[Workflow submission] position paper (Publishing and the Open Web Platform)

Hello,

Here's my position paper for Publishing and the Open Web Platform workshop,
September 16th and 17th, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Thank you for considering my application to this workshop.


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#### Position paper. - 29 April 2013


# Publishing and the Open Web Platform
## A W3C Workshop on Publishing using the Open Web Platform
September 16th and 17th, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Philippe Rivière — Le Monde diplomatique


# Participant's interest

“Le Monde diplomatique” <http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr> was the first
French newspaper to have a website. We have just launched, in April 2013, a
digital edition in ebook formats (mainly ePub 3).

Webmaster for this newspaper for the last 17 years, I have also been a
leading participant in the development of the SPIP <http://www.spip.net>
publishing platform.

# Point of view

Though ePub has its advantages (portability, offline usage…), the current
situation is far from satisfying. Most ebooks are poorly designed. Layout
and typography can be seen as an order of magnitude inferior to traditional
publishing. Footnotes just aren't. Features support on devices is random.
Format support in desktop applications (for reading and publishing) is
minimal. As for production, the level of work needed to achieve something
barely correct is immense. Most people seem to rely on folk and personal
recipes, or a soup of regexp, a far from ideal situation.

# Suggestions

Le Monde diplomatique's ebooks production is fully automated as an
extraction of our CMS. However, it tries to avoid being a “flat export”,
and instead to retain the structure of the newspaper (main articles,
boxes…). We tried our best to properly deal with page breaks, typography,
footnotes, embedded documents (such as maps).

We would like to see better support across the spectrum, and a larger
feature set in the CSS Paged Media Module. There is an obvious dearth of
complete and openly licensed libraries and toolsets, as well as
documentation.

We would also like to discuss what we now call a “book”. Notions of
closure, indexation, cross-references, versioning, which have framed the
way we think and debate, are being reinvented. There is a clear need for
standardization on these issues: for example, if one imagines an
ebook-as-wiki, edit links have to be provided on each chapter (or
paragraph).


-- Philippe Rivière