Comments on: The State of the Web-based Ebook Reader http://www.teleread.org/2009/01/29/the-state-of-the-web-based-ebook-reader/ News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:18:54 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Laisvunas http://www.teleread.org/2009/01/29/the-state-of-the-web-based-ebook-reader/comment-page-1/#comment-1008862 Laisvunas Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:40:50 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/?p=16012#comment-1008862 Hi Aaron, It seems to me that you are overly optimistic. Epub is there already for some time, but it was not embraced enthusiastically by publishing industry. On the contrary, Epub format remains at the experimentation phase - without mature and usable readers, without industry support, without users eagerly using it. How many publications in Epub format have you read in the time since the version 2.0 of the spec were released? And how many PDFs have you read in the same time? - I have many PDFs, some CHMs and no Epub; I have only downloaded some Epub publications of them for experimenting with readers. Epub was not embraced by industry. The quality of readers is hardly advancing. OpenBerg project silently died, Adobe's DE is unusable and will hardly improve in the future. Opera's widget is immature; FBReader has very weak HTML support. It seems that you are wrong about Stanza - it is NOT based on Webkit rendering engine - on Windows Stanza does not render even simple CSS and images, only text. You are also not coorect claiming that Epub means gravitating toward web. In many aspects Epub goes away from web. Epubs spec in strong words discourages one of the main web technologies - scripting. Epub supports only linear publications. It does not support Flash or other rich media. And the crown of this tendency of turning away from the web is perhaps the implementing navigation through pages of the publication not by using simple HTML links but by separate XML file. But the most irritating thing is that since the release of the version 2.0 the work on the spec stagnated. In the version 2.0 there is a paragraph about "future directions". And since that there was no sign that something was done in those directions. It seems strange to me that in such situation there is no revolt against IDPF which proved itself a poor leader for publishing industry. If IDPF does not offer appropriate leadership and Epub does not take off, it is time to form another body and to write a new spec - this time more web friendly, more simple and more powerful. Hi Aaron,

It seems to me that you are overly optimistic. Epub is there already for some time, but it was not embraced enthusiastically by publishing industry. On the contrary, Epub format remains at the experimentation phase – without mature and usable readers, without industry support, without users eagerly using it.

How many publications in Epub format have you read in the time since the version 2.0 of the spec were released? And how many PDFs have you read in the same time? – I have many PDFs, some CHMs and no Epub; I have only downloaded some Epub publications of them for experimenting with readers.

Epub was not embraced by industry. The quality of readers is hardly advancing. OpenBerg project silently died, Adobe’s DE is unusable and will hardly improve in the future. Opera’s widget is immature; FBReader has very weak HTML support. It seems that you are wrong about Stanza – it is NOT based on Webkit rendering engine – on Windows Stanza does not render even simple CSS and images, only text.

You are also not coorect claiming that Epub means gravitating toward web. In many aspects Epub goes away from web. Epubs spec in strong words discourages one of the main web technologies – scripting. Epub supports only linear publications. It does not support Flash or other rich media. And the crown of this tendency of turning away from the web is perhaps the implementing navigation through pages of the publication not by using simple HTML links but by separate XML file.

But the most irritating thing is that since the release of the version 2.0 the work on the spec stagnated. In the version 2.0 there is a paragraph about “future directions”. And since that there was no sign that something was done in those directions.

It seems strange to me that in such situation there is no revolt against IDPF which proved itself a poor leader for publishing industry. If IDPF does not offer appropriate leadership and Epub does not take off, it is time to form another body and to write a new spec – this time more web friendly, more simple and more powerful.

]]> By: Andrew Savikas http://www.teleread.org/2009/01/29/the-state-of-the-web-based-ebook-reader/comment-page-1/#comment-1008458 Andrew Savikas Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:46:32 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/?p=16012#comment-1008458 Don't forget <a href="http://bookworm.threepress.org/" rel="nofollow">Bookworm</a>, which offers a fabulous web reading option for EPUB, as well as a slick mobile site. Don’t forget Bookworm, which offers a fabulous web reading option for EPUB, as well as a slick mobile site.

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