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Charter for OEBPS Working Group
The following is the charter
for the OEBPS Working Group. The group will begin meetings
immediately. Participation in the group is open to IDPF members and
invited experts (invited at the discretion of the chairs of the working group). If you have any questions, please contact the
IDPF.
Document
Submitted by: Jon Ferraiolo (Adobe Systems, Inc.), Garth Conboy (eBook
Technologies, Inc.) & Brady Duga (eBook Technologies, Inc.)
Date of Document: March 24, 2006
Document Approved by Board: March 27, 2006
Charter Start Date: March 27, 2006
Charter End Date: December 31, 2006
Working Charter Update Date: August 22, 2006
OEBPS Working
Group
Mission
The mission of the Working Group is to update OEBPS 1.2 to improve the adoption
and viability of the standard as both a cross-reading system interchange and
production format as well as a final publication delivery format.
Scope
The scope of the Working
Group activities is limited to the adoption/creation of the next version of the
OEBPS specification and sample implementations thereof. This version of OEBPS
would be aligned with the expected OEBPS Unified
Container Format Standard.
The Working Group will be
the successor to the now closed Publication Structure Working Group which was
responsible for maintaining and developing the OEBPS specifications. See next
section, “Development History”.
Due to the estimated time
schedule for the deliverables of this Working Group, it is expected that the
Working Group will produce a tightly constrained next version of OEBPS.
Following the publication of the resulting specification, the Working Group may
choose to continue work on a substantially revised specification. This,
however, would require the Working Group to extend and revise its charter.
Development
History
The original OEBPS 1.0
specification was published in September 1999 followed by two updates to the
specification, 1.0.1 in June 2001, and 1.2 in August 2002. Work on these
specifications was guided by the Publication Structure Working Group (PSWG).
From 2002 through the summer
of 2003, PSWG worked on an upgrade of the specification version 2.0 and achieved
a significant amount of work, but was unable to complete the specification.
While the group decided to officially cease meeting in July 2003, there is
significant amounts of work available for the OEBPS Working Group to use.
The main goals and
near-completed work of PSWG’s 2.0 efforts were in the following areas of
development:
Increased content owner
control over publication presentation
Specific features in this
area included better layout functionality to improve precise positioning, font
and typography improvements, and device-specific processing.
International content
Improvements in the handling
of international content were deemed necessary for the specification to
adequately support publishing in world markets. Examples of improvements in this
area were glyph resource specification, improved writing system features, and
writing direction improvement.
Enhanced navigational
structure
This included better support
for searching, indexing, hierarchical structures, intra-publication references,
and inter-publication links, as well as improvements in OEBPS 1.2 features such
as guides and tours.
Metadata modularization
The metadata features of
OEBPS were deemed to have needed substantial improvement to accommodate rapid
changes in publishing metadata, DRM strategies, and device profiling. To handle
the significant amount of work involved, PSWG turned substantive responsibility
for metadata over to the proposed OEBF work group on metadata and focused on
creating the modularity necessary to support this division of labor.
Meeting minutes and relevant
documents to this effort can be found in the IDPF intranet at
http://members.idpf.org/pswg.
Current Industry Problems
There
are four main industry problems that this effort seeks to address in a new
version of the OEBPS specification.
The
first problem concerns OEBPS’s use in the industry as a modern production
format. Publishers and other creators of eBook content currently use OEBPS as a
“source” document (OEBPS package and document files) and then conduct
platform-specific processing and/or DRM-wrapping before the content is in a
format that is displayed to an end user. Since OEBPS 1.2 was developed on
technologies available at the time of its publication in August 2002, the
options for the structure and presentation of their electronic books are now
somewhat dated. This is both limiting adoption of the specification and causing
reading system-specific modifications to be made to publication source files.
The
second problem concerns the current industry lack of a final publication
delivery format. While the current OEBPS specification certainly offers the
ability for an electronic book to be directly rendered by devices and software,
this does not widely occur in the industry. Consumers therefore receive
platform-targeted eBooks. This limits their ability to move content from one
reading system to another and to archive content. This problem is being at
least partially addressed by the efforts of the Unified OEBPS Content Container
Format working group, but should nonetheless also drive the OEBPS Working
Group’s efforts.
The
third problem is that insufficient control of content presentation fidelity
exists in OEBPS 1.2 to optimally and consistently render complex or detailed
content (e.g. detailed control over fonts and graphics).
The
fourth problem is the lack of a “declarative table of contents” in OEBPS 1.2 –
this both limits the accessibility and navigational robustness of OEBPS content.
Accessibility
E-books
can provide an accessible reading experience for users with disabilities as long
as authors and publishers conform to accepted industry standards for the
creation of accessible electronic materials. This specification will contain a
statement emphasizing and illustrating the importance of accessible design in e-books.
OEBPS
will incorporate features that ensure content can be made accessible to
everyone. OEBPS publications should be authored in accordance with the W3C Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/)
to ensure that the broadest possible set of users will have access to books
delivered in this format. To encourage authors to create accessible materials,
this specification will include code examples that draw attention to accessible
markup, where appropriate. If the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working
Group (http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/)
releases the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 while this OEPBPS working
group is active, the new OEBPS specification shall recommend that authors
conform to that specification (the current draft is available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/).
Preliminary Solutions
The
direction of the Working Group would be as follows:
- Modernize OEBPS for use by content creators
and conversion houses as a modern production format. Preliminary solutions
may include:
- Update OEBPS based on developments in
underlying W3C family of standards including XML namespaces, XHTML & CSS
- Enhance OEBPS in the area of navigation
including searching, indexing, hierarchical structures,
intra-publication references, and inter-publication links. These
enhancements could be derived from adopting external development (e.g.
by Daisy) or by leveraging prior OEBPS work in this area
- Standardization of
OEBPS declarative table of contents
- Support the option of
embedding outline fonts
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Support the option of embedded vector graphics supporting
high-resolution graphical content, i.e. flow charts, pictures, etc.
- Optimize OEBPS for use as a final
publication delivery format.
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Align to optimally utilize new IDPF Unified OEBPS Container Format.
Publishers would allow for the sale of content (optionally after DRM-wrapping)
into Reading Systems that natively accept and render OEBPS with viable
fidelity.
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Nothing in this effort will prevent the future use of DRM.
Communication of DRM requirements from publishers to distributors and
resellers could be accomplished via various mechanisms (note that the
standardization of such mechanisms is not within the scope of the OEBPS
effort)
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Maximize compatibility with OEBPS 1.2, 1.0.1 and 1.0 specifications and
existing OEBPS content.
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Because of the desired time schedule for deliverables of this tightly
constrained next version of OEBPS, the Working Group should not support
arbitrary changes (beyond those described herein), deprecation or
removal of OEBPS 1.2 features that are supported in implementations.
- Promotion and invitation
to work on the specification from other standards groups and interested
organizations, formal or informal. Such organizations may include OASIS,
OpenReader, NewsML, TEI, Daisy and others. Specifically, the Working Group
will address possible endorsement of standards to evolve a specification to
gain greater adoption.
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Retain open and patent-unencumbered status of OEBPS.
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Preference for adopting existing standards rather than creation of new ones
in order to facilitate the timely creation, adoption and implementation of
the resultant standard.
Duration of Working Group Charter
The
Working Group should be chartered for the duration of 2006. The Working Group
expects an initial working draft published by August 1, 2006 that can be a basis
for experimental implementations, and a final standard recommendation submitted
to the Board by November 1, 2006.
Nature of Deliverables
Working group deliverables will include:
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Minutes from Working
Group conference calls and face-to-face meetings as well as working
documents published on a Working Group sharepoint website.
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Publication as
Informational Document of a Requirements document for this effort prior to
the specification writing process.
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Adopt and/or design
technologies for next version of OEBPS; generate IDPF specification thereof.
Following
publication of the specification, the Working Group will encourage vendors to
produce the following:
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Sample implementations
of content creator, publisher and conversion house use of the specification
as a
cross-reading system interchange and production format used to create
proprietary or alternate content formats
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Sample implementations for OEBPS compliant Reading Systems to use next
version of OEBPS and OEBPS Unified Container Format as a final publication
delivery format.
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Conformance-checking
tool for both the Unified OEBPS Container Format and the embedded OEBPS
publication to help ensure cross-Reading System interoperability.
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Enhanced versions of
various Reading Systems that can take the Unified OEBPS Container Format and
embedded OEBPS 2.0 publications as input for presentation or preview.
Intellectual Property and IDPF Corporate
Documents
All
work in the Working Group will be in compliance with the IDPF membership
agreement, intellectual property policy, anti-trust documents, policies and
procedures and bylaws of the IDPF. The Working Group will retain open
& patent-unencumbered status of the OEBPS format.
Work Schedule
- Gather and agree on requirements to achieve scope of
charter from new industry input as well as from OEBPS 2.0 efforts
- Consider proposals for meeting requirements and
determine direction
- Write and review initial working draft
- Iterate and refine based on comments and experience
from implementers.
- Publication of Specification
The
Working Group estimates submission of a specification to the IDPF output process
by November 1, 2006.
Meeting Schedule
Bi-weekly or more frequent 1-hour teleconferences, with face-to-face meetings
during steps 1 through 4 of the work schedule.
Communication to IDPF Members
All
Working Group documents will be made available to all IDPF Members via the
Working Group’s IDPF Intranet. Working Group Chairs will be available to Board
for updates on the progress of the Working Group. All IDPF members will be
encouraged to participate in the Working Group as well as select Invited Experts
to be selected by the Working Group.
Estimated Time Commitment for IDPF Members
Working Group
members are expected to attend bi-weekly or more frequent 1-hour teleconference
calls. In addition, Working Group members are expected to attend one or more
face–to-face meetings during steps 1 through 4 of the work schedule above. Face
to face meetings are usually 2 day conferences and usually take place in New
York City. Travel expenses are not paid for, but food is provided during the
meetings.
Working Group
members are also expected to volunteer additional time for technical research,
specification drafting and other activities pursued by the Working Group. This
off-call, and off-face-to-face time investment should range from 3-10 hours per
month during the height of specification design and drafting.
Members of Working
Group
Andy Henrick (eReader.com)
Andy Williams (Cambridge University Press)
Angel Ancin (iRex Technologies)
Ben Trafford - Invited Expert
Bill McCoy, Adobe (Adobe Systems, Inc.)
Birgitte Elbek (Greenwood Publishing Inc.)
Brady Duga, (eBook Technologies, Inc.) - Working Group Chair
Clint Brauer (SONY)
Eli Willner (Green Point Technology Services)
Elizabeth Mackey (eReader.com)
Garth Conboy, (eBook Technologies, Inc.) - Working Group Chair
Gary Taylor (Motricity)
Gary Varnell (Osoft.com)
Geoff Freed (NCAM at the WGBH Educational Foundation)
George Kerscher (DAISY Consortium)
Jan van de Kamer (iRex Technologies)
Janice Carter (Benetech)
Jason E. Barkeloo (Somatic Digital)
Jennifer Sutton (Benetech)
Jerry Bloom (Treasures Media Inc.)
John Rivlin (eBook Technologies, Inc.) - Working Group Chair
Johnson Lee (Prime View International)
Jon Noring (OpenReader Consortium) - Invited Expert
Jonathan Hevenstone (Publishing Dimensions) - Working Group Vice-Chair
Linh N. Do (Random House)
Markus Gylling (DAISY Consortium)
Mike Smith (Harlequin)
Neil De Young (Hachette Book Group)
Nick Bogaty (IDPF) - Working Group Secretary
Peter Sorotokin (Adobe Systems Inc.)
Rick Bowes - Invited Expert
Ric Wright (Adobe Systems Inc.)
Richard Cohn (Adobe Systems Inc.)
Rick Johnson (Vital Source Technologies)
Ron Stewart (Dolphin Computer Access)
Sean Allison (Motricity)
Steve Kotrch, (Simon & Schuster)
Tyler Ruse (Codemantra)
William Younts (Motricity)
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