Rhetorical questions about standards
Let’s say we have two people.
One works for a publisher and has been tasked with working in a standards organisation to get technology specified that is strategically important to the publisher.
Another works for an organisation whose goal is to democratise access to longform text and to improve the lot of authors—something that’s only possible if publishers (education or trade) are forced to reform, which is incompatible with the publisher’s extant strategy.
If you get both to work on specifying a piece of technology is the project:
a) More likely to fail (neither is willing to give up on their incompatible goals)?
b) More likely to be complicated and messy and therefore less adopted and buggy when implemented?
c) More likely to take such a long time to finish that it will be irrelevant when done?
d) All of the above?
Both the publishing industry and the web community are incredibly diverse groups. The idea that a single specification (the nebulous portable web publications idea) can serve them all without intolerable compromises is not plausible. The idea that a single organisation can serve them all is not a given.
Why should the web community work with the publishing industry, when the financial strategies of most publishers do not coincide with that of most who work on and for the web?
From the web perspective, the strategy that’s most likely to succeed is to work separately, without having to worry about the issues, business models, dynamics, and strategies of the publishing industries. Why shouldn’t the web community try to just improve reading in browsers at their own pace, focusing on their own needs and use cases without having to solve the self-inflicted problems of publishing?
Why is it a given that the publishers who have so far not participated in the web community must have something constructive to contribute to the web stack?
If the strategic goals of big publishers were compatible with the web, they’d have participated ages ago, as many many other tech-savvy publishers already have. Why do the IDPF and the W3C need to merge for the publishing industry to get involed in the web?
Why should the web community be happy about being forced to be involved in—and required to solve—the utter mess that is the ebook space?
Why do the IDPF and the W3C just assume that everybody will be happy about the proposed merger?
Why do people think that it’s a good idea?
Update: I clarified some of these issues in a short follow-up on possible points of contention. And this post was preceded yesterday by a question I posed about the implications of the merger.
(On second thought, I decided to inline the follow-up below.)
Tim Flem asked this here question (reposted from here):
Can you specify what you consider to be the “intolerable compromises”? I can certainly see how DRM could be a sticking point, but what else?
- Do not underestimate how problematic DRM will be in this collaboration. At the moment and as proposed, web DRM is limited to a plugin system for time-based media (which is bad enough). Adding publishers and a publishing industry interest group to the W3C will dramatically increase the pressure to extend that system to regular text. Extending that DRM system to general markup would be an intolerable compromise.
- The portability concept isn’t easily compatible with the web’s current security model (See my post A few simplified points on web and document security for an overview.) Fixing that incompatibility requires compromises in the web stack that I’m not excited about. Compromising web security to cater to the business models of publishers would be an intolerable compromise.
- The publishing industry is deep into EPUB. Maintaining compatibility with their EPUB stack is one of the stated goals of many publishers and publishing industry companies. However, compatibility with something as complex and flawed as EPUB is expensive, hard, and fraught with challenges and has no value to the web community.
- There is an opportunity cost to all of these features. The web stack is flawed and needs improvement on many levels. The work going into fixing ebooks for the publishing industry is often work that could go into fixing pressing issues elsewhere. Not fixing something important because of this would be an intolerable compromise.
- One of Tim Berners-Lee’s stated goals with the merger is tracking (see What the Inventor of the World Wide Web Sees for the Future of Ebooks) and from what I can tell this is also an explicit goal of many organisations in the publishing industry. Pervasive tracking however is one of the biggest problems plaguing the web industry. Settling on an acceptable compromise for tracking is already hard enough.
- The web and the publishing industry are more heterogenous than people make them out to be. Designing a single portable document format that serves the digital publication needs of everybody involved is, IMO, next to impossible without somebody making major compromises in their use cases. Somebody will inevitably find the necessary compromises intolerable.
Improving reading on the web can be done without introducing DRM, re-implementing its security model to cater to full-featured portability, making exhausting EPUB compatibility compromises, or making the online tracking situation even more complicated and consumer-hostile.
I also posted a few tweets that are relevant to the issue: