[CEUD-ICT] Joe Clark on the (technical) future of e-books...

[Barry McMullin]

Hi Folks -

Another nice (provocative?) post from Joe Clark on "A List Apart":

   "The electronic book is the latest example of how HTML
   continues to win out over competing, often nonstandardized,
   formats. E-books aren’t websites, but E-books are distributed
   electronically. Now the dominant E-book format is XHTML."

   <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ebookstandards/>

OK, I have a personal interest because I have long argued that
(X)HTML *can* be a good, accessible, format for electronic
publication of (long) texts:

<http://eaccess.rince.ie/white-papers/2006/pdf-eaccess/>

But what Clark is now pointing out is that, with the arrival of a
standardised "packaging" format (for collections of HTML + CSS
plus possibly other "embedded" resources such as images), namely
ePub, a key weakness of HTML for "long" texts has been rectified.
An ePub packaged document could (or should) be just as convenient
for offline storage and dissemination as the formats
"traditionally" used for this purpose (PDF, MS-word etc.). See
also this previous discussion here:

<http://list.universaldesign.ie/pipermail/ceud-ict/2009/thread.html#1911>

For what it is worth, there is already an "ePub reader" extension
available for firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45281

Of course, it is still very early days for ePub, and the tendency
to wrap it up in DRM is not helpful for accessibility (or
usability in general).

Still ... these are all interesting straws in the wind.

Best - Barry.