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Comment by notjustanymike | Hacker News Reader

Crazy right? And then you realize you can publish a legitimate epub using a JAMStack, which means some of us may have turned our onboarding documentation into a book, preloaded it onto a cheap branded android tablet, and then sent it to our premium clients as marketing schwag!

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That sounds awesome!

Wait, so you could actually do all of that and then let it interact with APIs as well? When JS gets involved like this, I can see some crazy applications in my mind packaged as an ".epub" book.

I guess it depends on what reader you're targetting then. A quick cursory search shows that not all of them support JS. Makes sense to me.

I used to work for a large US-based publisher with a big presence in education. I worked on the ePub parser and renderer written in React. As a company we basically took the standard and ran with it. Each book could have its own interactive widgets where kids could do reading comprehension questions or math problems and the system would capture all this for the teacher to grade. We had closed captioned audio for a lot books that the ePub reader would co-ordinate and play. Last I heard they abandoned all that for a completely proprietary format though. It's been the only situation where I've gotten elbow deep into implementing a specification. It was interesting feeling out the nuances and finding the optional parts of the spec that actually end up being important because it was all planned to fit together.

> Wait, so you could actually do all of that and then let it interact with APIs as well?

With epub? I hope not!

> I guess it depends on what reader you're targetting then. A quick cursory search shows that not all of them support JS. Makes sense to me.

Any epub reader supporting javascript would very much be an antifeature.

It would be a gem in the hands of someone like Bret Victor.

EPUB3.0 spec includes Javascript. So probably much of existing readers support Javascript. IRRC, iBook on Mac also supports javascript, but it is activated after user clicking.

https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub3/epub-contentdocs.html#se...

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