Introducing nextPub at O’Reilly Tools of Change
Posted On Monday, February 21, 2011 at at 1:04 PM by Dianne Kennedyi M back in Chicagoland, reviewing my week at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference. One highlight of my week was our session on February 15, “Introducing nextPub™; Bringing Complex Content to the eReader Channel.”
Joining me on the panel were Peter Meirs, VP of Production Technologies, Time Inc. and Chairman of the IDEAlliance nextPub Initiative and Penny Sullivan, VP of Editorial Operations and Technologies, Meredith Corporation. Meirs and Sullivan provided the audience with the use case for nextPub; with Peter addressing Magazine content and Penny addressing requirements for display books such as the gardening and cookbooks produced by Meredith. Both indicated they were looking for a mechanism to bring their complex, interactive content to the iPad and emerging tablet channel efficiently and easily.
It is important to understand the differences between ePub and nextPub. ePub 2.0 and the newly announced ePub 3.0 Specifications provide a standardized packaging and delivery format for the eReader channel. nextPub, on the other hand, is the IDEAlliance technology incubator with a clear mission to foster the development of next-generation publishing tools and workflows by embracing emerging technologies, developing best practices, recommendations and establishing industry specifications to make multi-channel publishing simple and efficient.
One work item for nextPub is to define semantically rich metadata and XML source content based on the IDEAlliance PRISM XML Specification. The first draft of the nextPub XML
Source Content Encoding Specification was published on February 14 and is available under “Hot Downloads” on the IDEAlliance website. A second nextPub activity during 2010 was to work in collaboration with the IDPF ePub 3.0 effort to contribute requirements that facilitate the development of that delivery channel for magazine and display book content.
Source Content Encoding Specification was published on February 14 and is available under “Hot Downloads” on the IDEAlliance website. A second nextPub activity during 2010 was to work in collaboration with the IDPF ePub 3.0 effort to contribute requirements that facilitate the development of that delivery channel for magazine and display book content.
The work of nextPub has just begun! The kickoff for the 2011 nextPub activities was held February 16 at Hearst Tower. This meeting brought together 40 publishers and technology providers to begin the complex task of evaluating technologies that will enable publishers to deliver magazines and other rich content across platforms, to eReaders, media tablets and emerging electronic display devices both efficiently and cost effectively and to define requirements for next-generation publishing technologies. Today magazines come to the iPad and Galaxy as a pre-rendered, branded format with interactivity layered on top using a number of existing technologies. In the future publishers hope to move toward dynamic templates and even more automated programmatic rendering. Topics such as ePub 3.0, HTML5 and JSON (Java Script Object Notation) were explored at this meeting.
If you have interest in following or participating in nextPub, contact me for all the inside information!
Dianne Kennedy
