Collaborative Publishing

In my last post (XML First…What about eBook First?) I discussed an emerging trend of publishing an eBook before the print version. An interesting implementation of this process is with the electronic release of The Complete Guide to Google Wave. This is a technical manual for Google's new web application, Google Wave. The technical manual was released one-month after the initial preview release of Wave. Since Google Wave is a hard-to-understand concept and application, this manual has been very useful for the early adopters of Wave.

The fact that the guide was released first in electronic form, rather then print, is only part of what is intriguing about this publishing experiment. The work is a collaboration effort between two authors who now use Google Wave to update their guide and receive public input on the future releases. The authors intention is to "Release early and Often". The guide will be updated and refined in public as Google Wave is changed and improved before a full public release of the product. The softcover print version is coming in early 2010.

XML First...What about eBook First?

The benefits for publishers to move to "XML First" workflows have been floating around for awhile now (see my post from November 12th). This type of workflow supports the easy and efficient creation of alternatives to the print book such as the eBook. It was only a matter of time that an "eBook First" discussion started.

According to the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), year-over-year eBook sales have grown to 300%. This certainly raises the interest of any publishing CFO who now sees the importance of electronic revenues. But it will surely raise the interest of authors and editors who until now built the content around the printed book and not the eBook. The shift to creating an eBook first, taking advantage of its creative possibilities has begun. No longer does the content have to fit within the constraints of the printed book.

Mike Shatzkin writes a very thought provoking post on his blog titled What it will mean when the ebook comes first. He predicts a huge upheaval for editors and authors when they start thinking about eBook First.

I've recognized for years that prevalent thinking is that the eBook is only an electronic version of the printed book. This is an artifact of the workflows that created the eBook from the print. With eBook First the content will surely be different than what is possible in print.

The Content Package

Publishing is as much about the content as it is about the packaging of the content. Many initiatives are underway to re-invent the package and how the user experiences the content on the web.

Google is experimenting with the user interface for news with their Fast Flip project. Users can very rapidly 'Flip' through the online version of news articles much as you would in browsing a newspaper or magazine until you find something of interest. Whether or not this new user experience will become the standard for online news reading isn't as important as the experiment itself as Google tries to push the envelope on the content package.

In an effort to promote innovation in the way information is accessed in the Life Sciences, Elsevier promoted the Elsevier Grand Challenge 2009. Elsevier was looking for specific tools to improve the interpretation of online journals. Specific objectives for the project were to:

• improve the process/methods/results of creating, reviewing and editing scientific content
• interpret, visualize or connect the knowledge more effectively, and/or
• provide tools/ideas for measuring the impact of these improvements

The winner of the challenge is a prototype tool that links the internal content of a journal article with external scientific content. A pilot of the tool can be seen in the November 12th issue of the Cell journal, published by Cell Press. In this issue, mentions of proteins, genes and small molecules are highlighted and links give the user pop-up windows with relevant contextual information. This is accomplished through rich semantic tagging of the content which can be ignored in the xml for print, turned on for presentation in the online version, and turned off by online users that don't want to see the highlighting. An example of the pilot can be seen at:

Dissociation of EphB2 Signaling Pathways Mediating Progenitor Cell Proliferation and Tumor Suppression p679

While innovation in the user interface for news and journal articles is moving ahead with promising prototypes, it seems that similar innovation in eBook interfaces has a ways to go. Most electronic readers attempt to replicate the printed book experience to widely varying success. One experiment that is underway is with the new so called 'Vook' which combines text of a book with video. This format shows promise but examples so far don't demonstrate content that truly shows a close link between the text and the video.

XML-First, Please

The introduction of XML-First into the publishing workflow allows publishers to move from a print centered workflow to a content centered workflow. By quickly and efficiently transitioning the author's manuscript (usually in Word) to XML prior to composition gives the publisher the ability to publish faster and in many more creative ways to their customers including XHTML and ePub. The move to XML-First has proved to decrease costs, increase ROI, and raise the quality of the end product. A very typical workflow can be seen in a slideshow from Taylor & Francis Books, "What impact does XML-First have on your costs". Mark Majurey shows in the presentation a 30% reduction in budgeted time for copyediting combined with the ability to outsource the typesetting results in dramatic cost savings to the publisher and ultimately a higher ROI.

The benefits of XML-First is not restricted to traditional publishing. Last month, the US Government introduced the release of the Federal Register in XML prior to composition of the printed register. The Federal Register publishes approximately 80,000 pages per year and is the de-facto news agency of the executive branch. The Washington Post on October 5th, 2009 reported this development in the article "A More Web-Friendly Register". The raw XML data can be accessed at Data.gov making the voluminous information accessible, customizable and reusable in a variety of formats. This development has made greater transparency in government a reality.

POD is Taking Over

Traditional production methods of books is in a steady decline. According to Publisher's Weekly, 275,232 new and revised titles were produced by traditional production methods in 2008 which is a 3% decline over the previous year. In contrast POD (print-on-demand) titles rose at an astounding rate of 132%, to 285,394 titles in the same period. Is the traditional book printing age over?

Clearly, Hewlett-Packard has seen these numbers and is launching a web hosted Print-on-Demand (POD) service named BookPrep. As reported in PCWorld 's article titled HP Bets on Print-on-Demand Services, BookPrep will include, among others, 500,000 out-of-print titles from the University of Michigan that were digitized by Google. BookPrep is partnered with Amazon to sell and distribute the books. According to Andrew Bolwell at HP, "There's a fundamental shift taking place in the publishing industry, Print-on-demand is the future."

"Intelligent" Content

For years now, publishers have created metadata which is nothing more than "data about data". It's the data that describes an artifact or piece of data. Typical metadata for a journal article would be the title, author, volume and issue.

Taking traditional metadata one step further is Intelligent Content. This is the emerging practice of enriching the content with information or metadata that allows the content to become adaptable to varying users, technology, output format, and purpose. This adaptability is often managed automatically by the publishing systems. For example, if content is published both electronically and in print, the intelligent content is able to tell the publishing systems to include video, audio and other rich media to the online edition. But intelligent content is not just about output format. Through the use of this metadata the content can be customized to fit the intended audience. Scott Abell in his Content Wrangler blog describes it this way:

"By adding intelligence to the content, you can have it do the formatting work for you, on-demand, only when it’s needed. That’s the smart way of providing the right content, to the right people, in the right format, at the right time, in the right language."

The possibilities are endless.

Staying ahead of Data Rot

Whenever the subject of eBooks comes up in a discussion inevitably someone mentions their love for the printed book and the hope that they will never go away. Everyday more and more books are created in an eBook form but will the digital copies of these books be around in 10 years? If history is any predictor the answer to that question depends on how well the digital copies are maintained over time and transferred to the latest and greatest storage formats to avoid being lost for all time.

I was reminded of this "data rot" this weekend as I ran across a reel-to-reel tape of my senior recital at music school some 30 years ago. I don't have the equipment to play it anymore, nor is the equipment readily at hand so I have no idea whether or not they are even salvageable at this point. But it is certain that if I don't take care of these soon they will be lost for good. Not a great loss mind you, but one I don't want to think about.

Storage formats come and go and in the electronic age those formats last about 10 years so efforts to keep eBooks around will become challenging. How is it that the books I have owned all of my life still survive? I remember a lecture from Library School that put forth the idea that printed books have proved to be the best storage format of all time. They are able to survive even fire. The edges of the pages might be charred however the text on the whole remains. Can this be said for any digital storage today? The printed book format has been enduring for hundreds of years. That's one format compared to over 10 eBook formats and the complimentary eBook devices I have owned over the years. Just as alarming is that I only have the latest Kindle copies of eBooks that I have purchased recently. All the other eBooks are lost forever.

I have always been excited and supportive of the digital transformation of books, but I don't think the printed book lovers have anything to worry about for awhile.