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by lurch_mojoff
5257 days ago
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I disagree that Apple's goal was lock-in. If it was, they'd probably make the interactive textbooks iOS applications, similar to what PushPopPress did, instead of this bastardized version of epub. Quotes from the linked post like this: "The ability to control the size of each column and column gap was recently discussed in the CSS WG. The Group decided that allowing setting of individual column width and column gap width is not a feature considered for the first REC of this document.", suggest, to me at least, that Apple created their proprietary format because standards didn't and still don't cover the fictionality they have in mind for these interactive books. I'd rather Apple do that than hastily muscle their implementation into the standards. |
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The settings for column width and column gap width, in particular, sound like they'd be critical for making a really attractive ebook. If the epub 3 standard doesn't support such basic functionality, there's a problem.
This isn't quite the same as the stuff Microsoft pulled -- MS created tools that claimed to generate "HTML" (but which in reality only worked in Internet Explorer) and encouraged their use on the public web. Apple isn't claiming these things are ePub 3 (or any other standard format), and in fact they're explicitly forbidding their use in a generic context. I'm not a fan of their licensing restrictions, but at least they're not claiming (or even implying) in any way that these ebooks are standards-based.