Publishing WG Telco-Asia, 2019-02-07

See minutes online for a more detailed discussion.

The Publishing WG convened a meeting at a (somewhat) Asia-friendly time. Asia is a big continent with many time zones. Most of the attendees from Asia are from Japan. The general sense from Japanese publishers is that EPUB 3 is stable, and there is a strong desire to keep it that way. There is not much interest from Japan in audio books or the manifest work happening in the Publishing WG. However, there is real interest in future work on merging the Web and Publishing platforms.

The consensus from members of the group joining from Asia was that toggling the meeting time is more difficult than joining late at night. The larger concern is the language barrier. One of the things that made this meeting successful was that we had several participants who were comfortable in multiple languages. One proposal was to arrange a pre-meeting in Japanese and choose a representative who is comfortable in Japanese and English to represent the Japanese-speaking members. The chairs are working on arranging this for future meetings. Other work will occur in the parallel BD Manga CG and may ultimately come to the Working Group.