You may not be writing software, but someday you'll probably write like the people who do

Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

Hugh McGuire's post yesterday raised some great points about what a really effective web-friendly distributed and inherently social writing platform should look like. When it comes to the software tools we use for certain classes of tasks, I always look to the software developers themselves for insight into what those tools will look and feel like. It's usually the developers who experience the particular pain point first (and most acutely), and who have the skills to build tools that solve those problems.

Writing (and "publishing") are among the most relevant and appropriate tasks to which we can turn to software developers for insight. After all, no one (no one) does as much collaborative and distributed writing, editing, and revising of complex, interrelated, long-form textual works than software developers. It's only natural they'd build tools to make the associated tasks easier and the problems more manageable.

I am not saying that everyone can, should, or will use the same tools that developers use today. But I do think Hugh is right on the mark to look toward something like Wordpress as being in the right direction (as opposed to Word or InDesign, however hacked). I'd go a step further and suggest looking at GitHub as a model to examine very closely for ways to provide the infrastructure for easy and effective distributed collaborative writing (and 'publishing'), as well as enable the social recognition and validation that are so important for many authors.

(I'd also like to think our own Open Feedback Publishing System is a step forward in the evolution of web-based book writing tools, though for now it requires authors write using DocBook XML or AsciiDoc, a high bar for non-technical writers.)

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform

Hugh McGuire
May 19, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (55) | Listen

WordPress as Book Publishing Platform

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress. My thoughts here come out of our experience building Book Oven (a thus-far closed, proprietary system envisaged to be just this); and subsequent conversations with John Maxwell, of Simon Fraser University's Masters of Publishing Program, and Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works. I am happy to report this is more than just thinking: this past term (January to April 2010), John Maxwell and his MPub students built a prototype of this WordPress-based publishing system, and tested the prototype by creating, and publishing the Book of Mpub, available in print-on-demand ready PDF, epub, and html.

Background: Book Oven

At the end of 2008, my co-founder Stephanie Troeth and I started Book Oven, an ambitious venture to work towards transforming the book publishing process into a webby, connected process. The key insights behind Book Oven were the following:
 

• publishing a book is (almost always) a collaborative enterprise
• online tools (should) make collaboration on making books easy(er)
• if you build a "book" in the cloud, using structured mark-up, then expression of that book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc), on various devices (including paper & print) becomes arbitrary, and should be nearly trivial
• further, if the "book" exists in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with this "book" multiplies significantly
• if a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it will be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of indie publishing.

I am still deeply committed to this vision. But I have shifted towards a belief that the above-described platform should be open source. Or at least, an open source version of such should exist.

The Big Revelation: WordPress

We've done some good things with Book Oven, but around November 2009, we shifted focus to the bit of our platform that was (according to our analytics) the most engaging to our users: Bite-Size Edits. That shift occurred in parallel with a revelation: We were trying to recreate so much in Book Oven that was already handled well by another class of software, namely blogging software, and specifically WordPress.

My thoughts about Wordpress were crystalized in October 2009, during a conversation with Shana Kimball of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library. I was pitching Book Oven as a good tool (in progress) for academic presses to use in their production workflows. Shana had various hesitations -- open source vs proprietary being a big one -- but during our conversation, Shana said something like: "It would be great to have a tool that's as easy to use as WordPress. I love WordPress."

Indeed.

So, I started having some conversations with some people I knew who were already doing some work in this direction, in particular: John Maxwell, at Simon Fraser University, who was experimenting with prototypes for html-first book publishing systems, and was exploring different candidates, including WordPress; and Kirk Biglione who had independently started poking at WordPress as a book-publishing tool.

I also floated the idea to a few others who are doing some of the most interesting things right now in publishing/tech, especially Liza Daly and James Bridle, and two of the best Wordpress hackers I know, Steph Daury (who works for Automattic) and Jeremy Clark.

The idea, everyone agreed, had some legs.

WordPress, it seems, is an ideal candidate as a platform on which to build an open source, online, webby, book-publishing system. There may be other likely candidates, but Wordpress has the following characteristic which suggest to me that it is an excellent place to start:

• it is a familiar and comfortable tool to most writers and publishers who are at all engaged online
• it is a stable platform that can handle just about any scale of traffic you can throw at it (the New York Times, for instance, runs on a heavily-hacked version of Wordpress)
• it is open source
• through its plugin architecture, it is infinitely extensible
• through its template architecture, it is infinitely stylable
• through WordPress Mu, it is infinitely scalable
• it has a huge, world-wide community of committed developers
  
• existing plugins and plugin suites already achieve much of what would be wanted in a Wordpress-based book publishing system.

[NOTE: I've since discovered Leanpub.com, built by Ruboss, which is already going along this path].

The Outline

I've described above some of the reasons why WordPress is, I believe, a good candidate as the basis for an online book-publishing platform. Here is a proposal for some very rough product specs:

• Authors/editors can add text
• Editors can edit text
• The editing/publishing process can be public or private, with easy assignment of various permissions (none, read-only, read/edit, read/edit/admin)
• Formatting creates structured html
• Finished text can be generated in the following formats:
• plain text
• epub
• html
• InDesign-compliant markup - to generate a professional print output from In-Design
• automatic print-ready pdf - using something like a web-based LaTeX system
• etc.

WordPress can do much of this already, but not all of it, and certainly not everything you would want it to do. The finished platform should have (among others) the following plugins/characteristics:

1. robust version control
   
2. digress.it (based on the old commentpress)- to allow para by para commenting for editors, and later, if desired, for readers
3. wordpress --> epub conversion
   
4. wordpress --> ~LaTeX --> print-ready pdf conversion (or similar)
   
5. wordpress --> InDesign-compliant mark-up conversion
   
6. book-friendly front-end template(s) (including Table of Contents, Title page etc)
7. generation of a download/(sales?) page that lists available formats (epub, html, pdf etc)
8. table of contents generator
9. a book metadata generation/management tool (ONIX, OPDS compliant?)
10. ...etc.

This list of plugins can continue, subject to the interest of developers, and the needs of users of such a system.

SFU and the MPub Prototype

All this would be just a lot of writing and good intentions and conversations, except for John Maxwell and his team of talented students at Simon Fraser University, including: Vanessa Chan, Cari Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Cynara Geissler, Ann-Marie Metten, and Suzette Smith.

In the span of four months in 2010, the SFU MPub team did two extraordinary things:

1. they built a prototype of this WordPress-based book publishing system (tied in with InDesign for the print book)
2. they published a book using the system - suitably, it was student-essays about the future of publishing: the Book of MPub

I had the pleasure of seeing John and some of his students present the results at BookCamp Toronto this past week, to a crowd of publishers, writers, designers, and technologists.

The Reaction

I was curious to see the reaction to John's presentation at BookCamp Toronto, with a wide range of people in the room. Particularly encouraging was Ingrid Paulson's take on it: Ingrid is one of Canada's best-known book designers, and was excited by the idea of streamlining and formalizing the process of text/mark-up delivery from publishers. She seemed entirely open to a better toolset to make that happen. Others in the room were equally intrigued.

For myself, I was amazed at what the SFU students delivered in such a short time, and was reignited with excitement for this project. I have no doubt that a streamlined online publishing system, using structured mark-up, will transform the publishing industry. And my bet is on Wordpress as a great starting platform to do just this. Whether or not it could be the long-term winner, I know not, but something will be, and WordPress has a whole lot to recommend it.

And how about you? What do you think?

Bio: Hugh McGuire builds webby things, and writes about media, publishing, mass collaboration, and technology. He is the founder of LibriVox.org, the volunteer-run makers of free public domain audiobooks; and Book Oven, which makes Bite-Size Edits, an online editing game/tool. He is a co-founder of BookCampToronto. His personal site is hughmcguire.net and you can find him on twitter at @hughmcguire.

[Pic of Hugh McGuire by Ron Grimes - Flickr / Twitter]

Is DRM More Costly Than Piracy? Thoughts on leveraging marketing strategy and DRM-free content

Brett Sandusky
May 6, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about building better (read: strategic) eBooks. The more that I've tried to wrap my head around what would work and what wouldn't, I keep coming back to the idea of reversing self-imposed constraints and searching for opportunity in areas from which we've closed off opportunity. One such area is DRM.
 
As a practice, wrapping content in DRM finds its justification in the fact that digital content is being pirated across the internet and distributed to people who we presume could be customers. These lost customers are choosing to not purchase our content but to download this content for free.
 
Before we continue, let's address a few myths:

1. DRM will eliminate piracy. This is completely false. Pirated content is always going to be available, whether we allow it or not.
   
2. Pirates are stealing our customers. Most likely, the person who is downloading pirated content wouldn't consider buying it in the first place. Piracy is not an alternative to retail, it is a parallel eco-system.
3. Publishers will make more money by enforcing stricter DRM. I argue that this, too, is false. In fact, I think if we leverage the marketing possibilities of DRM-free content, we would end up making more money in the long run.

So, we start with a DRM-free eBook. Now what? What if we flat out encouraged sharing?
 
Let's say a customer purchases an eBooks and they want to share it with a friend who would enjoy the book. In the development phase, the publisher could easily include a 'share' button or option. This would set off a mechanism for transferring the content purchased by one customer on her device to someone else's device.
 
If we can get past the 'piracy,' unpaid content aspect, this simple act is incredibly powerful. Here's how:
 
What if we asked the customer who is sharing the content she's purchased to input her friend's email address in order to deliver a download link? Now we've collected a second customer's contact information. To use lead gen-speak, this customer is a "qualified lead." Another way to look at it is that this represents a sort of passive word of mouth system whereby we let our customers tell us with whom they are sharing their content.
 
Then, we can engage the recipient of said content, because they've already been identified as an interested party by one of our customers. If done properly, the follow up to these new customers can not only lead to a sale, but to something much greater. It could be a vehicle for presenting your company as tech-savvy and engaging.
 
Now, let's go a step further: what if, after a certain number of shares, we rewarded the customer for passing along their content and helping us to identify future customers? Say after a customer shares their content with 10 other people, the publisher can set up a mechanism which would send an invitation to receive a free eBook for all their effort. (Let's not fool ourselves, they would be doing work for us.)
 
Not only does this give customers incentive to spread the word about our books, but it creates heightened brand loyalty. We cannot expect our customers to simply become loyal to our brands based on the laws of inertia and chance. Brand loyalty is an active pursuit which can be fostered by putting more products into the hands of people who use them. The more we can actively identify those customers who are not only reading our books, but those who are evangelizing for us, the more we are able to keep this momentum going by providing additional fodder to share.
 
In the publicity world, we send books to 'influencers' or 'big mouths' in the hope that they'll initiate their own word of mouth campaigns. The only difference here is that we are using the available technology of eBooks in our favor to identify who the influencers are and who they are influencing.
 
File share points online such as SendSpace do something very similar to this already. Anyone can email anyone else with a file that is too large to send via email. The recipient receives an email notification and a download link. People are used to receiving a download link, to allowing their email address to be disclosed in order to receive something they feel is valuable or important.
 
The point: it is not unreasonable to ask for email addresses in order to provide a free service.
 
Let's go back to our three myths about DRM:

• DRM will eliminate piracy. We already know that DRM is not going to stop piracy because people want to share content. Response: avoid piracy by actively promoting user-to-user content sharing and make it worth it for the publisher by creating a win-win situation for both publisher and consumer.
• Pirates are stealing our customers. Pirates will not be able to 'steal' our customers if we can provide them with a better, more valuable experience.
  
• Publishers will make more money by enforcing stricter DRM. Publishers will make more money, in the long run, by growing their customer bases, collecting consumer data, engaging with their customers directly, actively fostering brand loyalty, and providing a superior user experience that exploits technology in a smart way.

Keeping content on 'lock down' is not good for anybody. We are in an age of digital sharing, of online exploration, boundaryless personal expression, and high engagement expectations. Wouldn't it be counterintuitive to go against these trends and make it increasingly difficult for our customers to tell their friends about our products? At a time when every publisher must be concerned with search and discoverability of digital products, encouraging sharing in order to learn more about our consumer base and their behaviors seems like a natural course of action.

Brett Sandusky is Digital Marketing Manager at Kaplan Publishing. He is also the founder of Publishr, an ever-growing collection of essays that explores the world of digital publishing through both theory and practice. He lives in Brooklyn.

Session/Speaker Ideas for TOC Frankfurt 2010

Andrew Savikas
May 5, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Last year's first-ever TOC Frankfurt turned out better than we'd even hoped, with a 400-strong sellout crowd representing a diverse range of international publishers. We've lined up a bigger venue (which we hope will also help address some of the glitches faced around room size last year), and are thrilled to be teaming up again with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on TOC Frankfurt the day before the start of the Book Fair.

Because it's still a relatively small event, we're not doing a full-scale Call for Proposals, but we've set up a simple web form for submitting session and speaker ideas as we begin program planning. I'll be working closely with TOC Community Manager Kat Meyer to develop the program, and we're eager to include fresh voices, particularly those with a perspective from outside the US and UK.

The form will be open until the end of June, and we'll announce the program soon after.

Click here to submit session/speaker ideas for TOC Frankfurt 2010

Tilting at Bookish Windmills, Or - How the iPad Saved Spanish Language Day

Pablo Francisco Arrieta Gomez
May 4, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

It's been almost a month since the U.S. saw the arrival of the iPad. Long lines awaited the release, and -- as expected -- people had mixed emotions after having one in their hands. On that Saturday morning, as with many other international events, here in Latin America we were just spectators, reading reviews of the machine and apps, and dreaming about the moment when we could get our hands on one (months away if you are going to wait for the local release of the device).

Via the web we saw power users, experts, non believers, fans... even babies and cats using their brand new tablets. And the local discussion started, but all based on speculation. No one here had one, no one had touched one, no one had stepped into a store to buy one.

All over the continent, people were starting to share ideas on how this device might affect us locally. Some (including more than a few national newspapers) declared the device an expensive failure. Others predicted that because the wait will be long, and the price high - iPad users here in South America will appreciate the device more than those in wealthier nations. Locked within walled gardens though it may be, for many down here the iPad represents a gateway to other worlds filled with opportunities and freedom.

Just a few weeks after the iPad was released in the U.S., I was lucky enough to get an iPad of my own, and shortly thereafter, I had an interesting experience.

For Spanish speaking countries, April 23rd is "Spanish Language Day." It's a day when we celebrate the Spanish language and honor the memory of author, poet and playwright Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

On this day, I was at my university attending a meeting, when three children from a school in Bogotá came in to take part in a live video conference where they were to take turns reading parts of Don Quixote with an audience of readers located in Madrid.

I stayed in the room to tape the event with my camera -- hoping to use the images later in my talks. But, as the teacher started to turn the pages of her  copy of the book, a look of worry came over her face...everything was ready for them to read their parts... but the edition she was holding here in Bogotá was completely different from the one being read from in Madrid!

By chance, that weekend I had decided to watch Man of La Mancha, the 1972 movie, and after that I had downloaded a copy of the book to my iPad. So, I turned on my iPad, did a little search of the words I heard being read live from Madrid, and started to read the text aloud. The face of the teacher started to shine as she asked me if I had the book and if I could I lend it to them. She was quite surprised when I handed her "the thing" from which I was reading. The kids were ecstatic and so the reading started; I was asked to turn the pages, and happily obliged. It was great to see the audience's faces in Madrid as they realized the kids from the "third world" country were joining them with a text living in an electronic device.


When they finished, we all applauded and, surprisingly, the teacher gave me a hug and kiss. Suddenly, I was the local Don Quixote, saving the imperiled ones from calamity. "Desfacedor de entuertos," as Cervantes would have said.

So welcome to the daily life of a Latin reader, a real 21st century "Pirate of the Caribbean" on a journey towards a global and accessible book collection (or bookstore)... because the windmills are out there, and they are not that "virtual."

About Pablo Arrieta
Based in his homeland of Colombia, Pablo Arrieta is an architect by training, reader from childhood, and teacher/designer by vocation. Pablo runs his own training facility (Monitor CD) and is an university professor in both Universidad Javeriana and Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá.  He has been involved in digital design and web development since 1995, and travels extensively throughout South America introducing designers to the latest software and design tools. Since 2008 he has been an active participant in the evolution of the Spanish language editorial world. Print, digital or any other surface... reading is what matters.

The iPad in Europe (the English speaking part at least)

Eoin Purcell
April 29, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of posts exploring the reception--and potential impact, of the iPad in locations other than the good ole USA. In today's entry, Eoin Purcell chimes in from Ireland. ~ Kat Meyer

It can be hard to envision the impact a device will have when you have only demo videos and second hand reports of it. When it comes to the iPad, Europe is operating in something of a vacuum. A smattering of tweets about sightings in the wild, a few twitpics from lucky (or eager) mac fans and the odd blog post from tech heads who couldn't wait a few months and so had units shipped from the US were the only real evidence that the iPad was available to anything other than technology journalists and Apple developers in Ireland and the UK.

There are now dozens of videos displaying what look like impressive apps and concepts for apps not to mention reviews of good and bad iPad apps all of which mean very little when you have nowhere to see them in action. But despite the fact that the device itself is thin on the ground, speculation, rumour and preparations are rife. The trend in reviews from those who have the device here suggests some issues if people are planning to use the device for reading while commuting.

Whereas the iPod Touch/iPhone is a joy for a commuter with it's slim profile and easy to hold for extended periods, the iPad is a weighty 1.5 pounds! Most don't feel this is too much of a problem and think the device more suited to the home anyway.

Apple disappointed those of us waiting for the international release of the iPad when they announced that because of the success of the device in the US, they were delaying the release until the end of May and the pricing information until the 10 May.

Even when they do release the device to foreign customers, Apple will do so without the critical (at least to book publishers) iBooks app and iBookstore. At least when Amazon's Kindle rolled out, books could be bought directly on the device from Amazon, on the iPad, international users will need to use third party apps or directly purchase books apps on iTunes.
 
The London Book Fair would have been the perfect opportunity for Irish and UK publishing types to get their hands on the device for a short while anyway. But it was not to be, volcanic ash cloud interrupted the travel plans of most Americans.

There seems to be a real sense of belief in the iPad as a new space for content. Maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good, but while I see money to be made, a new space seems a stretch too far for my view.
 
I was fortunate enough to see one in real form this week and while I was impressed by the elegance and by the simplicity, I was struck too by the heaviness. I find myself wanting it without a good reason. My iPod Touch is more than good enough for my mobile entertainment needs, including but certainly not limited to reading, and my Macbook does the job for work needs. I'm looking forward to the pricing though and who knows, maybe I'll crack and buy one.

Bio: Eoin Purcell (@eoinpurcell) lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He is a publishing industry analyst and commentator. He runs Green Lamp Media, a publishing and publishing services company. He also edits Irish Publishing News.

Patrons Are Consumers, and Consumers Are Patrons; or, How Publishers Can Learn To Stop Worrying and Love Libraries Again

Heather McCormack
April 26, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

Editor's Note: Among my hopes for TOC going forward is increased and productive discussion between all the various and sundry players in our readerly world. Chief among those players who we publishers sometimes woefully neglect -- librarians. My favorite librarian advocate, Heather McCormack has graciously offered up a few eloquent (and entertaining) thoughts on the sometimes strained relationship between publishers and librarians. Enjoy, and please share your own thoughts in the comments. ~ Kat Meyer

Like all my favorite phenomena--Joey Ramone, punch-drunk love, Peter Pan donuts--this marvel has not been adequately documented, celebrated, or researched. I first encountered it as an adult circulation desk attendant at the Fargo Public Library in the summer of 1998. I was 23, freshly kicked out of the womb of liberal arts college, and a little depressed to be constantly reshelving Danielle Steele and The New Joy of Sex for minimum wage. I don't remember his name and am reluctant to re-create our conversation, but I will say this favorite patron, a genial from head to toe senior citizen, loved the Western author Zane Grey so much he had read all of his books a dozen times over. From the circulation desk, I'd see him crouching to take in their yellow spines as if they were newly unearthed diamonds.

One day, the inevitable happened. Another patron checked out the title he'd singled out to reread next. He was heartbroken, the closest I'd seen him to unpleasant. My solution was simple: Buy the books you love so much already! He dismissed me in his delightfully swinging accent, the Midwest by way of Brooklyn. The next day, he dropped in on me in the stacks, receipt proffered for my inspection. He had purchased Grey's complete oeuvre on Amazon.com (a website I had yet to visit).
I remember my response and a twinge of sadness.
"Is this good-bye, then?"

***

Of course, I saw that patron many times after his splurge, and before I left Fargo for New York to start at Library Journal, he gifted me with a handwritten list of Manhattan's best bookstores, where I made pilgrimages in search of rare Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, and Robert Palmer. At a now-shuttered shop on 13th Street, just a stone's throw from famed The Strand, I scored Tosches's Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. Bangs's Creem writings eluded me until I thought to meet the lions at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library.
 
Twelve years later, while following the tweets from the 2010 Tools of Change conference, it hit me--there's a powerful library-bookstore connection, a bona fide phenomenon that two people generations and states apart perpetuated unknowingly and that likely plays out every day around the country. Annoyed at the exclusion of libraries from the ebook pricing conversation, I tweeted, "Library patrons are consumers, just as consumers are patrons."
 
To be fair, my irritation had been mounting all winter. Libraries had little to no representation at the inaugural Digital Book World conference in late January; ditto in the fallout of the Macmillan/Amazon face-off. Worse yet, ebooks did not garner marquee billing in a single panel at the Public Library Association's 13th National Conference in March, even though there's strong evidence to suggest that more funds are going toward downloadable content and that its acquisition leads to significant surges in public library circulation.
 
Worse still, public librarians strike me as individually disengaged from the ongoing pricing debate. Anger over expensive content licenses, complacency in their young marriages with Overdrive and NetLibrary, and an almost fatalistic attitude about DRM--all of these are reasonable reactions to an issue that has probably exploded a dozen of my synapses. But as service strategies, they're epic fails. To me, a library has a responsibility above all else to remain relevant to its community. In most cases, this will mean making like Roman gladiators and grappling with ebooks, no matter how ridiculous their cost, formats, or readers.
 
Of course, book publishers have complicated an already mucky scenario. As LJ columnist Barbara Fister pointed out, panic is driving their strategies more than logic, especially regarding a library pricing model. Most CEOs and digital strategists will go on the record only to say they're "open to talking" with librarians--PR speak that plays to my ears as, "Holy, John Sargent, don't those people circulate stuff? Not. Gonna. Happen."
 
Allow me to be clear: I respect publishers' right to make money. I want houses large, medium, and small to thrive, or I'm out of a job and a calling. But somewhere, some publishers made the mistake of deciding that libraries pose a threat to their shrinking coffers even as they remain loyal customers in a harrowing recession; that the free exchange of information they encourage is suddenly anathema to a business that has relied on word of mouth for decades. How these misconceptions originated is not as remarkable as who they're hurting--publishers, libraries, bookstores, authors, and readers, the entire reading ecosystem.
 
***
 
That patron. I'm ashamed to have forgotten his name, but I can still picture his face lighting up about Fourth Avenue, New York's one-time Book Row. I still remember the shops he recommended, even though all but two are closed. Today, I remain a loyal patron of those bookstores and the city's three great library systems, just as I'd wager that North Dakota gentleman is still enjoying both the Fargo Public Library and Amazon.
 
This is just one story, but I bet you know five people who know five people who have used a library, then shopped in a bookstore, then gone back to a library before returning to a bricks-and-mortar or Amazon. And so on and so forth goes a gorgeous little loop that leads to innumerable sales and circs that no one's bothered to measure. As a result, publishers and librarians are in a standoff of sorts. But it's not too late for detente; in fact, it's just the right moment for taking stock of a relationship that must be strengthened, not severed.
 
Bio: Heather McCormack (@hmccormack on Twitter) is a lover, a fighter, and Book Review Editor of Library Journal. She and her colleagues are in the thick of organizing a virtual ebook summit for public, academic, and school librarians, scheduled for Sept. 29, 2010.

Seven Paranoid Provocations on Ebooks and Digital Fiction

Kate Pullinger
April 25, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

Editor's note: I love manifestos. I worry they are becoming too commonplace and will lose their cool factor, but this one, by Kate Pullinger - an incredible novelist, and trail blazer in the transmedia (or what ever u want to call it, @mikecane) arena, puts quite succinctly into words much of what has been missing from the future of publishing traveling circus. -Kat

1. Writers need to talk about money. Some of us reside inside the academy, some of us reside outside the academy; some of us get grants for our work, some of us do not; some of us are bestsellers, most of us are not.  Writers need to be thinking hard about how to protect our revenues across all platforms. As publishing is shaken up by the new technologies, writers need to be proactive, involved in the on-going discussions about developing fair terms and new business models.
2. Writers, publishers, and teachers need to get their heads out of the sand: the digital future is already here and we risk becoming dinosaurs, as well as ostriches, if we don't engage with the multitude of possibilities for storytelling offered to us by the new technologies. For many years a vanguard of writers and artists have been experimenting with form, creating media-rich, screen-dependent, born-digital, works of fiction.  However, in the absence of a proven business model, the traditional gatekeepers of writing and publishing have not been interested.  This is changing.
   
3. Stop talking about e-books. E-books are boring. Convenient, practical, destined to become one of the ways we read, but boring, as counter-intuitive as placing the text of the latest blockbuster novel on a television screen. The Google Book project, which sees the world's leading libraries collaborating in secret with a giant corporation, effectively pulling the copyright rug out from under our feet, is either our best friend or our worst enemy or both; however, the Google Book project, along with rapid developments in e-readers, has ensured that the book, as a digital file, will remain at the heart of our culture for the foreseeable future. So stop talking about e-books. There's a new world of media-rich literature around the next corner; reading on screen has huge potential to enhance the way we tell stories, and to expand our audiences in new directions.
4. We better keep talking about e-books.  Despite my own weariness with the subject, e-books are undergoing a rapid and soon-to-snowball set of advancements and the 'paper-under-glass' analogy will soon no longer hold true. 'Enhanced editions' and single-book apps where the author provides a wealth of extra digital material that is embedded in the text, from audio recordings of the author reading to music composed by the author, are already beginning to appear; children's books are undergoing a rapid revolution as the games industry giant EA collaborates with publishers to create works like 'Artemis Fowl' for Nintendo DS - fully interactive, with games, puzzles and a whole wealth of extra material for the reader to explore, embedded in the text. Both these examples are a considerable distance from born-digital fiction, as both are still pretty much the print book with a bunch of e-extras added on. However, e-books will doubtless continue to transform, especially as e-readers become more sophisticated and people really do want to get the most out of the potential for reading a story on a screen.
5. Be afraid of e-books.   Will the kind of digital fiction projects I'm involved in be completely swept aside and obliterated by the Great Machine of Corporate Publishing as it discovers the huge potential for digital fiction? Will works of this type, with their hand-made and very personal aesthetic, soon look like a movie I made on my mobile phone when everything else looks like 'Avatar'?
6. Always remember that human culture is highly visual. The first non-oral form of storytelling was cave-painting - the original powerpoint presentation. The dominance of film and television as storytelling forms in the twentieth century demonstrate that as soon as we are able to use pictures to tell stories, we do. Literature must reckon with this fact. As technology enables us to carry rich media in our pockets we need to find ways to make writing - good writing - relevant to new generations of readers. If we take the long view of the history of storytelling, are plain old words on the page - fixed-type print - an historic anomaly?
7. Good writing - and by this I mean writing that demonstrates the love of language, of a good sentence, a well-turned phrase, the power of words, writing that rewards re-reading - must survive, regardless of platform or media. It's up to us to make sure that happens.
   

 
Kate Pullinger writes both books and digital fiction.  Her new novel,'The Mistress of Nothing' won Canada's Governor-General Award for Literary Fiction and will be published by Simon & Schuster in the US in 2011; her award-winning digital fiction 'Inanimate Alice' is available for free online. 
 
www.katepullinger.com
www.inanimatealice.com
www.flightpaths.net

Scenes from a Very Quiet London Book Fair

Andrew Savikas
April 20, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Some photos snapped yesterday during the first day of the London Book Fair. Crowds have picked up on Day 2, but still an eerily quiet show.

Why iPad Adaptation is an Uphill Battle for Incumbent Publishers

Andrew Savikas
April 8, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

I heard quite a bit of buzz the past few days about the Popular Science+ iPad app, a "reimagining" of the magazine for the iPad (for the low-low price of $4.99 per issue), so I took a look at it last night.

And while it's slick, the problem is that it's ... a "reimagining" of the magazine. When someone is using your application/game/content/website on their iPad (and mobile device in general) they expect it to behave like everything else they're using on the device.

For example, if you're going to put in a "full-page ad" (what the heck does that mean on an iPad?) with a URL in it make the URL an actual hyperlink! I poked and poked at the url, and nothing would take me to google.com/chrome (see, that wasn't so hard).

  

This happened over and over again throughout the "magazine" -- I saw something I expected to be able to click (often URLs) and nothing happened. Here's some typical PopSci gadget porn, where not only can I not click the gadgets to get more info (or maybe comparison shop), but even the company URLs aren't clickbable:

This app is chock full of the exact same copy and images from the magazine, presented through a 7x9 window and without any of the affordances of a print magazine to help readers understand their place in the overall picture.

Working hyperlinks are the very least we should expect from content like this on a device like the iPad, and they're the bare minimum form of something notably absent in Popular Science+ -- opportunity for engagement. No comment links, no way to see what the most popular content is, no way to email a picture or an article to someone else, no place to submit my own recommendations for better tools or to tweet about what I just read.

My favorite example of the disconnect between what Popular Science intended and what they delivered is summarized succinctly in the introduction from the editor: "... everything in the issue and reimagines it to make the most of the iPad's screen and capabilities." Judge for yourself if this is really making the most of that screen:

Yes it's fun (if a bit exhausting -- very low return on effort) to swipe and pinch to play find-the-content-in-the-high-res-labyrinth, but this was clearly intended as a better/new/different version of the magazine, and so it suffers the fatal flaw of having to carry a ton of the baggage of the old medium into the new one.

I would bet that most of the executives around the table at Popular Science were absolutely thrilled with this app. And that's the problem. I have an informal filter on how interesting and innovative a new content-related development or device is -- if a large number of people from incumbent companies (especially big ones) are excited about it, then it's not actually interesting or innovative enough to matter much, because that means it's too similar to the current way of doing things. That's why the industry loves "enhanced ebooks" at the same time they're totally missing opportunities to re-imagine the "job" their product does for the customer. (In all fairness, we struggle with this a lot at O'Reilly too!)

NYT Web Piece on Mobile Outperforming Web Demonstrates Own Conclusion

Andrew Savikas
March 12, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

NYTimes.com has a piece from Wednesday about several popular mobile apps that are better than their "parent" websites (using Zillow and Yelp as examples). What struck me when I first opened the page on my laptop after following a link to it on Twitter was how the NYTimes.com web experience stacks up to their own mobile app.

Many critics of smartphone reading lament the relatively small screen real estate, but a look at how a site like NYTimes.com actually uses the extra real estate a laptop browser offers is instructive:

I count about 50 words from the story visible on that page, with most of the screen taken up by navigation, ads, and whitespace.

Looking at a similar article on the NYT iPhone app, you actually get more of the article text (more than 70 words) before you have to scroll down:

Having a larger screen size is only an improvement if you actually take advantage of the larger screen size (conversely, the smaller screen of a smartphone imposes constraints that result in a much better reading experience).

Mobile phones and smartphones are not the same thing

Mac Slocum
March 8, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Comparing a basic mobile phone to a spiffy new smartphone is like comparing a circa-1993 desktop computer to a Macbook Pro. They're related in a basic sense, but the discrepancies are immense.

Why is this relevant? Because worldwide mobile phone penetration is high while smartphone penetration is relatively low. And if you're a digital publisher trying to reach new markets, you better create material that works on the dominant devices. That means small displays and limited functionality. Arthur Attwell, co-founder and CEO of Electric Book Works, expands on this phone divide in the following interview.

Making the most of the iPad life preserver

Simon St. Laurent
March 5, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

I was very happy to hear less fear at last week's TOC conference than I've heard at previous shows. Publishers, while still concerned about their futures, seem to be adjusting to the prospects of a much less book-centric world.

A couple of years ago I'd hear standard complaints like "people don't read any more," "customers would rather surf than read," and "piracy just makes the whole Web thing impossible." On the bright side, we all agreed that "at least we don't work in newspapers."

This year, attendees seemed more excited and definitely more positive about the future. Maybe it was Macmillan's successful spat with Amazon. Perhaps it was just an adjustment to the lowered expectations of the economy, and a sense that those who've survived this far are past the disaster.

I suspect, though, the anxiety reduction has something to do with publishers having more hope about the three things all financially-driven publishers need to function:

1. An audience
2. Something to sell that audience
3. A market for selling those things

The audience (1), seems to be coming back, if it ever really left. I didn't hear much about "the decline of reading" this time, but I did overhear "texting is awful, but at least it's text." While the Web may not have helped book sales, it does seem to have made basic literacy much more clearly relevant.

Based on the conversations I had during TOC (an admittedly unscientific sample), publishers' hopes are reviving in large part because they expect the iPad to create a market for their goods (3) on terms they mostly like better than Kindle's terms. Apple's design appeal has created a market for its devices, while Apple's thirst for control over their products has created a controlled market with simple terms, prices publishers (mostly?) control, and relatively little piracy. Publishers have craved something like this for the last decade.

I worry that many of the conversations I heard at TOC assumed that publishers already had (2), something to sell, under control. After all, publishing does an excellent job of creating books -- all kinds of books, on all kinds of subjects, for all kinds of readers. Convert them to ePub or PDF or maybe even an iPhone app if necessary, and we have something to sell, right?

For the moment, yes. There is still demand for traditional books presented through shiny new devices. Millions of readers love and understand books, yet might be willing to make the transition from bound paper and ink to an electronic rendition. Unlike most previous ebook readers, however, the iPad puts its content in direct competition with the Web as readers have come to know it. Unlike the Kindle, for instance, where browsing felt like an afterthought that would use up expensive connectivity, connecting to the Web is more central to the iPad experience than is reading books.

The competition from the Web won't just be free content versus paid content, but a matter of user experience. Will readers be content to follow a long text, or would they rather switch applications to something more interactive, with more connections between content?

I saw two talks at TOC that seemed to get to the heart of this: Pete Meyers' Book Meets Tablet: 10 Ways to Enhance Your iPad Books, and Bob Pritchett's Network Effects Support Premium Pricing. (Neither talk, alas, is available online, though their slides are available at those links.)

Meyers looked at the challenges of competing with the far more interactive Web world, of keeping users interested in the content that publishers hope they will buy. His 10 suggestions, presented as sketches, were all about ways to use the new format to pull readers into the book. Some of it is supplementary material, some of it is allowing readers to personalize their books (with notes), and much of it pushes into new territory that takes a more interactive turn than books have allowed. My personal favorite was renegade sidebars and footnotes, which take familiar asides in books and let them cause more interesting trouble.

Pritchett took a somewhat different course, talking about the possibilities of breaking books out of their covers and bundling them into more comprehensive applications. Pritchett has something of an advantage going into this, as Logos Bible Software works in a field, Bible study and religious reference, where consistent hypertext referencing has gone on for hundreds of years. Concordances, citing chapter and verse, and an immense collection of explorations along similar pathways give Logos a rich field for creating new products by connecting different resources. Establishing those connections and making their use comfortable is a challenge in itself, but opens possibilities no single project can have.

(Beyond the confines of the TOC conference, I also highly recommend Craig Mod's Books in the Age of the iPad, which steps back even further to question the differences between books and the iPad experience.)

So should publishers be happy? Is the iPad a much-needed life preserver for publishers on stormy seas?

Well, yes. It gives them access to a market of people who are interested in buying things from them, who are familiar with their goods, and who likely have the spare cash and time to enjoy them. The harder question, though, is what we publishers are going to do with that life preserver. Is it just going to keep us afloat, or are we going to swim to new places? Most of us, I suspect, should be practicing our swimming.

(And of course we should all worry about Apple's fondness for control leading to limiting what its partners are allowed to do or striving to abolish its competition through aggressive patent suits. This is definitely a salvation worth questioning.)

Continuous publishing through Live Editions

Simon St. Laurent
March 1, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (21) | Listen

One of the biggest challenges of technical publishing is that sinking feeling you get a few moments, days, weeks, or months after you first see a book in print: it's obsolete. No matter how much hard work you put into a book, you can only do so much future-proofing. Sometimes obsolescence comes slowly, but often, especially for popular topics, books have a depressingly short shelf life. Readers want to be able to use the latest and greatest, and blame books quickly when something no longer works.

We've been working for a while on a new way of ensuring that our content will continue to have a life after it's been set down in print. Last week, we released Learning Rails: Live Edition, the pilot for what we hope will become a common way to ensure that our customers can get current content from us, even if it's not yet time for a new edition.

The Live Edition is presently available as an Ebook (PDF, Mobi, and ePub) bundle, and the updated content will also be available through Safari Books Online and eventually print on demand. Customers who buy a Live Edition will get all the updates to the book up until the next new print edition of the book, when the cycle will start again. (For Learning Rails, customers will get all the updates for the upcoming 3.x version of Rails.)

Live Editions follow a different process. Instead of a long wait for a slow new edition, the model is "release early and often." Authors can quickly respond to reader feedback and errata immediately, rather than filing it away for a reprint or a new edition.

Right now, Live Editions are built as an extension of our normal DocBook publishing process. Authors do have to make their updates in markup, rather than Word or OpenOffice. This may be unfamiliar to some authors, but gives them the power to do things like add or remove index entries as the book changes, and gives them a quick path to seeing PDFs in final form.

We plan to create more Live Editions in the near future, starting with topics where change is constant and having the latest information is the critical feature.

Emerging topics from TOC 2010

Mac Slocum
February 26, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

It's interesting to chart technical developments in the publishing industry against TOC's brief history. As Andrew Savikas notes in the following video, things like ebooks and mobile have evolved from small topics to dominant themes. If the pattern holds -- and I don't know why it wouldn't -- we'll see international markets and digital analytics claim more attention at future events.