Is HTML5 the Future of Book Authorship? 116
occidental writes "Sanders Kleinfeld writes: In the past six years, the rise of the ebook has ushered in three successive revolutions that have roiled and reshaped the traditional publishing industry. Revolution #3 isn't really defined by a new piece of hardware, software product, or platform. Instead, it's really marked by a dramatic paradigm change among authors and publishers, who are shifting their toolsets away from legacy word processing and desktop publishing suites, and toward HTML5 and tools built on the Open Web Platform."
No, But Maybe. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LaTeX anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
The thing is that the current set of problems are not the same set that was solved so well by TeX and LaTeX. The focus of publishing is shifting from the printed page to the mobile digital screen. This brings a host of new issues and opens great new possibilities. Now we look for personalization, user interactivity, multiple media types, and the ability to link to and incorporate material from sources around the net.
HTML5 though has a ways to go to generate the workflow and ecosystem necessary to support large scale publishing. As noted by Sanders though, O'Reilly seems to be making progress in using HTML5 for significant publishing efforts.
The current publishing paradigm has significant momentum, not only in technology, but in how may practitioners think about the problem. An amazing amount of digital content carries over the same representations and style that was used when printing to paper. We can do so much more with modern tools.
Of course I have thought that this shift was due for the past 15 years. Perhaps publishers will now look at the web as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Re:Obligatory answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
This is correct. Mod parent up. No disrespect to HTML5, but it is not going to play any key role for "authorship," (which is, although beside the point, absolutely the incorrect term for the query; "publishing and distribution" is what is meant and what should have been used).
Any writing will be composed however the author feels most comfortable or creative, via pen and paper, dictation, typewriter, or word processor. They're NOT going to compose and tag HTML code for crissakes! I realize some of you supernerds have already, good for you, but no one cares. Write with the method you want to write with, Napoleon. GOSH!
Any written work, or book of images, or any combination of the medium, that is ever intended to be physically printed en mass, is going to be normalized as PDF no matter what the original form of the composition, even if it is a book of mathematics that is typeset in LaTeX, even if it is a small run of physical books and the majority of the tokens are sold as eBooks. If it is going to press, it will be PDF at some point. PDF is fine for digital distribution, but it is not ideal for eReaders, per se, unless the digital consumer desires a digital representation to be identical content to the printed book, in which case PDF is ideal.
IMO, there will be no single winner of the digital formats, because there's plenty of room for all of them, and then some. It's digital... who cares? Let's give the consumer some choice, it will make no significant difference in cost. Publish your book, print and sell the hardbound and softbound editions, and make available PDF, ePub, and Kindle format, Plaintext, DjVu, CHM, HTML, and sure, whiz bang HTML5 with JavaScript and video if you want... and any other versions for the digital consumer. There's no problem. Stop evangelizing the need for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Re:Obligatory answer: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes, HTML5 is the future of publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
In physical publishing, the industry has long adopted PDF. It is ideal for printing.
...but it absolutely SUCKS for reading on any kind of screen. It hardly ever reflows properly. Even on a large PC screen it's a pain to read a multicolumn pdf: you are always going up and down because top and bottom of page are outside the screen. You can imagine on an ereader... It's also very resource intensive on phone/ereader.
Re:Obligatory answer: (Score:2, Insightful)
The "vertical-align" property only functions as a general vertical alignment tool in table-cells. Now that we have "display: table-cell" in basically all modern browsers, this is more or less sufficient, but it's still a far cry from being as simple as you've made it out here.
Columns are HUGELY more complex to build than they have any right to be, and they are fragile in any number of cases where they shouldn't be. Support for true multi-column content panes is far from where it should be.
Saying "the developer builds their own" is the same as saying "one is not provided." Whether it should be provided is a worthy argument, but it's not a foregone conclusion, and calling the OP a poser isn't remotely justified here.
Doing rich interface design is unquestionably clunkier in HTML/CSS/JS than in dedicated GUI toolkits on the desktop; I don't agree with the parent that it's not suitable for any real work, but your dismissing him out of hand isn't remotely fair. And it's pretty clear that he's not a "poser web dev," but rather a native dev who's used to more explicitly specified layout mechanics (that is, not having to work around the assumptions inherent to HTML as a descendant of a width-specified static document format.
Re:Yes, HTML5 is the future of publishing (Score:5, Insightful)