To Chunk or Not To Chunk?

Laura Dawson
October 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

This is excerpted from a column I wrote for the most recent issue of The Big Picture, my free newsletter about technology and the book industry.

As we're proceeding with Start With XML, I'm thinking a lot about chunking.

Chunking, at least as we're talking about it, means carving up your content into chunks and distributing those discrete pieces of it. Travel content (distributed over GPS, the web, and in book form) and recipes (distributed via Epicurious and AllRecipes.com as well as in book form) are the most obvious examples of this. Textbook publishing does this as well - certain assets can be used in the main text, in supplementary workbooks and lab manuals, as individual activities to be downloaded to an iPod, or embedded in e-books.

And as we talk about chunking, it's clear that there are certain types of content that don't immediately lend themselves to that kind of carved-up distribution. Novels, for example. Narrative nonfiction such as memoirs. Philosophical or political works, where tracing the author's thought from beginning to end is important.

The truth is, we may not quite know what will chunk readily and what will not. There are some blue-sky ideas right now - tagging content within narratives, to be pulled out later and stand on its own - but we just don't know yet if readers are interested in that kind of thing.

But publishers can't afford NOT to prepare for the unknown. There has never been uncertainty like this in publishing - uncertainty in stock prices and supply chain issues (paper prices, transportation/shipping costs, the costs of composition and conversion), uncertainty in revenue-generation, uncertainty as to who's going to buy what in which format - and it's not going to get any clearer for quite some time.

And you can't chunk at all if you haven't tagged - you can't even begin to think about chunking if you haven't tagged. Tagging is never a bad strategy - you will never regret doing it. But the risk of NOT doing it - the risk of not being ready for the next wave of consumer demand whatever that demand may be - means that you can't afford not to do it.

Related:

• See more StartWithXML posts

Standardizing Tags in the Metadata Minefield

Laura Dawson
October 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

One issue we haven't discussed much is that of metadata. XML documents are by definition rife with metadata. At what point does metadata cross the line from useful to pollution?

When it's not standardized.

The kind of XML tagging we're primarily talking about can be sectioned into three buckets: rights data ("this picture is good for print products but not electronic ones," "we can use this graphic anywhere," "these animations are exclusively for the workbook"), formatting data ("this is a chapter," "this is a footnote"), and context data ("Paris," "1955," "General Robert E. Lee," "noodles").

This is a perfect recipe for complete chaos. Obviously standards are crucial to the success of using XML in publishing. Even standards within a department -- using tags the same way from one project to the next, from one PERSON to the next -- are crucial.

There's been some talk about the role of the Book Industry Study Group in developing tagging standards, in the same way they've developed BISAC code standards. And this makes a great deal of sense. The rights and formatting tag standards should be relatively easy to establish -- publishing houses, no matter whether big or small, tend to use this data fairly consistently. It's the context tags that pose the more serious challenges.

Library of Congress has done this sort of thing with its subject headings. But, like the BISAC codes, these refer to the subject of an entire book. Many books, however, are comprised of more than one topic - many chapters are comprised of more than one topic. That level of granularity has never been taxonomized before.

Still, it's important to do so in a standardized way, to avoid a cacophony that drowns out meaning. (Is it "pasta" or "noodles"? When you say "diamond," are you talking about baseball or gemstones or Neil? Why is a chapter published by Mosby about dentistry coming up in search results with the chapters on collecting Limoges china published by Antique Trader? Hint: "porcelain.")

If you've ever seen a tag cloud on a website, you'll know what I mean. You never know what you're going to get when you click on it. Standardizing context tags is probably the most thankless, boring job publishers will ever engage in. But it's also the one that's going to ensure that books are actually discoverable the way they're meant to be discovered.

Related:

• See more StartWithXML posts