The publishing community group is the place for innovation. We store here intermediate documents that supports the discussions and help keep information together all along the incubation process.

In the publishing industry, most incubation work occurs within book-sector specialised membership organisations, which devote significant effort to reaching professionals and to collecting feedback from multiple sources. The publishing community group’s role is then often to gather broader public feedback before passing it on to the working group. To make this feedback process as efficient as possible, it focused its work on:

  1. Translating technical issues into practical, real-world implications for the publishing community.
  2. Develop “impact statements” that clearly articulate why publishers and developers should engage.
  3. Proactively reach out to a diverse range of stakeholders, including non-technical individuals, as well as both small and large publishers and developers.

Ready-to-use notes can be developed within the publishing community group, as it is an open space, and can then be submitted to the working group.

Current incubation documents

Ways to publish and consume parallels contents

Adressing the discussion at https://github.com/w3c/epub-specs/discussions/2829 on how publishers can provide similar contents in different forms that may be displayed together or available thru switching mechanism.

W3C Guide on Incubation:

Incubation is a way of exploring some new aspect of the Open Web Platform when the best way forward is unclear, when feasibility, compatibility, or developer interest is not yet established, or when early development would benefit from a wide variety of informed points of view before Standards-track work commences.

It enables exploration of novel work, without overly diffusing the effort of a Working Group or expending a lot of resources on work that is ultimately abandoned.

One possible result of incubation is the transfer of work to a Working Group, for Standards-track development. Work might also be forwarded to another group in liaison with W3C. Another possible result is the conclusion that this is a promising area of work, but that a number of prerequisites exist which should be solved first. Finally, incubators might conclude that no Standards-track work should be done in the area. This is still a valuable result, as it can reduce the effort expended on unfruitful option.