially upsetting at how excited Rick Johson, CTO of VitalSource got over the prospect of live advertising in ebooks.

It's idiotic to see that companies can never get enough money. Making a sale of an ebook is not enough: they have to have more, by putting ads in it. Bought books are about the last type of media without ads in it. It seems those days are over. I use ad blockers everywhere, and don't install any ad-sponsored apps on my phone. If I can't avoid ads in my books, I will probably stop reading. (I *never* watch TV either, because of them. I only watch movies, that I have ripped from disk myself.)

As tablet and smartphone adoption increases, readers will expect richer features from books.

“Users want features. They want eye candy, they want sharing,” said Johnson.

Uh... No. I don't want that. I can actually see those features and interactivity increasing to the point that each book is downloaded page by page as you read it. If so, I will return to paper books once more.

[darryl]

To me this is appalling, though it will be interesting to see how readers take to this technology. When does a book cease to be a book?

It seems that what is being done is essentially creating a more restrictive version of the web to run on smaller, limited devices. Whilst hyperlinks may be of some use in certain types of books, for instance, text books, why would I want to look at the links referred to on my tiny ereader or even a larger tablet, when I can use my nice 17 inch MacBook or my even larger desktop monitor. I suspect it will be a little like DVD's which incorporate so much useless extra content which many people never even bother to view.

[MovieBird]

Guess I'll keep an eye out for NoScript for eBooks now...

[RHWright]

I posted my comments over on the article.

In short, this is complete BS.

[azazel1024]

It is interesting to me, for as an example the text book deal. I can also see some interest in general reference books and magazines. For a book book, you know, the kind of thing I spend 90% of my time reading (well, when I am not reading the "interwebz") I think it is a terrible, horrible thing.

To me ePub2, with CONSISTENT treament of the style sheets and markup is just fine. Sadly not all readers display ePub2 the same way, whic irks the hell out of me. Some basic style guides and formating as well as (mention) table of content links is exactly what I want in my electronic books and nothing more.

[DiapDealer]

First off ebooks can't store information on (or send info from) a device (through javascript or any other method) if the retailers don't allow that to happen on their devices.

So the whole idea that publishers could somehow circumvent the retailers and gather their information about readers' habits (that the retailers have been denying them all along) is pure poppycock.

"Please Mister retailer, would you allow our ebooks to gather and transmit their own data about your customers from your device directly to us? Pretty please?"

"What? Ok, thanks anyway."

"Sorry Mr. Macmillan. He said no f'in' way."

[fjtorres]

Jeeze, the more you think about this the (sorry!) stupider it sounds. Don't those folks *ever* get out of their conference rooms?

It kinda strikes me that *this* is the way they start to promote the vitues of epub3? I can just see the headlines: "ePub3 turns your ebooks into spyware! Video a 11!" Or maybe; "Is your Nook spying on you?"

And, of course, where is this going to raise the most hackles? Right: europe, just about the only place left where epub's interoperable "standard" status has any commercial traction. Easy to see News Corp's HarperCollins getting into a fight with Amazon for not letting their Kindle editions phone home, right?

The timing is just...awful. For epub loyalists, anyway.
(Or an awful one for everybody.)

What was it that Bezos said about Kindle staying proprietary? Something about it letting them innovate on *their* terms? These guys are making him look real good, right now. As if Amazon needed any more consumer clout...

ePub3 actually brings a *lot* of good things, most of which are also coming to KF8. (But not Javascript.) But instead of touting smart layouts, better magazine and textbook rendering, and all the other consumer value adds, they chortle publicly about its spyware value?

It's going to be a good year for Jeff Bezos.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

First off ebooks can't store information on (or send info from) a device (through javascript or any other method) if the retailers don't allow that to happen on their devices.

So the whole idea that publishers could somehow circumvent the retailers and gather their information about readers' habits (that the retailers have been denying them all along) is pure poppycock.

You think so? There will be a lot of complaints that those restrictive readers suck, as they cannot even comply with the hot new standard. BOOHOOO, my book is crap, b/c i cannot talk to other people while I read. Even right now there is complaints that some readers don't fully support all of epubs current incarnation. Even browsers for world wide web. Why do they have to tell the server - oh this is IE, this is Opera, this is Chrome, this is Safari. IF they would comply with the html standard, they should say: "this is a html4 browser", "i am html4, but i want the mobile version please" that should be plenty for the web server to supply the correct format ....

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

You think so? There will be a lot of complaints that those restrictive readers suck, as they cannot even comply with the hot new standard. BOOHOOO, my book is crap, b/c i cannot talk to other people while I read. Even right now there is complaints that some readers don't fully support all of epubs current incarnation.

All the publishers need to do is get Adobe to make sure ADE caches and then sends the info the book feeds it.

There is no reason they can't simply tell the epub bookstores: "This is the book. Carry it or not, that's your choice. But if you don't, the other guy will. Or we'll sell it straight from our website."

Besides, the tech has so many uses: Registration, Authorization, even DLC!

The people who care more about the plumbing than the content (and we know who they are) will make sure the holy standard is fully adhered to.
And that everybody else buys Kindle.

This is simply a bad idea.
Which is exactly why the BPHs love it.
They have a recent tradition to uphold.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

All the publishers need to do is get Adobe to make sure ADE caches and then sends the info the book feeds it.

There is no reason they can't simply tell the epub bookstores: "This is the book. Carry it or not, that's your choice. But if you don't, the other guy will. Or we'll sell it straight from our website."

Exactly, that is why Epub3 is a really bad thing altogether putting publishers in a position to not make any ebooks any more, unless they also have a "book-only" version for Amazon. Unless Amazon itself would want to go Epub3, which I doubt b/c they only do what they want. As I understand, if a publisher decides to sell the ebook on their own, on other sites, and all that and also on Amazon it will still sell 95% of all sales on Amazon. Don't believe me, at least take HarryT into consideration:

Quoted from this post:

Originally Posted by HarryT

Because it would be economic suicide to do so. Most authors who sell on multiple sites report 95%+ of sales via Amazon.