You’ve already read of the footnote debate; just how important are FNs in the hyperlink era? Are pop-ups the solution? Even with P books—see photo—things could be better.
Now here’s another for you. How should scholarly publishers point readers to specific locations within books? Might paragraph marks be the way to go? But then what to do about new editions? Check out an excellent MobileRead discussion overlapping somewhat with earlier dialogue in the TeleBlog.
The .epub angle: Remember, we’re talking reflowable text, which is great for general usability but complicates matters. Hello, IDPF? What’s the latest on this issue. Perhaps Jon Noring, an invited expert to the IDPF, can fill people in.
And speaking of the IDPF—annotations, this time: Hey, guys, we haven’t forgotten the annotations issue. Is a genuine IDPF standard coming? According to Jon, the W3C never got around to officially blessing the Annotea standard. Also check out some of Jon’s general thoughts on digital annotations and his related post, Annotating Life.
See Rothman, David, “Page numbering, paragraph marks, whatever—just how should scholarly publishers point readers?” from “Remember, we’re” to “but complicates matters”, viewed on November 7, 2007.
Speaking of annotations, I posted earlier under a related TeleRead subject: http://newteleread.com/wordpress/blog/?p=7496#comment-608984
If this part of the DTBook spec is included, then epub already has a way to do bookmarks, highlighting and annotations. Would anyone like to clarify whether this is included in epub or not?
The Bible does pretty well with Chapter and Verse.
In other books, Chapter and Sentence?
Joseph, even though OPS 2.0 (which is inside the EPub container) supports DTBook well enough that a DTBook Publication can easily be made to conform to OPS 2.0, this does not mean that EPub requires support for the unique features in DTBook. The only “DTBook” requirement is that all OPS 2.0 Publications must include the DTBook NCX, which is the machine-readable table of contents.
Thus, to support the items you list for EPub would require subsetting EPub, pretty much requiring the OPS 2.0 Publication conforms with DTBook.
Jon, thanks for the reply. I knew that the NCX file came from DTBook. Also, the OPS spec says that DTBook is valid markup for use as content (along with XHTML). DTBook is further mentioned in this section of the spec: http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/OPS_2.0_final_spec.html#Section1.4.1.3
As the DTBook spec was mentioned in that section, you can see why I wasn’t sure if all parts of the spec were included or not. Perhaps the parts of DTBook that aren’t supported by OPS should be specifically listed, to avoid confusion.
Speaking of DTBook – DTBook mark-up includes special way to denote the page boundaries in the content. I think the page numbers in some shape or form won’t die (at least until eBooks oversell paper books – if ever).