Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host Jen Simmons, and this is Episode 52. We first want to say thank you so much to today's sponsor, Environments for Humans, with their upcoming WordPress Summit, CSS Summit, and CSS Dev Conference. I'll talk more about them later in the show. They've been a great long-term supporter and sponsor, so thank you.

So today I thought we would talk about EPUB and eBooks and electronic books. What's up with that? HTML, HTML5 and web technologies seem to be converging with the ePublishing / eBook world, which means that if you're a person who knows how to write HTML, CSS, JavaScript, that kind of stuff, you will increasingly will be a person who perhaps knows how to make eBooks. So I really wanted to dig into what's going on in that world and understand the technology better as well as understand what eBook is and will be.

So I've been looking for awhile for somebody to be on the show who could really help us understand this, and I found Nellie McKesson. Hi Nellie!

Nellie

Hi Jen!

Jen

Nellie is a Digital Development Manager at O'Reilly Media.

Nellie

That is correct.

Jen

Where you plan and implement and envision awesome new stuff for a really great company.

Nellie

Yeah. I'm really lucky to work here.

Jen

[00:01:45] It feels like O'Reilly — I don't want to say more than other book companies, but maybe more than other book companies (laughs) — seems to really be innovating this medium. O'Reilly has a conference—

Nellie

[00:02:02] Tools of Change, or TOC for short.

Jen

Tools of Change. Isn't this like a giant conference on this question of EPUBs and HTML5?

Nellie

Yeah, it's a huge deal. I think most of the execs from the big publishing houses come, and also all the smaller publishers or people who are just starting to get into self-publishing come and try and wrap their heads around what is changing and what's developing in the digital and print publishing worlds.

Jen

I dove in[to this field] myself in the last year for a project I was working on, and I didn't actually know about this conference — and then suddenly I realized not only would I have benefitted greatly by attending it, but it was happening right that minute in the city that I was in. And I was like, "I can't believe I'm not there."

[00:02:49] It feels like there's a whole other world that's a little separate from the web world, or the web world that some of us are used to being part of, or conferences we go to, or people we know, people we follow on Twitter. There's this whole other world of people who are redefining and inventing book publishing, having to do with technology.

Nellie

It's true. And it's actually really unfortunate that it is so separate because, as we're going to talk about today, these publishing technologies that are developing are so intricately intertwined with web technologies, especially HTML5, CSS, JavaScript. So the fact that most of these people aren't web people and aren't immersed in that world really sets them back and makes it a lot harder for them to understand how to approach these technologies and really develop their products.

Jen

[00:03:36] It feels like there's more and more attention these days in web design and responsive web design especially — not because of responsive design, but hand-in-hand parallel to this transfer to responsive — is sort of a rethinking of reading on the web and how to make things readable and beautiful. And typography, all the new fonts. Sort of saying, "We could change the whole layout of this page and redefine the navigation, and change the reading experience." And who better to know how to design a quality reading experience than the book industry?

Nellie

Yeah, you would think so. I think a lot of the digital publishing design right now is actually being driven by the device makers, people like Apple and their iBooks reader or even Amazon and their various Kindle devices, they're really the ones who are dictating what eBooks look like today. I'm hoping that's going to change in the near future.

Jen

[00:04:42] Will you remind us for people who know, or tell us for people who really weren't paying attention, a kind of off-the-cuff history of electronic publication of books?

Nellie

I can tell you as much as I know (laughs). One of the original eBook formats and one that everyone is familiar with is of course the PDF, which is just a fixed page, looks just like a printed book basically, but you can open it on a computer.

And then EPUB came along, and that was a way to package HTML files or XML file, or some kind of markup, and put it on a computer and parse it as a book. So EPUB 2, or 2.1 maybe, was the standard for a long time. And it was great at packaging books that were primarily text-based. It wasn't great at adding any kind of multimedia or interactivity or the kind of thing that you might expect today to be included in a digital file that you would see on the Internet.

Then we had EPUB 3, which just started being developed -- I think the spec was released officially at the beginning of 2012. I might be wrong about that. At some point in the last year and a half it was officially released. The goal with EPUB 3 was to really bring EPUB in line with web technologies. EPUB 2 was already based on web technologies for the most part, but with EPUB 3 they really wanted to officially align them. And they wanted to bring in some of that multimedia handling, the ability to add video or audio, the ability to include JavaScript in your book files, while at the same time maintaining a very high level of accessibility. A huge part of the EPUB spec is to maintain accessibility for any reader.

Jen

This is one person sitting way off on the side having no insight into how things actually work, but it felt like PDF was, "We need a digital version of our book, so let's just take pictures of them." We actually have pictures of them now that we create them digitally.

It used to be you created your book by hand or through a lot of photography You'd shoot pictures of type sitting on a page in order to get something to put on the printing press. But then it became digital in the 1980s, to where typesetting and typing was done on a Mac, or later on other computers, with Pagemaker, and even before Pagemaker. You already had a digital copy, let's just take a pure version of that and we'll just print it out.

I guess the advantage of PDF is that you could have all kinds of colors, you could do any layout you wanted, you could have your photographs look like really big, beautiful photographs.

[00:007:58] But really, isn't it typically that PDFs are just giant pictures of text?

Nellie

They can be, but I think that's really oversimplifying. Because in PDFs you can still select text, and text is at the heart of the technology. It is actually rendered as text data, not as image data, if you're creating them correctly.

Jen

If I just hit Print > Save As PDF, I don't know that's going to, for accessibility purposes for example, to have a screen reader be able to read the text that's in a PDF. Or to be able to highlight a section and copy it so you can paste it into something else and quote it.

Nellie

Exactly. So if you're just scanning in pages on a scanner, that's going to just be an image. But if you're creating the PDF correctly, then it will be selectable text. And it will be mostly usable. The downside is that it's not resizable. So if you want to see the whole page on your screen and you just have a 13-inch MacBook Air, the text is going to be pretty tiny, which makes the usability a little bit diminished.

Jen

Yeah. It doesn't ever reflow, it doesn't change shape or size.

09:12 But I guess if people are creating PDFs, they could and should go out of their way to figure out how to create them "correctly," so that they're less problematic for accessibility reasons.

Nellie

Yeah. Most programs that are used today to create actual professional books, so programs like InDesign is a big one, they automatically will save that text as text data and make the text readable for accessibility purposes.

Jen

[00:09:43] But also, PDFs are flat, right? So it's as if it were a piece of paper, they don't do anything, they don't change state. There's no video in a PDF.

Nellie

No. There were some attempts to add some at some point in the past. I remember playing around with that. But nothing ever came of it.

Jen

[00:10:01} And then the Kindle came out in 2007.

Nellie

Ah, the Kindle (laughs). Let's talk about the Kindle.

Jen

Explain the Kindle, what's up with that? It's clearly not the first eBook reader, but it felt kind of like the first big one that hit a mass consumer market.

Nellie

Amazon did a really smart thing for themselves. They made this e-reader and they actually put a lot of work into making it really usable and nice. I have a Kindle and I love using it, because they did put so much thought into it.

But they also decided to make up their own book format to go with their product. It's called a MOBI. It's sort of based on EPUB, but it has a much more limited feature set and styling support. Amazon used their status as one of the major book sellers in the world, and they insisted that publishers supply all of their files in this MOBI format. And then of course customers would just get the MOBI and put it right onto their Kindle and they wouldn't know the difference. But they can only be read on the Kindle or Kindle apps. And the Kindle can't read any other format. It can't read just an open source EPUB or something.

So the problem with the MOBI file format is it has much more limited support for styling and HTML elements in general. I think it's based on HTML 3.2 or something ridiculous. If you look at the list of supported CSS selectors (PDF), it's just laughable. Which makes creating this file really difficult because publishers then have to incorporate some really graceful degradation into their files so they can supply them to all the different channels that they need to.

Jen

[00:12:19] So it seems like, looking at a Kindle, it feels like the user changes the text size and maybe the publisher picked the font? Or is there just five fonts in there and as a publisher, that's what people use?

Nellie

Publishers can embed some fonts. Font embedding in eBook files is kind of a touchy subject. I think we at O'Reilly at least try to just trust the device default fonts as much as possible. But you can add your own fonts. The Kindle Paperwhite doesn't ship with a monospaced font, and so many O'Reilly books include lots of code blocks. So we do ship our files with a monospaced font embedded, so that our readers can see the code blocks in monospaced font on the Kindle.

Jen

It almost feels like the Kindle and the MOBI was designed for summer novel reading.

Nellie

Yeah. They definitely were. Until very recently, they didn't even have adequate support for tables. So if you had a table that spanned more than 3 columns, it didn't render at all. It would just get cut off at the edge of the page. We used to get so many complaints about that. There was all this dancing that you had to do. "Should we convert the table to an image and put it in the file that way? But then what about the EPUB? Do we have to maintain these two whole different sets of source files?" So they did finally expand their support for tables. But that's just a really basic non-prose element that they couldn't even support right off the bat.

Jen

[00:14:02] And is the Nook very similar?

Nellie

The Nook is much better. The Nook reads EPUB, it doesn't read MOBI. They don't have their own proprietary format. It depends which device you're reading, of course, as with the Kindle. With the Kindle there are so many different devices, there's the Fire, there's the Paperwhite, there's the Keyboard. The Nook has, I don't remember the names, something like the Nook Simple Touch, the Nook tablet, whatever that one is called. Generally the tablet-type devices have much better support than the E Ink devices. But the Nook has alright support for styling.

Let's step back a minute. The EPUB spec recommends that devices support all the HTML elements and anything that is included in the EPUB spec should be supported by the device makers and by the apps that are reading these files. But that's just not the case. A lot of these device makers will choose to support a subset of elements, maybe because of whatever they're using to build their browser software that's reading the file, or just because they think that they have a better sense of what people are going to want to see.

But it makes developing these files really difficult because you have to think about graceful degradation. You have to think about, "I can do pretty much whatever I want and it will show up great in iBooks, but if I transfer it over to, say, a Kobo, they don't support all of the things that iBooks supports, so how can I make sure that it looks good everywhere?"

So this is actually a part of why EPUB 3 is so great, because EPUB 3 builds in much better semantic markup, because it's based on HTML5, which already has great semantic markup improvements. And the more semantic your markup is, the better the default rendering is. If you just tag everything in your file as a <p> and try and rely on the CSS to style it differently, when it goes onto a device that has poorer support for CSS, it's not going to render the way that you want it to.

Jen

[00:16:34] This whole thing sounds like HTML 4. I don't mean XHTML 1.1 that was right before HTML5, I mean back in the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape 3 and HTML 4. Different computers were so different from each other. And the color space of a PC and the color space of a Mac were radically different.

Nellie

Right. That's a really great analogy. The browsers were still really evolving, and they hadn't really built in all the support that they have now. And so when you're cross-testing across these browsers, it's such a different landscape, and you have to be really careful. So it's the same exact situation right now with these different reading devices.

Jen

Back in those days, it was intentional on the part of the browser makers, to have differences, because they wanted a competitive advantage. So it sounds familiar, talking about the Kindle and the Nook. Especially the Kindle, Amazon doing something completely separate and proprietary on their own. And it is kind of like, "Okay, kids, we've been around this block, and it doesn't really work out. Why don't you learn from this thing that we just did last decade or two decades ago, and have a standard that everybody agrees to and everybody agrees to implement exactly the same as each other?" And then we can have a much more interesting experience and a much more interesting industry focusing on how to innovate given the standard, rather than how to destroy each other by refusing to support standards.

Nellie

Yeah. That would be great. I think that's sort of the goal of EPUB and the IDPF Working Group, who are the people behind developing these kinds of technologies.

[00:18:16] A problem is that these devices are made to render the information, but an inherent part of the EPUB package is that it has all these extra little data points about navigation, like the Table of Contents, or how to move through the chapters. So the device makers need to build some kind of UI mechanism to interpret those. It just lends to the competitive advantage thing again. "So how can we do this the best possible way, and how can we do this differently? How can we implement this functionality differently?" It leads to the devices really imposing some design elements on top of the files that you're loading, but compromises the publisher's ability to really have complete control over what readers are seeing and how the spec is interpreted.

Jen

[00:19:16] I've noticed as I've bought books over the last couple of year that the PDF tends to be really beautiful. I have an iPad so I toss the PDF in my iPad, and I like it because the line spacing is nice, and the typography looks good. But if I want to blow that up, the only thing I can do is pinch it and make the whole page bigger. Then I have to scroll side to side, and that's annoying.

So, I've got this other file, so I open up the EPUB file and it's better because I can highlight text and see the highlighting in the notes section of iBooks. But the line spacing is jacked up, and there's no user adjustment for line spacing in iBooks for whatever reason. So it's sometimes hard to read because the line spacing is way too tight, or things just feel awkward. The margins around the headlines are awkward or somehow off.

Nellie

Yeah. It's so true. A lot of the reason why those things aren't designed by the publisher is that many devices just don't support that kind of styling. There is a sense of "why even bother if a device isn't going to support it?"

And then you add on top of that the device decides to implement a running header in its own way, or it decides it has to present you with the buttons where you can increase the font size and stuff, and it tacks that onto the book file itself, or the actual book page itself. So if you open up your file in iBooks, you have the book page, and included on the actual book page, not as a menu bar, but actually on the page, are these buttons and this footer and these navigation things that just make it much harder to design a really beautiful seamless reading experience.

Jen

[00:21:12] So with EPUB 2 is it possible to make a really gorgeous book that's going to look really beautiful in iBooks, and have great line height, and no awkwardness? Is that possible right now? And publishers are just sort of not doing it because of efficiencies and production chains? Or is there a limitation with the technology where it's next to impossible and we tried for days or weeks or months but we gave up?

Nellie

I don't want to say it's impossible. I don't like anything to be impossible. There is this format called fixed-layout EPUB, and that is a way to create a fixed-paged EPUB where it's much more like a PDF page, and you do have complete control over every element on the page and where everything sits exactly and how the images work within the text. You run into the same problem there, where if your pages have a lot of text you can't really increase that text size much. They're a little bit harder to read. They don't have the same usability benefits that a reflowable EPUB does, where a reader can resize the text. But that is an option.

Not many people do it because it's actually really difficult. It takes a lot of work to make these files, and there's a lot of custom coding that goes into it. And the fixed-layout format actually differs across different devices, so there are few other tablets that also support fixed-layout. But they each have a slightly different spec for how to code your fixed-layout files. Which means that you'd basically have to maintain multiple different files if you wanted to go that route, which just isn't practical for most publishers.

So with a regular reflowable EPUB, you can put a lot of thought into it, and a lot of work, and try and work with these limitations that are imposed on you by the reading system. And you can make something that is pretty and that fits well with the reading system and works. I redesigned our EPUBs really recently, and I think I did an alright job. I thought really hard about it and did the best I could. And I think they look really really nice. But you just can't get the same kind of control and results as you could if you didn't have these extra limitations imposed on you by the reading system.

Jen

[00:23:52] What are some resources for people who want to create EPUB 2 files and have them be as good-looking and successful as possible? What kind of places can people go to learn more about how do that, or what those limitations are?

Nellie

The best way to go about it to start is just to look at the different devices that are out there. It's not practical for everybody to just go buy one of every single device, there are so many. But do some Googling, look at some screenshots, look at how these different devices have decided to implement the extra functionality like where the font choices button goes, or where the running header goes, or what the navigational elements are that are also on the page. Just try to think about those as you're writing your CSS and think about how that's going to look when it's combined with your content.

Jen

[00:24:55] It does seem similar to the web, although much more antiquated perhaps. If you're writing CSS, then write the CSS and test it on several different devices and realize that the one you're looking at, maybe the line height looks great, but over here it looks really bad, so you need to open it up over here a little bit bigger than you would normally want it, so that over here it looks decent.

Nellie

Really the only foolproof way to make sure it's going to look good is to test it on as many devices as you can.

Jen

[00:25:29] And so if people are building EPUB books or digital books in late 2011 to now, but being conservative and not really future-looking, then what do they need to make? They need to make an EPUB 2 file and a MOBI file and a PDF? Is that what people typically do, and sell all three?

Nellie

That's the standard package: the EPUB file, which is read on most devices, and then the MOBI file which is for Amazon, and then the PDF for people who want PDF. We've actually found that PDF is still our most popular format among our customers.

Jen

[00:26:07] And you're selling mostly technical books, so that might be part of why.

Nellie

I think a lot of our readers have their book open on the computer screen while they're coding next to it, so that makes a lot of sense.

Jen

Or I was thinking they would want to really see the code examples cleanly, and the tables, and the pictures and the color.

Nellie

Sure, yeah.

Jen

They're not sitting on the beach reading it on their Kindle.

Nellie

(laughs) Well, maybe.

Jen

Some people are, I'm sure… there are many of us who will be reading JavaScript how-to books on the beach this summer.

Jen

[00:31:18] So, the future. Is everything about the future EPUB 3? Are there other contenders right now?

Nellie

There are. The big debate right now is EPUB 3 or just straight-up HTML5.

The benefit of EPUB 3 is that it is a packaged format, which means that you can take it offline and load it onto your devices, and you can read it on the beach if you want to, when you don't have a wireless connection. But the downsides of EPUB 3 are all still there. They're all the same ones. It's the device support, it's the different device handling for these design elements.

I think a lot of people have started to shift their focus to "What would happen if we just made HTML versions of our books, and we streamed them online, or maybe we build our own custom app that allows for cached reading or something?" Because that way you're not fettered by all of this new pseudo-browser development, this HTML 4 landscape of support. You can really target your code and your development to the modern state of the web, which is just so much more advanced and so much better than where eReaders are currently.

Jen

[00:32:47] I was reading about EPUB 3 awhile back, and I was getting kind of excited about it. It sounded really cool. Is it?

Nellie

Oh yeah. It's definitely cool. It's hands down better than everything we used to have. If the only question was "is EPUB 3 great and should we use it?" then the answer would be "yes, it's great and yes, we should use it." But unfortunately there's the other question of the devices that are made to read it. That's where the real problem is.

Jen

Yeah, it's not well supported. I remember the new version of iBooks that came out in October 2012 started supporting it, and that was kind of it. Is that right?

Nellie

Yeah, that's still for the most part right. The different devices have varied support for various different pieces of EPUB 3. There's actually a really good Excel spreadsheet that, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) maintains, that lists the majority of the devices that are out there and what pieces of the EPUB 3 spec they actually do support. And iBooks has mostly yeses through all the columns, but they're the only one.

Jen

[00:34:09] We'll get to HTML5. I think that's a good debate. But just EPUB 3 by itself, what kinds of things can a publisher do using EPUB 3 that were not possible? I feel like many of us know if we've had a chance to mess around with a tablet, or a Nook, or a Kindle, or iPad, or Android tablet, or whatever, we kind of know what we're talking about when we talk about "what is an eBook?" But it feels like EPUB 3 is a whole other thing, that many of us haven't actually seen EPUB 3 books yet. We may not realize how different they could be, and what kinds of things are possible if you're creating an EPUB 3 book for, at the moment, iBooks. You could really kind of change everything about the way the book works, and the layout of the book, and do something really interesting. So what kinds of things are possible with EPUB 3?

Nellie

Let's see. To name a few: you can include multimedia stuff, so you can include video and audio in your book.

Jen

Video you could do in EPUB 2, couldn't you? Kind of clunky and simple.

Nellie

Yeah. You can use the new <video> and <audio> tags in EPUB 3 with the different formats that are supported. I guess it's H264 or WebM.

Jen

And make it more beautiful and elegant and integrated rather than awkwardly stuck on the page.

Nellie

Right. Exactly. You can also include JavaScript, which is huge and really great. I think everybody already knows the wonderful value of Javascript.

Jen

[00:35:50] And is it all of JavaScript? I remember reading something about a debate in the EPUB community whether or not to include JavaScript because people are afraid it was going to be too much power for the evil masters.

Nellie

The debate there as far as I understand it is that they really want to keep EPUB 3 as an accessible format, a format that can be used by anybody. When you're writing JavaScript, there's a tendency to add tons of stuff that's injected with JavaScript or manipulated with JavaScript. When you do that, that content isn't necessarily available to accessible reading devices. So their recommendation and what's built into the spec is actually to only include Javascript that manipulates the content in a way so that every piece of the content is still available to these accessible screen readers, so that every reader has the same access to exactly the same content, and you're not limiting a reader's access to your content by harnessing JavaScript in that way.

Jen

So developers: don't screw it up.

Nellie

Yes.

Jen

[00:37:18] But it got included. Is it a subset of Javascript, or sort of a constrained version, in order to try to keep developers from doing bad things? Or is it all of JavaScript?

Nellie

I don't think it's a subset. I might be wrong about that. I think it's all of JavaScript. They just say in the spec "make sure that you're not fettering your content or making your readers have a decreased reading experience if they can't read that JavaScript."

Jen

[00:37:45] Which is completely true. It's one of the things I can easily rant about for a long time. Why are people taking content that's getting put on the web, and instead of wrapping it in HTML, marking it up with HTML, and putting it on the web and then doing fancy stuff in JavaScript, they're delivering an empty page and then adding the stuff. Don't destroy what the web is at it's very core. You need to be able to have your website work. You turn off all the JavaScript and all the CSS, and the content is still actually there. You have to redefine "work," what does that mean? But if you're a newspaper website and you're delivering news articles to people, you should be delivering those news articles. But we've been seeing a lot of people — Twitter was infamously doing it for a long time — where they're treating the web as a big container for their custom application, and they deliver nothing and then they inject everything in with JavaScript. It's just wrong.

Nellie

It is wrong. It's so easy to understand the temptation. I mean, look at all the things you can do with it. But you do have to really be careful. I think the web has come a long way in understanding the accessibility needs for people. The EPUB working group is trying to maintain that viewpoint.

Jen

It seems like books are that much more important. Because books hold thousands of years of knowledge of the history of the world and humanity and everything we think about all the time. Literacy and the ability to read, and the ability to read in other languages, even if you have some kind of disability that makes it really hard to look at letters on the page, or you can't see letters on the page for whatever reason. There's so many ways that people have not been able to read written books.

And digital books have this tremendous potential to close that gap, because you can click a little button and have the book read to you. iOS especially is incredibly accessible. Voiceover on an iPad and being able to read a book is a miracle, instead of needing a book on tape.

Books on tape are still cool because they're human beings reading instead of robots reading. I used to have a friend in college who'd write all her professors before the semester started, buy all her textbooks ahead of time, and her mother would collect all her books and sit down and read all the assignments into a tape recorder and then mail her the tapes so she could listen to the tapes. An incredible amount of work. So now instead of doing that, she could get the books in an electronic format — maybe her mom would have done a few books like that — but not have to do all of them to get around dyslexia that made it hard for her to actually read the words on the page. I'm glad that the publishing industry is really taking it seriously.

I'm ranting about this now because I feel like developers need to continue to carry that torch, be the keepers of a belief that this technology really should be open and it should be available, so many different kinds of people are able to read books. And not somehow screw this up.

Nellie

Yeah. It's a hard challenge finding a balance between building in these interactive things that we suddenly have the ability to do, and maintaining that kind of openness and accessibility to the content. I think the publishers and the working groups and the device makers are all trying think about that a lot. We'll find some balance. It might take us a little while, though.

Jen

That's where the philosophy of progressive enhancement, where the ability to read what's on the page is available to everybody, and then maybe this ability to visually adjust something and have it visually modify itself is not available to everybody. Because there's no way to translate that into an audio format, or vice versa. Maybe somebody who can't hear anything, and there's an audio segment of the book where someone reads something out loud, and there's just going to be no translation of that. It's the enhancements that not everybody gets. But the real important parts everyone continues to get. End rant. (both laugh)

Nellie

[00:42:30] So actually your rant ties really well into another new thing in EPUB 3, which is media overlays. Which means that you can tie audio clips to your content and have it read aloud with the audio of your choosing. You can have Morgan Freeman or whoever do some narration and you can tag it to be tied to specific paragraphs, but it actually does read along with the text. It could maybe highlight the words as it's going through them.

Jen

[00:43:04] That's where it starts to get exciting to me. What does it mean as an author, as someone who wrote a book, instead of writing 150 pages about web technology or science, chemistry, just sequentially in a straight narrative, what does it mean to read these two pages and then listen to this thing, and then watch this movie, and then you try out this code example in a code editor, and then you read some more? It feels like writing changes a bit when you've got all these different modalities to toggle in and out of.

Nellie

It's an interesting question. It kind of segues into the question of "what is a book now?" What is the role of a content creator? I started calling them content creators now instead of just authors, because they really are these integrated content creators, and they're creating so much more than just words on the page.

Jen

[00:44:13] It's like the difference between writing a blog post about a web technology — I'm just assuming people who listen to this show read and watch and listen to a lot of information about web technology. Someone who wants to do a conference presentation or someone who does a blog post, or someone who writes a book, or someone choosing to do a conference presentation with HTML slides versus doing them with Keynote slides or PowerPoint slides. All those little choices. It's sort of the same question. What's the best delivery format for this information? Even if everyone is teaching about border radius in CSS3, there are so many different ways to teach about border radius in CSS3. It feels like that's part of what EPUB 3 is unlocking, is the ability to get away from just straight text with a couple pictures or tiny videos or small tables that are half broken.

Nellie

Exactly. You can really enhance the reading experience so much. It's a very fine line because you want to make sure that you actually are enhancing the reading experience and that this is the best possible way to present the content. You don't want to just add video and audio because you can, but because it really adds to the content and really is the best way for the reader to grasp the concept that you're trying to present.

[Transcript in progress. Check back later for the rest.]