Members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently met for a Publishing Summit, the organisation's first annual meeting since combining forces with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in February. The two-day conference drew more than 200 participants from around the world, a mix of publishing professionals, librarians, developers, executives, and digital creatives working with a now shared sense of purpose.
The W3C has spent more than 20 years creating global standards for the Web and Web-based technologies. IDPF developed the EPUB format to be the 'universal accessible interchange and delivery ecosystem for eBooks and other digital publications,' a goal that aligned with W3C's mission.
The pressing need for a common standard in digital publishing was made clear during a panel discussion about global eBook adoption. In Japan, the majority of eBooks comply with the EPUB3 format, the most flexible and future-facing iteration of the EPUB format.
During a presentation at the summit, Liisa McCloy-Kelley, VP, director eBook product development & innovation at Penguin Random House, and IDPF board member shared a long list of print formats that publishers currently cannot adapt as digital books—mostly due to the technical limitations of eBook formats. These included pop-up books, flap books, touch and feel books, and books with more than 3,000 images.
Accessibility was another major theme at the summit, as speakers argued that single digital book standard would make it much easier for more readers to access content.
Many speakers looked ahead to the future of content, exploring how data analysis, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality will reshape content in the future. O'Reilly Media founder and author Tim O'Reilly summed up these opportunities in his keynote.
The most futuristic example came from Bluefire Productions founder Micah Bowers. The creator of the Bluefire Reader imagined what reading will look like in a future where virtual reality tech is portable and ubiquitous. The company has created a prototype virtual reality environment for reading EPUB books in a soothing simulated environment.
At the end of the conference, Maurice York, an associate librarian overseeing digital preservation at the University of Michigan Library/Publishing, offered some technological context. The librarian read a quote from a 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine describing a 30-ton computer with 19,000 vacuum tubes—an unimaginably huge machine that is now eclipsed by the power of a single smartphone.
York's library has preserved everything from papyrus to rare books to carefully standardized digital books, but the librarian reminded publishers to prepare for a future where technology might remove the need for screens and paper altogether.
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