Publishing WG Telco, 2019-04-08: Supplemental Materials in Audiobooks, usage of duration

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

Should there be a TOC if supplemental materials are provided in an audio book?

This question has been raised in Issue #408. Having a clear place to find those materials is important (e.g., for accessibility purposes if they provide a textual transcript). The discussion was around whether supplemental materials (e.g., PDF booklet) in an audiobook should be added in a TOC or whether it should be part of the usual resources' structure labeled with a particular rel value. There is no formal resolution yet.

Should duration be part of the general WPUB draft

The current audiobook uses the duration term from schema.org. It does it for an individual (audio) resource as well as for the whole book. However, there is nothing in that definition which would be audio specific; the same attribute could also be used for, e.g., video resource as well.

Another issue was what exactly the role is of the book level information. Current readers usually calculate that value; they do not trust the author/publisher data for accuracy. On the other hand, that value may have an important role in user-friendliness; e.g., it would inform the "reader" (i.e., listener) how long that book is.

Two outcomes of the discussion:

• It was decided to move the duration term into the general WPUB draft as one of the generic terms for linked resources
• An alternative for book level data could be the schema.org timeRequired term, that seems to be looser in its requirement, and may very well be enough for the purpose of that information. To be discussed further.