scribe+

wendyreid: background of audiobooks spec
... audiobooks were historically rooted in accessibility c. 1930s
... 70s and 80s saw mainstream adoption - e.g. listen to books on tape in the car
... today it's a $3B industry
... use cases: continuous listening, portability, navigation, accessibility
... current digital audio book space does not cover this well
... there is currently no standard 😱
... what are the components? cover image, audio files, track list, supplemental content (e.g. graphs, charts, images)
... distributors may or may not have individual content standards. retailers also have differing requirements.
... divergence causes many problems
... from bad UX to software bugs
... small publishers shut out by proprietary channels
... indie creators need to distribute broadly
... to stay afloat

<dauwhe> repo: https://github.com/w3c/audiobooks/

<dauwhe> spec: https://w3c.github.io/audiobooks/

wendyreid: having a single audiobooks format based on the modern web platform would solve many of these issues
... including a better user experience

<scribe> ... new use cases: variety of non-audio supplemental content, table of contents, synchronized media (text + audio rendered simultaneously), packaging for file exchange and download

UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: we have 2 specs: pub-manifest and audiobooks profile
... pub-manifest contains resource list and reading order and metadata
... pub-manifest format is JSON-LD
... metadata comes from schema.org
... publishing industry has strong feelings about existing metadata standards that they use - we are not interfering with that
... packaging comes from LPF community group
... sync media comes from sync media in publications community group

https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub/

scribe: feedback welcome
... CR coming at the end of this month
... audiobooks uses the same structural format as pub-manifest and adding audiobook specific needs
... an audiobook is a pub-manifest but not necessarily vice versa

<Zakim> Alan, you wanted to ask about the ecosystem

Alan: business perspective - who do we need to involve in the convo who's not here

wendyreid: we are looking at both UAs that want to support that; also looking at content creators who want to create in this format and who can put pressure on distribution channels
... has to come from both directions

duga: audiobook publishers have tables of contents that are rich and stored in excel files; not delivered or used by anyone
... it represents a lot of work to create this sort of file
... a format that is better for exchange and distribution should be attractive to them

dauwhe: complex business situation - the costs of the lack of standards are often not borne by the publishers themselves
... e.g. publisher may send raw materials to intermediary who does all the work
... but the publisher may not feel the pain; also, the intermediary is benefitting monetarily from this flow

james: portability across platforms is interesting
... can you read a book on one platform and then find your place in the same book on a different one?

wendyreid: this falls under addressability
... bookmarking is one of our more complicated issues

dauwhe_: this is a very complicated problem across the web
... e.g. sync desktop and mobile versions of apps
... privacy considerations
... (do i want the different platforms to know that i'm the same person?)

james: store user info in manifest? UAs would have to have write access

wendyreid: schema.org might have a property that could represent this

james: is anything editable by UAs?

duga: we don't include user data in the file

wendyreid: this is v1.0 - want to keep simple and extensible - leaving room for future versions

Alan: any pushback that 1.0 is not a good starting point?

wendyreid: no pushback re starting point
... we are adding some features already (supplemental content, sync media)
... we had to find a balance between what is acceptable for a change-resistant industry and ease of understanding

Markus: who are the interested implementors

wendyreid: collibrio reader in europe is implementing, some publishers are showing interest

Markus: any validator?

wendyreid: no but we have epubcheck

laurent: audio studios would benefit from a single format
... table of contents is a new idea for audio studios
... so they will save some time with a single format but covering new concepts will cost some time
... readium foundation is also implementing on all our toolkits
... so there will be an open source toolkit for UAs

dauwhe_: this was largely designed to meet a use case of b2b exchange
... publishers providing audio books to distributors + retailers
... not really a web use case

laurent: disagree; librivox as 25000 audio books
... free of use, on the web
... uses a JSON manifest
... issue on the web is that the main distributors (e.g. apple, kobo) is that it's vertical / walled garden
... indie publishers will benefit from this standard

wendyreid: we could use more browser attention. no indication that what we're doing is web-incompatible. dream: open an audiobook directly in a browser.

dauwhe_: bundled exchanges may mean that we're closer than we think to browser adoption

wendyreid: being super cutting edge can scare off publishers
... publishing industry is 100s of years old and rather slow moving
... we are incrementally pushing them towards the future

james: making this more webby - new APIs could help - such as the one that opens a file extension in an associated app - what's it called - FileHandlingApi
... lots of tech coming out that will be of use when it's ready
... as a user i prefer an app to entering a URL and logging in

wendyreid: content licensing can be an issue, e.g. audible are the only ones who has handmaid's tale; kobo has the sequel
... bad portability between services

laurent: DRM

room: shh!

sander: any barriers to including certain things in the book?

wendyreid: we've left it flexible

james: what about podcasts?

wendyreid: this has come up as a use case
... similar to audiobook use case
... could bring many improvements to podcasts (lang, narrators, structure)
... we have not found a good standard format for podcasts. most use RSS.
... no podcasters have joined us 😭

<wendyreid> marisa: I think that that would be a great audiobook creation tool

<wendyreid> ... translating a list of audio clips into the profile would not be rocket science, speaking as a developer

dauwhe_: is the mapping relatively simple between RSS and audiobook profile?

wendyreid: suspect so but more research is required

Bert: what would be the mime type?

wendyreid: lives in pub-manifest. audiobooks uses this plus has type: AudioBook

Markus: if I did want to link to an audio book, would i link to the zip package or the manifest? can it live on its own (not in a zip package)?

wendyreid: yes it does not have to be in a package
... manifest JSON is the starting point for the publication

laurent: primary entry page can be HTML, can be helpful as a starting point

<wendyreid> https://www.w3.org/TR/pub-manifest/

<wendyreid> https://www.w3.org/TR/audiobooks/

<dauwhe_> dauwhe: i just built an experimental audiobook, using the x-playlist custom element in an html file that also has an embedded publication manifest. It was turned into a bundled exchange. Theoretically, a future version of chrome would allow you to double-click this and open the audio book

wendyreid: please check out our work, we welcome feedback!

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