The Sword and Laser discussion
Is HTML5 is the Future of Book Authorship?
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Aren't ebooks already some form of html? I don't know why they don't look better.
HTML5 is not the future of book authorship. It might play some small part in the future of one aspect of book publishing. It is already proving very useful in my day job realm of magazine publishing, but frankly it's creating more headaches than it's solving.
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The article mentions that both MOBI and EPUB are based on HTML, but doesn't specifially say HTML5, which has some major changes from HTML4 that has been around since 90's.
I think the lack of a good WYSIWYG editor specifically for books doesn't help either.
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Andrew wrote: "HTML5 is not the future of book authorship. It might play some small part in the future of one aspect of book publishing."
I'm not sure if you're you taking issue with his word choice, or if you think HTML5 does not help authors?
I think if someone puts out a good WYSIWYG editor specifically for making ebooks, it could very help authors.
Then again, I'm not an author so I have no real sense for how hard it is to generate a nice looking ebook right now.
I think a good WYSIWYG editor would help, but I also think the ideas of the author in the article are pretty grandiose. I expect the area where this would be most helpful would be with textbooks or other non-fiction books, I'm not sure how relevant it would be in a novel. If your documents includes images, footnotes, etc it might be helpful, but if the most complicated aspect of the book are italics and chapter headings it won't be much of an improvement.It'll also depend a lot on how good the UI is. An intuitive UI can convince a lot of people to adopt a program with marginal benefits while a terrible UI will scare off people even if the benefits are considerable (in my experience.)
HTML5 is the Future of Book Authorship