(2013-11-02) Books In Browsers-2013

Peter Brantley summarizes the latest Books In Browsers conference.

HypothesIs was well represented by Jake Hartnell of UC Berkeley and Dan Whaley, who provided a quick overview of online Annotation and its technical foundations, and then launched into a live demo of annotation integrated in EpubJs, a JavaScript-based EPub-3-ready book viewer. The ability to open up an epub book on a web browser and then annotate it on the fly was a superb example of the power that emerges when publications are made openly available through the web. Perhaps one of the most tweeted comments of the entire conference was when Jake observed that “The browser is the greatest publishing and reading application of all time.”

Endorsements of open annotation rippled out from the audience. OReilly Safari Books Online’s VP of Engineering, Liza Daly, tweeted that they were porting their proprietary annotation code to the open Annotator platform underpinning HypothesIs... Early-stage integration with an IPython NoteBook was demonstrated by Raymond Yee of UC Berkeley, annotating a passage of Luke.