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https://www.w3.org/community/publishingcg/
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As a user I want to store and manipulate my annotations independently of a Reading System #46

Open gautierchomel opened 1 year ago

gautierchomel commented 1 year ago

User story

As a reader exploiting academics and technical documents I often use different reading systems because of different files formats or because of different devices I use for reading. As an example, I prefer to read an EPUB on Thorium while I'm at the Office, but I use Colibrio while traveling and reading on my mobile device. I also prefer to use Zotero for PDF documents on my desktop but Acrobat Reader on my mobile phone.

As a result of this practices, I can't use any Annotation or highlight tool provided by reading systems because they do not allow me to centralize that outside of them, even when I can perform an export, it's disconnected from the file and won't be updated when I add notes. It's hard to maintain a set of notes up to date and gathered over different reading situations. My fallback is a set of markdown files edited outside of any reading application, it implies a lot of copy/paste operations.

Details

Explanation:

  1. Audience: Anyone having reading practices with heavy use of bookmarks, highlight and annotations and reading different formats using different devices / reading applications.

    • Specific audience: students, researchers, anyone using a large amount of documents and needing to make references or organize his thinking.

  2. Use case: I need to centralize my bookmarks, highlights and annotations independently of reading system or device. I want them in a common format I can use with a large choice of applications.

    • Problem: bookmarks, annotations and highlight are Reading system dependent.

  3. Benefit: I can concentrate on gathering thoughts and points of reference while reading and I can easily search, link, organize, compile & reuse my notes when I need to.

    • Specifically, this would remove interoperability headaches and give me more agility in my intellectual work.
clapierre commented 1 year ago

This use case should also cover Web Based documents, and something like Hypothesis is something to consider.

mattgarrish commented 1 year ago

FYI: https://idpf.org/epub/oa/

P5music commented 1 year ago

Hello gautierchomel Maybe you are interested in reading this post https://github.com/w3c/publishingcg/issues/55

lrosenthol commented 1 year ago

@gautierchomel Are the documents (EPubs and PDFs) stored in the cloud somewhere or are they local to your devices? If they are local to the device, are you OK with the comments in the cloud?

Trying to ascertain the scope of the use case....

gautierchomel commented 1 year ago

Are the documents (EPubs and PDFs) stored in the cloud somewhere or are they local to your devices?

Both cases are to be taken in consideration.

are you OK with the comments in the cloud?

User should have the choice of non clouded comments and the choice of cloud service.

lrosenthol commented 1 year ago

Both cases are to be taken in consideration. User should have the choice of non clouded comments and the choice of cloud service.

OK - I understand the desire for flexibility, but let's look at some practical questions to help scope.

1 - If the annotations (etc.) are stored locally, then is there any expectation of sharing across devices? Across apps on the same device?

2 - If the content is stored in the cloud, would the annotations (etc.) be stored on the same cloud service? Or would a separate cloud service, perhaps one focused on annotations (etc.) be viable?

3 - You mentioned both EPUB and PDF. Do you expect the annotations (etc.) to work across formats - for the same content?

4 - You didn't mention this, but are all annotations (etc.) only for you (aka personal) or would you also expect to be able to share them with others? And if sharing is desired, would that work only with cloud hosted or also locally stored?