O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures

Andy Oram
June 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

My goodness, the Internet certainly brings transparency to every human interaction these days. One of my authors, Baron Schwartz, has posted a long blog about his personal experiences writing for O'Reilly, and a lot of it is scary. So I suppose I need to provide an editor's and publisher's perspective (developed over 15 rapidly changing years) to Baron's recorded experiences.

Over the past several years, many publishers and other content-centered firms have been feeling incredible pressures from the increasing speed at which information travels (and ages). Publishers inevitably transfer some of these pressures to the authors, who in turn sometimes react with frustration. Authors and publishers are at risk of a growing disconnection.

For instance, just a few days ago the Boston Globe printed an article highlighting the anxiety felt by successful novelists (those fortunate few). Many of their publishers are asking them for a new book each year. It's obvious how convenient this strategy is for budget-makers at the publisher, but the novelists are rarely happy with the expectation.

In the computer book industry, these universal pressures are felt mostly in terms of author motivation and the threat of books slipping, which can cause canceled orders or loss of relevance in a fast-moving market.

The key take-away in my response to Baron is that some books do slip a lot and have enormous, unpredictable demands -- but many don't. It's hard to know in advance. If you want to be an author, don't be scared, but be prepared. (In short, I pretty much endorse everything Baron says.)

I'll organize my comments under three categories: unpredictable time commitments, external market pressures, and staff responses. I've run these comments by Baron.

Cautious Optimism for Britannica's Hybrid Web Community

Mac Slocum
June 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Encyclopaedia Britannica continues to take baby steps into Web-based collaboration. In April, the Britannica Web site began offering free subscriptions to bloggers, journalists and other link-friendly folks, and now the company is cautiously embracing community collaboration. From Wired:

Britannica is going halfway to where it's never gone before: it is opening up its site to the crowd, but keeping the gates up against the barbarians as far as the official version of the publication [is] concerned ...

Members of the company's community of scholars and registered users will be able to post about new topics without intervention, but the company says all articles on new topics will be fact-checked and vetted before appearing in the main edition.

It's easy to toss off Britannica's conservative Web initiatives, but in this case they deserve credit for bridging the gap between top-down "expert" articles and user-generated content (UGC). In fact, Britannica's efforts might finally reveal viability in the commingling of crowdsourcing and editorial content. If the company can successfully attract useful UGC and then bubble the best of this content up into its core editorial products, we might finally see the beginnings of an actual UGC business model (other than OhmyNews).

That's an optimistic attitude, especially in light of failed citizen journalism efforts. But the Britannica model appears to acknowledge -- in a general way -- two common UGC pitfalls: lack of editorial guidance and little/no incentive to participate. Learning from past mistakes is certainly a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, Britannica's official announcement has a number of red flags that could undermine this initiative. Vague talk of incentives only seems to apply to Britannica experts, not the regular folks who make successful Web communities vibrant. In the same vein, the company's messaging continues to push non-experts to the sidelines. Here are two recent examples:

Example 1: The level of quality and professionalism among Web publishers has really improved, and we want to recognize that by giving access to the people who are shaping the conversations about the issues of the day. Britannica belongs in the middle of those conversations. [Emphasis added.] -- From Britannica's free subscription announcement in April

Example 2: These efforts not only will improve the scope and quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but they'll also allow expert contributors and readers to supplement this content with their own. The result will be a place with broader and more relevant coverage for information seekers and a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors. [Emphasis added.] -- From the recent community project announcement

Neither statement is egregious, but both show a misunderstanding of community. The goal with any Web community is to create an inclusive, interactive platform for discussion and collaboration (Wikipedia knows this). Marginalizing a community with pats on the head and "lay contributor" branding will stifle Britannica's project.

My criticisms are certainly nitpicky, but I'd hate to see this promising UGC effort fail to gain traction because of easily rectified communication issues. Even if Britannica only sees a modest success, we're bound to learn techniques that can benefit a variety of Web community initiatives.

Related Stories:

• Britannica Opens Up with Free Subscriptions
• German Wikipedia Coming in Book Form
• Steve Outing: "An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media"
• The Importance of Viewing the World as Readers Do
• Opportunities in Book Publishing and Web Communities

Publisher Offers Tips for Embedding Web Links in Ebooks

Mac Slocum
June 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

Morris Rosenthal, owner of Foner Books and author of the Laptop Repair Workbook, is blurring the line between books and Web content by embedding clickable hyperlinks within the margins of his PDF-based ebooks. Rosenthal discusses his linking process in the following Q&A.;

Q: What inspired you to insert links into your ebooks?

I was forced into large margins for the Laptop Repair Workbook due to the flowcharts that make up the meat of the book, and I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to include the links if I hadn't been staring at all that white space.

Q: Do you recommend inline links or links in the margins? Is one form or the other easier, from a production standpoint?

For a large size book, 8.25 X 11 or 8 x 11, I think links in the margins make the most sense because they can do double duty as design elements. Since the ebook is printable and since most people will be printing on letter size paper, I kept the design nearly identical to the soon-to-be released paperback version. Inline links would be much easier from a production standpoint, but they would tend to interrupt the reader, making people stop and think "should I click on this?" In the margins, they are clearly labeled as supplementary illustrations of procedures. And since the printed book requires full URLs to be shown, it would make the text pretty ugly to show them inline. For the ebook, I could have hyperlinked words without showing the URL, but again, the ebook is printable, and seeing that some words are underlined in blue doesn't get anybody anywhere.

Q: How much time did it take to create separate Web pages and insert links into the Laptop Repair Workbook?

Around half of the Web pages were created before I even started on the book. But in general, a photo illustrated page takes anywhere from a few hours to a day to create. A test procedure takes longer, as there's quite a bit of experimentation behind any given test.

Inserting the 25 or so links, once I settled on the large-margin format, only took a couple hours. I used the text box tool in Word.

Q: Are you able to track visitors from the links?

No. I suppose it would be possible to add an extra anchor argument that would separate the PDF visitors from direct traffic and bookmarkers, but I haven't done it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more sophisticated ways to identify visitors through links, and it certainly would have been possible to link to duplicate pages that are excluded from spidering, but I didn't see a reason.

Q: Do you think embedded links help thwart or offset piracy?

I don't think anything short of full DRM helps to thwart piracy, and then, it's really a question of thwarting casual vs professional pirates. The embedded links may help offset some unauthorized distribution in two ways:

First, anybody who clicks on the links will find out that there's a book for sale, and that might be the first time it hits them that the file they downloaded from site X or received as an attachment from a friend is really a published book that they haven't paid for.

Second, if the links aren't carved out of the PDF, they should help the search engines keep track of who the originator is, if the PDF should end up hosted for a while on a university domain or other authoritative site. When I published ebooks a few years ago through Lightning Source, I went with full DRM primarily to impress upon the customer that the ebooks were a commercial product protected by copyright law. This time around, I've gone with no DRM beyond my embedded copyright notice, but I do send customers through a click licensing agreement.

I should mention that shortly after the New York Times quoted me and mentioned the ebook in an article on laptop repair, I saw signs in Google that some people had been checking filesharing networks for it, as the queries sometimes result in an indexable page. While I take my copyright rights seriously and have the Federal court experience to prove it, I know that the majority of my potential customers will only find out about the ebook through visiting my site, and I'm sure most of those who are willing to pay for an ebook will get it from me. I don't think that most people go trawling through pirate sites when they're looking for a book, but maybe I'm out of touch. I did get some grief from customers during my full DRM years, and while I'm not a knee-jerk "customer is always right" type, I understand that customers have a valid point of view that a publisher ignores at his peril.

Q: What's the upside to embedded links?

For the reader, there are multiple upsides. I'm able to illustrate troubleshooting and repair procedures on my Web site with color photos, updating them at will, without having to charge an arm and a leg for the book ($24.95 paperback, $13.95 ebook). While I could have embedded quite a few photographs in the ebook, most of them would have been irrelevant for any given reader with a different laptop model, different problem, or information that they already knew. When all of those illustrations appear in a book, the customer is paying for them one way or another, and many publishers (especially of textbooks) load up on color pictures just as an excuse to up the price. In this case, it's all supplemental material, a fraction of which may be useful for most readers, but none of which is necessary for core troubleshooting procedures of the text and flowcharts. And from a practical standpoint, I'm able to create a larger number of illustrated procedures because the standard of photography and editing required for a Web page isn't the same as for a book, or ebook.

Q: Any downside to linking?

The only downside I can see is if some readers conclude that the links represent material that has been left out of the book, and that the links are a sorry excuse to make up for it. The book simply wasn't designed that way, but you can't please everybody.

Q: Do you have any formatting best practices?

I did keep all of the links in the root directory of my fonerbooks.com domain, and all of the file names are less than eight characters, though in truth, that's an artifact of doing most of my Web design with my old GNN Press editor (thanks O'Reilly) from 1995. Since the links appear in the margins, I ended up breaking them over two lines, with the domain on the first line and the filename on the second line. I could have force-fit them on a single line; it was just a visual design decision.

Q: Will links be a standard part of your future books?

Certainly a part of future ebooks. For print books, it would depend on whether there was a large enough amount of supplementary material on my Web site to justify a page layout that supported links.

Related Stories:

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Adobe Eyes Interactivity in Ebooks
• Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free
• Open Question: When Will Digital Books Overtake Print Books?