Though I was the principal author of the paper, I’d like to thank the other members of the JISC team for their support, edits, and encouragement: Theo Andrew, Peter Sefton, Emma Tonkin, and David Flanders. Many other deliverables were produced as a part of this project, including digital publishing toolkits and usability studies; please check them out on the jiscPUB blog.

Executive summary

…This report aims to describe some historical perspective on electronic publishing, leading up to why the “ebook revolution” has happened in the 2010s when it had failed to take hold before. We will describe some of the details of how digital books are authored, both in a scholarly context and in general ebook production terms. We have included in-depth coverage of the unexpected outcomes of ebook distribution, including issues of rights, royalties, copyright, academic impact, and the implications of limiting access to and reproduction of digital books. Finally, we review findings from a number of ebook pilot programs conducted in U.S. universities, and draw from the work done by the rest of the “JISCpub” team in uncovering possible future work that could be actionable and relevant to a scholarly publishing audience, with a goal towards providing better tooling for both authors and readers of scholarly works.

Recommendations in brief

1. Rich full-text semantic search tools for scholarly ebook collections.
2. Tools for generating or traversing highly-specific stable citations.
3. Development of a pilot to produce student theses with high-engagement linked-data content.
4. Plugins or add-ons to provide simple, ebook output for popular word processing tools.
5. Improved workflows for authoring attractive, accessible, standards-based mathematical notation in ebooks.
6. Development of an ereading system with an emphasis on scholarly annotation and research-gathering.
7. Provisions to train and share scholars interested in digital publishing.
8. Aggregate ebook services for authors and university presses.
9. Maximize use of orphan works.
10. Community resources for institutions with digital collection.

Read the complete report.

I was thrilled to be able to contribute a chapter to Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, a compilation of essays edited by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary. (Incidently, it was great to see how much the text was improved by their editorial work.)

In the essay, I highlight some advantages and affordances unique to digital books. The conversation is too often about the deficiencies of the electronic form, as if parity was the best that ebooks could hope for.

Generally, digital books can’t be lent or resold. You can’t curl up with them and smell them, nor can you pass them on to grandchildren.

Many of these limitations have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of a digital book, but are instead a reflection of the difficult transition between an old, established medium and a new, to-date undeveloped one. We compare the physical to the digital and quickly spot the differences: digital’s shortcomings.

Ebooks do not have to be mere simulacra of printed works. What are the unique qualities that being digital, especially born-digital, add to the reading experience? In what way is literature being transformed? What can we do with these new kinds of books?

You can read What We Can Do with ‘Books’ online, or buy the DRM-free EPUB version from O’Reilly.

To match the licenses of other content in the presentation, the PDF is available for download under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike.

There are a few videos in the presentation which I’ve pulled out separately:

Using an accessible HTML5-based EPUB with VoiceOver

This demonstrations uses The Restless Universe from The Open University with a screenreader. The publication (somewhere between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3) uses the HTML5 canvas element to present visualizations, and includes alternate versions for the visually-impaired. Though this demo was run on a computer, the EPUB works in iBooks. (Software tools to build these publications available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookbind/.)

For each example, I show the visual presentation first, then the alternate screenreader-friendly one.

Creating a screen-readable interactive publication with WAI-ARIA

WAI-ARIA roles and states are used here in this demo (running on Firefox, Windows XP, NVDA screenreader) showing that JavaScript-driven interactive publications can also be accessible.

You’ll be able to hear the screenreader announcing that the word “delighted” has a “submenu”. When I use the keyboard to navigate I can find the link-like region through the auditory landmarks, select it, and then hear the popup read to me. WIthout using the ARIA roles, such JavaScript-driven interactivity would be invisible to the screenreader. See the slides for more details on the ARIA markup used here.

Interactive storytelling for the blind

My presentation included an excerpt from the documentary Get Lamp by Jason Scott; the relevant bit begins here in this presentation at a Google Tech talk.

I love the Part title pages especially:

Thank you!

In a recent video Chris summarizes some of his ideas about the broader media landscape: The Future of Media, including some mentions of our discussion, like my location-based book demo.

- Thomas Edison, June 23, 1911, on the world of 2011 (via PaleoFuture)

It may now be the case that there has been a policy change to require the presence of in-app purchasing whenever content can potentially be purchased. This potentially affects many applications, but ereading apps would be particularly hurt because of small margins on ebooks and the added complexity of agency pricing.

When I conceived of Ibis Reader, I thought the primary value of an HTML5-based ereader would be cross-platform availability. When the project kicked off in mid-2009, there were no versions of Android that actually supported HTML5; by the time Ibis launched in February 2010, compatible Android 2 devices were in stores. (Android still lags far behind iOS though, and overall we’ve been disappointed by the slow evolution of Android HTML5 support.)

Now it’s clear that HTML5 offers a more substantial benefit than cross-platform compatibility: ownership. Serious businesses take years to evolve; many of the ereading platforms that are threatened by Apple’s move are not even profitable yet. I would be very nervous about building a business with a long runway that could be rolled up at any minute.

That’s why we’ve decided to aggressively pursue licensing Ibis Reader in 2011. Our experience with our initial licensees has been overwhelmingly positive. Each new integration has strengthened the core platform and added valuable features, some of which are only available in the licensed version:

• Full internationalization support
• Secure content encryption
• Performance enhancements and core platform updates

Because we offer source code licenses, the entire platform is completely customizable and entirely within your control. You may hire us to help integrate Ibis with your ebookstore or content distribution system, or take the code internally for your own use.

Our roadmap for the platform in the coming year:

• Rock-solid, app-like performance
• EPUB3 and enhanced ebook support
• Annotations
• Dictionaries
• Strategic social-media integration

For more information or to schedule an appointment to meet with us at Tools of Change February 14-16, please contact us at info@ibisreader.com.

The goal of this post is to simply document the extension and show how to create new works with it. I’m not going to debate whether it’s a good thing for the ecosystem here.

Install Phone Disk

Anyone working extensively with iBooks EPUB development should first grab a copy of the invaluable Phone Disk. This allows Mac and Windows computers to browse most of the iOS device filesystem as a normal drive, including opening and inspecting EPUB books.

Download a fixed-layout EPUB sample from the iBookstore

iBooks samples do not have DRM and so can be opened and read normally. A good bet is to download one of the “Children’s Picture Books”; these tend to be fixed-layout books.

Find the display-options file

The key component of the extension is the addition of the file META-INF/com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml. This file tells iBooks that the book is the fixed-layout type, and typically looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<display_options>
    <platform name="*">
        <option name="fixed-layout">true</option>
    </platform>
</display_options>

There are a number of options here which are detailed in the iBookstore Asset Guide (v4.5), including how to define two-page spreads.

The first thing I tried with one of the samples was to validate it with the latest epubcheck 1.1:

Epubcheck Version 1.1
WARNING: /Users/liza/foo.epub: item (iTunesMetadata.plist) exists in the zip file, but is not declared in the OPF file
WARNING: /Users/liza/foo.epub: item (iTunesArtwork) exists in the zip file, but is not declared in the OPF file

These are just warnings; the fixed-layout book is valid. You can try opening them in other EPUB readers, with varying success depending on how wild the book designer got with the fixed-positioning.

Inspect the OPF and NCX

One immediate surprise to iBooks developers is that you’re likely to find an embedded font (now supported in any iBooks EPUB). Otherwise there’s nothing added to the OPF.

The NCX examples I found did not include all of the XHTML pages; I’m not sure whether that’s just a function of the book being a sample.

Structure of a fixed-layout book

In a typical EPUB, each chapter or major division of content is a single XHTML file. In the fixed-layout model, each XHTML file corresponds to a single physical page. So while it’s typical to name most EPUB XHTML files like chapter01.html, chapter02.html, in the fixed-layout book you’re apt to see a layout like:

cover.xhtml	font		package.opf	page001.xhtml	page003.xhtml	toc.ncx
css		images		page000.xhtml	page002.xhtml	page004.xhtml

XHTML content

The one unusual element in the fixed-layout content will be this HTML, which is required:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1000, height=1000"></meta>

The specific width/height is per-book and based on the desired dimensions of the page. iBooks uses this information to scale the screen size appropriately (more on this later).

Otherwise the XHTML should look relatively normal (other than being very short). In fact the XHTML will be exceptionally readable since these books are by necessity all hand-coded at the moment.

CSS

Here’s where things get interesting:

The body element must be defined with an absolute width/height that matches the viewport above:

body {
	width: 1000px;
	height: 1000px;
}

Images and text will often be absolutely-positioned. z-index and other advanced positioning techniques are also supported. Font sizes are specified in pixels, not ems (users can zoom fixed-layout books, but the text will not reflow). Background colors are useful in this model as the XHTML content is full-bleed and does not usually have the goofy fake book margin.

Since this is all standard CSS 2.1 (or CSS3), these books don’t technically require a specialized reading system; any one based on a modern browser, like the mobile version of Ibis Reader, could potentially consume these books if the reading system could scale the pages appropriately.

Interactivity

It’s been noted that my original JavaScript in EPUB example no longer works in more recent versions of iBooks. This had nothing to do with the JavaScript parts themselves; instead the problem was that Apple began squashing the positioning information needed to align the popups.

In recent work for publishers I’ve found ways to get around those limitations, but they’ve been quite awkward and difficult to author. Would the “freedoms” of positioning in the fixed-layout books allow the original sample to work again?

Yes!

I took my original file and made only three changes:

1. I added the com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file just as shown above.
2. I added the viewport directive to the XHTML file and set it (arbitrarily to 600 pixels wide, 800 pixels tall).
3. I modified the CSS body directive to match the viewport.

The result:

Download the example EPUB (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0)

Obviously the layout could use some work; there’s no longer any default margin added by the ereader, so the text bleeds out. Also my 600×800 dimensions don’t exactly match the iBooks aspect ratio, so there’s more fake book border. But you can see how this could be improved.

Note that the vast majority of EPUB books should not be formatted this way. This isn’t a one-way ticket to CSS Town. If the text on a particular XHTML page overflows the bottom of the single page, it will get cut off. You cannot mix fixed-layout and reflowable pages in the same EPUB file.

You can see the specifics of the current proposals from the subgroup as they evolve on the EPUB3 wiki at PURL-based EPUB Identifiers and URI Links Proposal. Please comment there or on the epub-revision mailing list rather than here.

The aggressive publication deadlines for EPUB3 (fast approaching in Q1 2011) mean that this work cannot expand too much in scope, but I suspect that’s good motivation: we should try to understand and solve the most pressing problem(s) for EPUB to EPUB links and then get out of the way and watch the implementors & content creators.

Note: These early drafts on the wiki don’t represent the consensus of the EPUB3 Working Group.