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How to help people who have questions about EPUBs? #88

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dauwhe opened this issue Jun 24, 2019 · 23 comments
Open

How to help people who have questions about EPUBs? #88

dauwhe opened this issue Jun 24, 2019 · 23 comments

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@dauwhe
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dauwhe commented Jun 24, 2019

EPUBs are complicated. The spec doesn't fit on an index card. There are more reading systems then Democratic candidates for President. Book content is infinitely varied.

So where do people get help? The IDPF Forums seem mostly-dead. Stack Overflow doesn't really seem to cover EPUB. Best Practices seem devoted to answering questions before we know if the question is being asked.

Is there anything this CG can do about that? In some other communities, there is a forum where people ask questions, and other people answer them, or at least try to help. What would happen if we started a repo where you could ask any question about EPUB?
@artbyrt
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artbyrt commented Jun 24, 2019 via email

@damiangza
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Yes, +1. Would be great to have one location where the latest and up to date solutions can be found. Googling is only useful upto a point.

@rdeltour
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Thanks @dauwhe for launching the discussion. This is an issue with EPUBCheck too, where we regularly get support requests or questions asked on our issue tracker, which is not made for that.

Stack Overflow doesn't really seem to cover EPUB.

I guess this could change but we need to make it happen, as a community. Users need something that is both visible and easy to access (e.g. no complex login or frightening user interface). I'm wondering if trying to get an active community on StackOverflow would be more suited than a GitHub repo?

@llemeurfr
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llemeurfr commented Jun 26, 2019 via email

@mattgarrish
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mattgarrish commented Jun 26, 2019 •
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If there are lessons to be learned from the idpf forums, it's that getting a critical mass of people answering questions is no easy feat, and that making people aware that such forums even exist is equally problematic.

It might be helpful to look into the various platforms where people are asking epub questions and see whether there is a clear favourite and/or what could be done to improve the experience/responsiveness.

Is there a way to leverage discussions that already happen in Twitter, for example? (i.e., to port answers somewhere where they can actually be found.)

Is Stack Overflow good enough if we just get more people involved in answering questions?

@teytag
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teytag commented Jun 26, 2019 via email

@TzviyaSiegman
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There is an effort underway to document EPUB on MDN, but that doesn't solve the problem of answering questions as they arise. I kind of like the idea of keeping questions and answers on StackOverflow or GitHub. We just need to make sure that we (exactly who TBD) are paying attention.

@thinkulum
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A couple of Q&A sites I follow:

  • There's a Stack Exchange site for ebooks that has an EPUB tag.
  • The MobileRead forums have an EPUB forum.

The activity in these is fairly low, but they have some serious participants with technical knowledge, so there are already people who think of them as places to go for authoring help. One or both of those could be good places to invest in.

@RachelComerford
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I would argue that StackOverflow might not be the right place for it.

While the people who could contribute the answers to the questions that would come up would know StackOverflow as a resource they're not the target audience of this solution. The people we're trying to solve for have little to no development or EPUB experience. They, like me, don't know what StackOverflow is and would never look to it as a resource. They are also unlikely to look for MDN which I say sadly as part of the team working on the documentation. SEO will be key to this no matter where we put resources but I think it's important that we keep perspective on Dave's question. We need to help all users not the already experienced or semi-experienced developers. And as we push a broader audience into this format, that means a broad base of wildly inexperienced beginners with a lot of questions who have never worked with developer resources - they have always worked in word and/or adobe resources.

@amandasramalho
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Hi all!
Here in Brazil we also do not have a single place to answer questions. Just like in science, we end up creating "invisible colleges" where we share, among professionals, some news and discoveries about EPUB. As many university publishers started producing EPUB files with weaknesses, we made a complete guide to the format explaining the use of each of the tags (more than 70 pages long). Another "tool" is to use the #eprdctn hashtag of Twitter.
One comment I would like to make: think of a multilingual platform, so that, whatever the language, discussions can be found in one place.

@dauwhe
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dauwhe commented Jun 26, 2019

I would argue that StackOverflow might not be the right place for it.

While the people who could contribute the answers to the questions that would come up would know StackOverflow as a resource they're not the target audience of this solution. The people we're trying to solve for have little to no development or EPUB experience. They, like me, don't know what StackOverflow is and would never look to it as a resource. They are also unlikely to look for MDN which I say sadly as part of the team working on the documentation. SEO will be key to this no matter where we put resources but I think it's important that we keep perspective on Dave's question. We need to help all users not the already experienced or semi-experienced developers. And as we push a broader audience into this format, that means a broad base of wildly inexperienced beginners with a lot of questions who have never worked with developer resources - they have always worked in word and/or adobe resources.

One big problem is infrastructure. I feel like we don't have a lot of choices. We can use GitHub issues in this or another repository. We can take advantage of existing sites like StackOverflow. But I don't think we can build our own forum.

Any existing or new system will be challenging for newcomers. They don't know what's out there, so we have to help them find it, and then help them use it. Having good tutorials will be really important, and even some way of getting people help for logging in to whatever system we go with.

@rdeltour
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While the people who could contribute the answers to the questions that would come up would know StackOverflow as a resource they're not the target audience of this solution.

It's true that StackOverflow’s primary audience is software developers, and the existing topics (that one would see on the home page on their first visit) can be daunting for our target audience.

If we want to dig deeper in the “StackOverflow universe”, using a specialized space like the ebooks StackExchange community mentioned by @thinkulum might be better. SEO might not be as good as the main StackOverflow site, but it could be a good comprise. To be investigated…

@rkwright
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As a long-time forum poster and monitor, I tend to agree with Romain. SO is not friendly. Though https://ebooks.stackexchange.com might be a little obscure, at least initially, I like it as a direction.

@RachelComerford
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As someone with literally no knowledge in this area, is there anything we can do for SEO of https://ebooks.stackexchange.com?

@MyDK
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MyDK commented Jun 28, 2019 •
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My experience is this:
Everybody knew about the IDPFs site, unfortunately it died.
Ebook authors are creating EPUB files using different software/tools and tend to look for help in those environments /forums:

  • Ebook authors creating EPUBs with InDesign will look for help in Adobe InDesigns help forum and epubsecrets (last is primarily for Mac users).
  • Ebook authors creating EPUBs using Sigil will look for help on the MobileRead forum. (which works nicely)
  • flightdeck have a nice litte handbook: https://ebookflightdeck.com/handbook with code snippets (by joshua tallent.

Having one joint (multi lingual) community site for Best Practice, would be lovely to have. And I would love to contribute to this, answering and helping other ebook authors. (I help Danish ebook authors today making better epubs)

@artbyrt
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artbyrt commented Jun 28, 2019 via email

@RachelComerford
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In the interest of moving this forward, a proposal:

Community Group Members begin to formally use https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/ as a Q&A space for EPUB help and to publicly push it as a forum for others to use as well. The best practices sub-group will link to https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/ from the MDN documentation.

Please thumbs up for agreement
Please thumbs down for disagreement

@artbyrt
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artbyrt commented Jun 30, 2019 via email

@damiangza
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damiangza commented Jun 30, 2019 via email

@llemeurfr
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llemeurfr commented Jun 30, 2019 via email

@mattgarrish
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I'm hesitant to say any solution is the right one without hearing more from people about what they're looking for. The stackexchange site looks fine if it's just about posing questions and up-voting answers, but it's not designed for discussing problems or solutions.

@MyDK
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MyDK commented Jul 2, 2019

How about dividing people into 2 help sites/areas, depending on what kind of EPUB help they are looking for:

  1. ordinary readers, users of ebooks and reading systems, and
  2. ebook authors / developers who are producing the epub files

@rdeltour rdeltour mentioned this issue Aug 27, 2019
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@raducoravu
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+1 somebody asked for my help to create an EPUB containing an HTML document with a Javascript inside it, it would have been nice to be able to direct them to some kind of users list where people who work more with the EPUB specs can help with such cases.

@jccr jccr mentioned this issue Feb 10, 2021
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