Meeting minutes
<liisamk> Date: 12/13 January
EU Copyright Directive and Text Data Mining
Liisa: Laurent is planning
to make a propsal for a Community Group on Text Data Mining
… we'll keep the BG appraised of when that proposal is
sent
Update: EU Copyright Directive and Text Data Mining
Liisa: the feeling is that
there is a time crunch to indicate there is some direction on a
technology front
… to help the EU
… so there may be a smaller number of ways to express
rights
… hopefully we'll find some people to join a Community
Group
Daihei: this is initiated by
the EU copyright directive
… we're curious how other markets might react
Liisa: it affects any
copyright holder who has content hosted on a server in Europe
… many of us have that, depending on our trading
partners
… the assumption is that little text data mining can
be done without permission
… so if orgs see business value in allowing this,
there could be interest in a standard way to describe rights
… those whose servers are behind firewalls might be
less concerned, though they might also see additional business
opportunities
… e.g. a smart speaker who could mine books to bring
back facts [of interest to the household]
Video and Audio Enhancements
Liisa: with the work that
the EPUB 3 WG is doing, there was a question on how important it is to
have references to audio and video outside the file to be able to
stream
… there was some feeling that this is probably
something we should support
… it's been a business issue to keep the size of the
package down
… as we're seeing more video content there are
increased business opportunities to produce enhanced books
… we found a significant bug in some of Amazon's
devices that were using an external player
… some publishers had to pull titles
… many of the a/v titles were experimental and
produced years ago
Shinya: I tried to do some
remote video streaming to have dynamic advertisement
… this is one use case
… in Japan this kind of dynamic advertisement in
ebooks is not a big market
… it's useful to support but not an urgent thing
Daihei: is dynamic advertisement something that might have a bigger market in Japan?
Shinya: we've tried to put
dynamic advertisement in our services but the biggest ad agencies are
not ready to move to such technology
… there's not yet a big business need
Daihei: so until the ad
agencies are interested in opportunities in e-books or digital
magazines, the use of dynamic advertisement might be limited
… there are business issues
Liisa: are digital magazines successful in Japan? they haven't been very successful in the US
Shinya: two or three years
ago we had the biggest market in digital magazine services; more than
3M paid subscribers
… but the digital magazine market has been shrinking
… so we're looking for other ways to use our services
Wendy: the main discussion
in the WG is whether or not we need to make any changes in the support
of foreign resources around iframes
… EPUB doesn't explicitly support nor disallow foreign
resources
… there are security issues around foreign resources;
they might contain viruses
… so reading systems might be reluctant to support
foreign resources
… however, foreign resources might be useful from a
packaging perspective
… the WG is not opposed to exploring this but we want
to know how important it is to publishers
… one of the workarounds we're looking at is support
of more formats with better size benefits
… the WG has to understand what people want
Liisa: if you want to link
to web sites with live data that is a part of the story you are
telling, what is the off-line experience?
… making sure we have good fallbacks or good ways to
explain
FXL Improvements
Daihei: we have talked about
this a few times
… FXL books such as cookbooks and children books
… have been difficult to publish
… it is not difficult to render graphical books on the
web
… but it has been difficult to render FXL EPUB
Liisa: we're trying to
continue collecting use cases, and particularly business cases around
the kinds of categories this works for
… what kinds of books does this improve, to extend the
market?
… what kinds of books have never been made digital
because they need this?
<liisamk> https://
Liisa: I've just started an
issues page in GitHub to collect these
… please add examples there; it would be great to have
lots of input on this
Accessibility for Publishing
Daihei: in Japan this is
more and more looked-for
… there will be a webinar scheduled in February; LIA
will present on improving accessibility in publishing
… LIA published a paper last year that Murata-san
translated to Japanese
… the BG can exchange information more
Murata-san: yes; I
translated the LIA guidelines several months ago and is being reviewed
by the technical committee of the Japanese Daisy Consortium
… I hope it will be publicly available in a few weeks
… and I hope it will have big impact
… the Japanese standardization activity will submit a
proposal to MITI to create a JIS for ISO
… I will chair
… the upcoming standard will have an annex specific to
Japan with authoring conventions, ruby, vertical and horizontal
writing, and the use of whitespace as word dividers
… we'll announce more about this activity soon
Community Group Update
Zheng: the first CG meeting
of 2021 is tomorrow
… we have talked with the Pronunciation CG who are
trying to improve browser integration with screen readers
… right now we are more focused on accessibility, lead
by Avneesh and Makoto
… in terms of documentation, we are trying to find
people to work on EPUB documentation in MDN
… we are also thinking about how to expand the CG
meetings to more people from Japan and Australia
… please reach out to me and Mateus with your ideas
… we look forward to more discussion in the CG mailing
list
Daihei: in terms of collaboration between the BG and CG, we should participate in the CG and send potential use cases for the CG to consider
Zheng: definitely!
… we really look forward to new use cases
… we'll also look for other task forces we might start
Daihei: might the CG discuss the video and audio resources if we bring use cases?
Zheng: definitely
<liisamk> https://
Zheng: preparation of a/v enhancement and FXL enhancement can happen in the CG before it goes to the WG
Liisa: see the ^^ CG repo
Topics for the March 23rd/24th extend PBG conference
Liisa: we're thinking about
having an extended conversation about a few topics
… similar to what we did during TPAC
… two topics in a day, in two sessions
… what issues would you like to discuss?
… what activities in W3C should we collaborate on
more?
… what are the big _publishing_ activities we'd like
to work on?
Kamata-san: ebook content
outside of comics; what are the next content areas for ebooks?
… for digital magazines there might be different
structures for supporting external video resources vs. embedded
video
… e.g. for dynamic advertising or streaming services
… for enhanced ebooks
… these could be areas for discussion
Daihei: please come back to us with your thoughts for discussion topics for this extended BG conference in March
Liisa: send either to the full BG list or to the co-chairs
Reminder re: EPUBcheck Fundraising
Daihei: we still need money
Liisa: new releases of
EPUBcheck are coming soon; we are still fundraising for improvements
… testing tools of the new API
… we continue to work on evolving EPUBcheck
… and we need money to pay those developers
Next meeting
Daihei: Jan 26 for Europe/Americas time