NTT's Position Paper



I've been interested in a production and a circulation of eBooks.

My main interests are:

* Multilingualization of eBooks

  Japanese Publication Rules, such as JLREQ formalized by W3C, has
  become crucial in Japanese electronic publications.  Not only the
  printing (writing) rules, but also rules for index, annotations,
  ToCs, searching texts and etc, may be unique and differ among
  various languages and scripts.  Investigating such language-specific
  rules for books and incorporates them into standards may be an
  interesting topic for eBook workshops.

* Accesibility of Books

  EPub standard incorporates DAISY standard, which is based on SMIL,
  to provide audio accesibility of books for visually impaired or
  dyslexic people.  However, such multimedia overlays would also be
  useful to normal people, who may want to switch between reading and
  hearing the books.  Unfortunately, SMIL is not so popular in various
  browsers, and alternate JavaScript solution for text-audio overlays
  may be important.  Clarifying the usability and problems of such
  multimedia overlays, and efficient production of them, may be an
  interest of eBooks workshop.

* Fonts and Glyphs

  Some languages and scripts, such as Japanese, adopts ideographic
  characters for writing, and significant number of them are not
  encoded as character standards because they are unique to specific
  literal works or they are private.  To cope with such characters,
  fonts for unique characters, and text decorations and layout rules
  that should equally be applied to specific categories of characters
  will be important.  Also, use of full of OpenType features on HTML
  will be important for digital publications.

* Interaction among eBooks and other applications

  eBooks may interact with other applications such as dictionaries,
  search engines, tools for bookmarking, quoting, annotating, or
  referencing.  What kind of applications for eBoosk can be
  considered, and what meatadata are required for such applications,
  may be an interest of eBook workshops.

* Web, social networkings and eBooks

  eBooks and Web should be able to refer each other for better
  interconnection.  Sharing reading records, quotes and annotations
  among people, and forming group with common interests, may be
  important for future eBook applications.

* DRM and eBooks

  Once purchased, ordinary books can be inherited from generations to
  generations, and can also be referred for hundreds of years.
  However, eBooks with DRMs or user-specific license would make the
  lifespan of books ephemeral.  It would be interesting topic to
  maitain both the copyright of books and their longevitiy.

* Scientific and Math Books

  Today, it is sometimes difficult to verify the math equations or
  scientific assertions in the books.  However, eBooks may enable
  their math equations to be exported to mathematical software for
  verification or re-use, or eBooks may be able to provide raw data to
  back-up their assertions.  Such computational applications of eBooks
  may be an interesting topics of eBooks workshop.