Publishing@W3C: September 2021 Seminar

Hi everyone, and welcome to the presentation on the W3C Audiobooks specification.

The Audiobooks specification is designed to provide a unified manifest for delivering audiobook content through the supply chain.

The manifest provides a method for content creators to send metadata content and resources in a single format through the supply chain.

For our purposes, we define an audiobook as a collection of audio resources grouped together by reading order, metadata, and resources.

And the specification is really designed to kind of bring together all of the various practices around the industry today for audiobooks and unify them into a single manifest format that can be used by anyone.

The first part of the format is really focused on metadata, and to be clear this metadata is mostly used for identification and classification purposes, it is not meant to replace current metadata standards like ONIX or anything that retail or industry use today.

It's meant to allow reading systems or distributors to organize the content and manage it, especially also in the context of sideloading, allowing reading systems and other library applications to know which book that they're opening.

So the metadata is mainly focused on identifying, naming, providing a way to provide an author or a narrator and the language and publisher type information.

This metadata uses the Schema format, and so it's quite flexible in terms of, you know, what can be included, but it's really meant just for classification and identification and shouldn't be taken too far.

It's definitely not a substitute for your ONIX or MARC metadata.

The reading order is really the core of the specification, and this is where we sought to kind of combine all of the current standards existing in the industry today for audiobooks.

So the most important feature of the new format is this reading order.

And it's basically a definitive list of the order of audio files in the audiobook, including key information for user agents.

So the reading order of an audiobook can only be made up of audio resources in this specification and it is the definitive order of operations.

So we intend that user agents can take this list and, you know, play it in order and the user will have the full experience of the audiobook.

The other real purpose of the reading order is to allow content creators to provide key metadata to distributors, retailers, user agents, in order to create a really good user experience.

So being able to provide things like what type of file it is, the duration, and the name are all really important.

The last section of the manifest is the resources.

The resources part of the Audiobooks manifest is reserved for all non-audio resources, so anything that is not in the reading order.

This is where any files like a cover or a table of contents or supplemental content can be located and much like the reading order, we've provided metadata that allows a content creator or publisher to specify that this is the cover, here's the content type and, you know, any key information that someone might need to know about that particular file.

One of the last things we've included as part of the core file experience is packaging.

Right now there's no real good way to package audiobooks and file sizes can be quite large and quite expansive.

So we wanted to create a way that a content creator could bundle together all of their content, the manifest, the audio files, cover, and other supplements, and put it all into a single file, and with that we've created the Lightweight Packaging Format.

This is a zip-based packaging format, not dissimilar to EPUB, except that it's significantly less weighty.

There's very few required files and it is really designed to make it really easy for a content creator to package up their content and send it through the supply chain, you know, to the distributor, to the retailer, directly even to user.

One of the key focuses that we had for the Audiobooks specification was really improving accessibility.

Audiobooks have long been considered an accessible by default format and they are incredibly accessible and they have allowed a lot of people the opportunity to enjoy content where they might not have before.

However, they're not completely accessible and we wanted to address some of the gaps in the accessibility experience that we've found in audiobooks.

And so one of the biggest gaps was the lack of textual alternatives that are available in most audiobooks today.

And it can be argued that, you know, textual alternative might be the ebook version of a book, but some audiobooks have very different experiences to that of their print equivalents and some audiobooks don't have print equivalents.

And so we wanted to see if we could provide that experience in a seamless fashion.

And so what we have done is we've added the Alternate property to the reading order, which means that a content creator can provide an alternate to any audio resource and this alternate can actually take many different forms.

It could be a text transcript, text file, we don't put any restrictions, important to note that we don't put restrictions on the file format.

So it can be something as simple as a TXT file that serves as a text transcript, it could be more complex and rich like using synchronized narration or it could be an alternate format like a video or an HTML file.

We also wanted to make sure that the Audiobooks format provided important contextual and navigational information to the user, and so we've provided a method to create a table of contents.

This is really important for users because it helps them to understand what they're listening to and where they are in the book.

Structural information is really key to understanding, you know, your location, especially in audiobooks, knowing what chapter you're in and knowing how far you are into the chapter is really, really helpful, and so we wanted to make sure that that was provided to create an even more accessible experience.

The future.

Can't predict the future unfortunately, but Publishing@W3C has formed the Audiobooks Working Group to maintain the Audiobooks standard.

After the standard was made official in the fall of last year, the Working Group was built to make it possible to maintain that standard.

So we've decided that it should be treated as if it's a living standard, which means that we can make corrections, clarifications, and add new features as needed with the same rigor of ensuring that it's tested and, you know, accessible and internationalized, but we still wanted to have that ability to update with the pace of the industry.

And so we're here to listen to complaints, errors, or even just new features that you want to see and we're happy to hear about anything as you go along your implementation journey.

The last thing is that the standard is not even a year old, so with us achieving Recommendation status, it's ready for use.

And we're really encouraging anyone in the publishing industry to use the specification.

We want to see it implemented by content creators, distributors, vendors, reading systems, user agents, you know, anyone.

And if you're interested in implementing the Audiobooks specification for your business or personal use and you have questions, the Working Group is here to help.

We really want to help people get this out the door, we think that it's a good move for the industry to really unify on the standard and we're here to help make that happen.

So if there are any questions or, you know, feature requests, please let us know; we are always here to help.

Thanks.