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Mike Shatzkin: November 2008
Another Position: XML Alone is Not Enough
Mike Shatzkin
November 6, 2008
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George Lossius, the CEO of Publishing Technology PLC, wrote a very thoughtful post about our StartWithXML project for the new UK blog, BookBrunch. He comments after a report on the presentation I did at Frankfurt about our project.
George's point is that XML "is not enough." Books will live in a larger world also using XML and highly internal standards and procedures for XML use, internal to a company or internal to the book business, do not necessarily equip a publisher to live in the larger world of the semantic web.
We don't disagree with George's premise that XML can be used to position publishers better for the semantic web. The question for all publishers will be how much they can take on how fast, particularly in pursuit of models and opportunities that haven't really emerged yet. But the most forward-thinking always lead the target a bit, and George's post enumerates one aspect of that.
We urge our readers to check out George's post. And we encourage George to put his XML commentary right here on this blog; we're delighted to receive it.
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For a Workflow Change, Support from the Top is Required
Mike Shatzkin
November 5, 2008
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Last week Laura Dawson and I spoke about StartWithXML to a group of IT and operations people from publishers at the User Group meeting for Global Turnkey Systems, a company owned by one of our lead sponsors, Klopotek.
We got some great questions afterwards. On reflection, we realized that they touched an important theme: the need for CEO-level support for the change initiatives to put XML into the workflow. There are savings of time and money to be made by doing this, but that's not the immediate result. In the short run, the changes require more work, more effort, and, sometimes it would seem, generate a less desirable result.
This echoes what we've heard from Andrew Savikas of O'Reilly. Instead of characterizing the two elements of a publishing organization as "hard (production, accounting, ops) and "soft" (editorial, marketing), Andrew says that for XML change they are "hard" and "harder." Trying to get the most creative people in a publishing company to do something that is "harder" requires a top-down understanding that doing it is important to the business.
That's why we asked David Young, the CEO of Hachette Books in the US, to deliver our keynote address. He'll be speaking on the topic "XML: Why Bother?" That's the question every CEO must answer to get the collaboration up and down an organization that large and systemic change requires.
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