Comments on: Practical ePub metadata: Authorship

By: Liza Daly

Liza Daly — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:27:30 +0000

They would just be expressed by multiple elements:

person

By: elmimmo

elmimmo — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:48:59 +0000

How about one creator with several roles? Say, author and illustrator are the same person, but then there are also other creators with their own role.

By: Nic Gibson

Nic Gibson — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:05:17 +0000

I’m terribly late to comment here but I was the person who required Dave Cramer to abuse the mechanism. I totally agree that we should never have to work around bugs in the reader but the editorial staff at the major trade publisher I worked for at that time were absolutely opposed to any ebook being released that didn’t show all authors on the author line. We raised this with Adobe who accepted that is was a bug but that didn’t resolve the commercial issue.

I’m currently writing an ePub conversion spec for another major trade publisher (they currently require simply that their conversion partners work to the IDPF specs and the output is too variable with that wide a specification). I’ve found myself in exactly the same situation. As a result I may have to create the same requirement again.

By: Liza Daly

Liza Daly — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:28:31 +0000

Personally I hate working around bugs in readers when composing an ebook. The ebook file will long outlast the bugs, and should be written with that in mind.

By: Mike Cook

Mike Cook — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:31:26 +0000

How would you handle something such as Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books in the NCX file?

Various
Andrew Lang

As many reading systems will assign the first dc:creator it encounters as the author. Because I always place “aut” first this will be shown as “Various” (this is how Adobe DE works), though it would probably be more useful to have the author shown as “Andrew Lang”.

In these situations would you recommend I put the “edt” first, or stay with my current hierarchy (below) and live with the fact that the author will be shown as “Various”?

dc:creator opf:role=”aut”
dc:creator opf:role=”edt”
dc:creator opf:role=”ill”
etc.

By: Xelle

Xelle — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:18:25 +0000

In our digital publishing process, we also choose to put all the main authors in one element, to comply with ADE… All our publishers currently want to have DRM, so ADE is not one reader among the others, it’s the only reader we have to work with.
They don’t understand yet all the consequences of this choice on their ebooks’ quality…

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:03:13 +0000

the other guy’s bugs are always trivial.

except, of course, when they’re not…

-bowerbird

By: stuart yeates

stuart yeates — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:21:36 +0000

I’m with Liza on this. We do lots of things in our ePubs that are beyond the capability of an particular reader to display.

By: Liza Daly

Liza Daly — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:26:41 +0000

That’s unfortunate but I don’t believe that publishers who are making significant investments in digitization projects should be working around bugs in ADE that are trivial to fix.

By: Dave Cramer

Dave Cramer — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:53:09 +0000

Unfortunately, ADE will only display the contents of the first dc:creator element above the NCX display. So some customers have required us to put all authors in a single dc:creator, wrong as that is.