Published October 31, 2012

Organizations or individuals wishing to participate should submit a position paper explaining their perspectives on a workshop topic of their choice no later than December 10, 2012. Click here for more information about participation.

The BISG and IDPF, is organizing a workshop on Electronic Books and the Open Web, to bring together major players of the e-books market, including publishers, standards organizations, booksellers, accessibility organizations, etc, in order to help bring e-book publishing to its full potential through standardization.

Workshop Dates: February 11-12, 2012
Workshop Location: Co-located with O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference (TOC 2013) in New York City

Today's e-book market is dynamic, fast-changing, and strong. Nevertheless, publishers continue to face major business and technical challenges, some of which could be reduced or removed by standardization.

The Open Web Platform -- which includes core W3C technologies such as HTML, CSS, XML, and many others -- is already used extensively in e-books and e-book production. However, more can and should be done to address the specific issues and requirements of the publishing industry regarding web standards for websites, e-books, and content applications.

Participants in this workshop will walk away understanding:

• Current and future standards driving e-book publishing
• How to become directly involved in developing e-book standards
• How best to promote e-book standards within their organization and the industry at-large
• Clear guidelines for documenting technical use cases and requirements for e-book standards to current W3C Working Groups
• Details about future standardization work to be done by W3C, BISG, and IDPF

How to Participate

Position papers are required to be eligible to participate in this workshop. Organizations or individuals wishing to attend must submit a position paper explaining their perspectives on a workshop topic (below) of their choice no later than December 10, 2012. Position papers should explain the participant's perspective and viewpoint on the topic, including concrete examples of their suggestions.

To ensure productive discussions, the workshop is limited to 80 attendees. Participation is free and open to W3C members and non-members. Each organization may provide a maximum of two attendees.

For further information and instructions, please visit the W3C website.

Workshop Topics

Production

• standardization issues, including relationship to current and future W3C standards like HTML, SVG, MathML, Web API-s, metadata, etc.
• layout definition and control (fixed and adaptive layout, high quality typesetting, font definition and management, etc.)
• accessibility (authoring accessibility guidelines including graphics, fallbacks)
• voice control

Presentation

• color management and conversion
• device descriptions
• widgets definitions, standardization
• conformance (definitions, requirements, testing methodologies, certification)
• ergonomy

Distribution

• DRM management (including interoperable and open DRM systems, social DRM, etc.)
• unique identification of e-books
• outreach and deployment
• packaging
• metadata storage and vocabularies