Today's eBook market is dynamic, fast-changing and strong. eBooks compete with printed versions, and there is a wide choice of hardware and software available for eBook readers. Nevertheless, there is still work to do in order to reach users in their local language and script.

Following on from the first W3C Workshop on Electronic Books and the Open Web Platform in New York in February, this second workshop in Japan gathered requirements for eBooks in global markets and investigated international functionality that needs to be added to the Open Web Platform.

The Open Web Platform includes core W3C technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG, XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, PNG, RDF, and many more, that are already extensively in eBooks and eBook production.

The workshop was held in Tokyo, Japan, on 4 June 2013, and was hosted by W3C/Keio University.

See the workshop report.

Goals

Identify and prioritize requirements for extensions and additions to the Open Web Platform for eBook contents, applications and services that will improve the use of Web technologies for handling multiple languages.

Workshop topics

Possible topics included, but were not limited to the following:

• Use cases of eBooks based on the state-of-the-art digital publishing markets in non-English speaking countries.
• Requirements for extensions to the Open Web Platform to improve the use of Web technologies for handling multiple languages.
• Issues with high-level language specific text layout, e.g., vertical layout and ruby text, tone marks, and other linguistic features.
• How to handle language specific fonts and characters.
• Sentence structure and word boundaries.
• Metadata to manage eBooks databases and provide quick and convenient search services.

Expected participants

To ensure productive discussions, the Workshop included sessions which are primarily technical, but grounded in business needs.

We invited representatives to submit papers that helped us bring together knowledge in the following topic areas:

1. the development and deployment of eBooks, including related authoring tools, application software, search engines, service providers, etc.
2. requirements for supporting regional language and script needs in eBooks.
3. gaps and priorities in the specifications that underly the Open Web Platform in terms of regional language and script support for eBook deployment.