HTML5, EPUB 3, and ebooks vs. web apps

Two experts help us navigate the ebook format jungle

One of the benefits of working on TOC is that I get to see some of the behind-the-scenes industry debates that take place via email. Since it’s “formats” month here in TOC-land I thought it would be fun to share a thread about HTML5 vs. EPUB 3 featuring O’Reilly’s Sanders Kleinfeld and the IDPF’s Bill McCoy. They’ve both agreed to share this thread with the TOC community since it helps clarify the state of both EPUB 3 and HTML5.

It all started with an HTML5 interview I did with Sanders earlier this month. Bill reached out to Sanders as follows:

Your mileage may vary, especially on the Nook

Bill: Your interview with Joe for TOC was interesting. As you know from prior discussion I totally agree with you that the current situation is sub-optimal. It’s disappointing that nearly a year after EPUB 3 is out, B&N’s flagship tablet device doesn’t support EPUB 3 yet, even though it ships with a reasonably modern browser that does support HTML5. This is due to delays by their current vendor for eBook rendering software (Adobe) rather than a lack of desire on B&N’s part, but it’s still a problem. I also agree with you that where EPUB 3 is supported like Apple iBooks and Kobo the consistency in terms of being able to safely use leading-edge JavaScript libraries and other browser-stack features in disparate reading systems is not where it needs to be. While it’s true that EPUB 3 needs to be able to be supported on limited capability devices I think we didn’t help by making so many things optional and being silent on reading system support for various APIs that are de facto part of the browser stack but not officially part of the HTML5 spec normatively referenced by EPUB 3 spec (e.g. geolocation, local storage, XMLHttpRequest).

I also agree with you that Web-technologies-based apps are the future for experience delivery, both in browser and increasingly for native-class apps that are liberated from the browser (whether wrapped in PhoneGap or CEF, W8 Metro apps or the new Chrome Packaged App model Google rolled out this summer at I/O).

Sanders: Yes, I think what I find so frustrating is that we’ve got tablets on the market like the Nook, which use two different engines to render Web content–one for the Web browser and one for the ereader–and the ereader is lagging so far behind the browser in HTML5 support. The ereader is being treated like a second-class citizen, even though it’s ostensibly the primary feature of the tablet (or at least the primary feature by which the tablet is being marketed; I concede that there are many people buying the Nook who just want a low-cost Android tablet, and have no intention of reading ebooks on it).

One of the things I appreciate most about iBooks is that it uses the same Webkit engine as Mobile Safari, and if you test the same HTML5 content in Safari and in iBooks, you usually get the same results.

Distinguishing apps from ebooks

Bill: But… despite all this violent agreement… I’m having a hard time with your contention in the interview that “a lot less is going to fall in the eBook side than it does now for enhanced text and graphics… anything that’s more enhanced is going to drift over to the app side… we’ll have  our standard EPUBs for fiction/nonfiction and then biology textbooks will be on the other side”. That’s what I want to probe on in this email.

Sanders: I’ve thought about this quite a bit after my initial conversation with Joe, and I think the debate of “ebook” vs. “app” can be pretty facile if you’re not careful about how you define those somewhat loaded terms. And I think I failed to do a good job of that in my interview. So let me step back and try to do better now.

If you define “ebook” as “something that can be represented in EPUB 2/3 or Mobi format and rendered in an ereader app”, and you define “web app” as “something that can be rendered in a Web browser and/or sold in an app store”, then you’re really just arguing about packaging, not the underlying content, because an EPUB 3 file is composed of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, just like a web app. In the quote you cite above, I wasn’t really trying to make an argument about packaging, as much as about the kinds of electronic media that publishers are creating right now, and will be creating in the future.

I think Phase 1 of ebook creation for publishers was basically, “Let’s take all our print books and digitize them so they can be read on a Kindle or iPad”, without much in the way of innovation in terms of interactivity, customized rendering for a reflowable context, or even hyperlinking.

I think we’ve now graduated to Phase 2, where publishers are thinking, “How can we make customized digital content for tablet devices, instead of plain-old text-and-graphics ebooks? Do I make an ‘app’ or do I make an ‘enhanced ebook?'” I think publishers are generally taking two approaches to this:

Approach #1: Hire on software developers to make full-fledged native apps they can sell in the app stores for iPad/iPhone/iPad and Android (lots of these are children’s titles, e.g. “Finding Nemo: My Puzzle Book“)

Approach #2: Make an “enhanced ebook”, which takes the standard Phase 1 text-and-graphics context, and then grafts on some multimedia features, like audio and video clips (here I’m thinking of the Steven Tyler memoir “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You (Enhanced Edition)“, which was featured prominently in Ana Maria Allessi’s talk at Editech)

I’m rather against Approach #2, because I don’t think it’s especially innovative, and I don’t think it’s what customers really want out of next-generation e-content. I feel like the whole notion of “enhanced ebooks” is somewhat of a transitional concept, as publishers start making baby steps in rethinking how they produce content for a Digital First world. In the long term (next 5 years or so), I think a large part of the “enhanced-ebook” middle ground is going to go away, and ebook content is going to fall more neatly into one of two categories:

Category 1: The standard text-and-graphic content that you can read on even the lowest-end eInk ereader (because I don’t think all-text fiction/nonfiction is ever going to go out of favor)

Category 2: Everything else, which will be more and more app-like in the sense that it will be highly interactive, to-some-degree social (commenting, linked to Facebook/Twitter, etc.), and conceived from the start for a Web context (densely hyperlinked, with sophisticated mechanisms to search content and navigate it in a nonlinear fashion)

So, that’s what I was getting at above; I just wish I had articulated it better in my interview.

That’s just part one, folks. Stay tuned later this week for excerpts from the rest of the thread where Bill and Sanders talk further about the subtleties of EPUB 3, HTML5 and web apps.

(Update: Part two can be found here and part three here.)

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