Talkin bout tech

I’ve just read an interesting article in Harper's, “The Last Book Party: Publishing drinks to a life after death”. In it, the author is attending a German publishing festival where publishing houses bid for the international rights to the year’s ‘hottest’ new books. What is interesting about the article is that the author is expressing a doubt I myself have about the future of the publishing industry and the different ways in which both authors and publishers are dealing with it. The author, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, also covers some ground familiar in Epstein. Lewis-Kraus creates a vision of the older generation of publishers as people genuinely interested in literature for literature’s sake, content with small profit margins with the greater goal of being purveyors of thought. This environment of people actually taking pride in their work was transformed when entities like Viacom and CBS entered the mix and “were insulted by margins of 5 percent”. We have all read about how this has created a craving for the next bestseller and authors receiving huge advances usually out of proportion with how well their book will actually sell. New technology, and more importantly the author’s ability to manipulate this technology is changing the focus once again. One author at the Fair, in a move similar to Stephen King’s online novel, has put his entire catalog on his website. He quips that he is “stealing from myself”. I find it interesting that by being on the vanguard of this techno-movement, the author forces the pendulum to swing back the other way, away from huge advances and inflated expectations. Because, at the moment, there is not an adequate system in place to create revenue for authors using technology to spread their work, we may be left with those authors that are true artists and whose greatest passion is to create great literature. Conversely, we may get to the point where everyone with an internet connection thinks that their work is worthy of being read to the masses. It will be interesting to see in the coming years how the publishing industry continues to navigate the issues arising from the use of newer technologies.

Epstein, iPhones, and the fall of the book

I am sorry Epstein; I have seen the end of the publishing business as we know it. I just watched an iPhone commercial in which one of our friendly fingers was paging through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I have to believe, copyright issues notwithstanding, that this marks a crucial step towards the complete digitization of books. On a previous iPhone commercial they demonstrated how the phone could analyze a fragment of a song and connect the user to the iTunes store where the album could be purchased. What’s stopping this from being applied to text? I am greatly anticipating the time when I can read the New York Times Book Review, on their website via my phone of course, and immediately be connected to an online bookstore so that I can purchase the hottest new titles. Given these new possibilities, perhaps Apple should create something like iMedia. Similar to what Epstein conceptualized as a publishing conglomerate, filtered through online marketplaces, the opportunities afforded Apple could lead to the eventual creation of localized sites that cater to every interest of every consumer, be it Peruvian pan-flute music, the newest blockbuster action movie, or digital copies of text books.
What I find terribly ironic is that the iPhone answers Epstein’s complaint, and the subsequent voracity of his belief that printed text will never become an extinct expression of technology, by providing digital books with which a reader can still fulfill some sort of tactile experience. It is true that holding an iPhone loaded with your favorite novels and poetry will never equal the sensory experience of standing in a room filled with those same books. I guess we just have to ask ourselves whether it is a fair trade-off to lose the experience of the smell and feel of a book in exchange for having access to the most extensive library imaginable in our front pocket. For me, the answer is a resounding yes and my interest is piqued as to how these technologies will continue to unfold and change our day-to-day lives.

Software for Writers

If you're writing a long (book-length) document in Microsoft Word, you really need to get the Author Tools Template from the Editorium. It's a beautiful add-in set of MS Word macros. Make sure to enable macros in Word for it to run.

If you want an alternative to Word, here are some possibilities:

Commercial Software

• Scrivener (Mac only): everybody who uses it loves it.
  
• PageFour (Windows): I use it and think it's great.
  

Freeware

• Notepad++: plain-text freeware, a huge improvement over regular Notepad.
  
• JDarkRoom: plain-text freeware makes your screen black -- a retro computer look with no distractions.

There are other options out there, but these are the ones I'm most familiar with. Here is an article comparing Scrivener with several other Mac-based alternatives to Word.

How should you format text?

So here's a question: suppose you work for a publisher or are a publisher yourself. What format should you start with? I hear you saying "Hermagoras, what a silly question: whatever form the author gives me." And it's true that authors will likely give you files in a word processing format like Microsoft Word. Some technical writers, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists will submit files in formats like LaTeX or perhaps even HTML (the code for most web pages). But almost all other authors will give you a Word file or, perhaps, a Rich Text Format (RTF) file that can be translated among various word processors.

Over the last twenty years, editors and layout people have mainly worked with desktop publishing programs such as Adobe PageMaker and FrameMaker, QuarkXPress, and even Microsoft Publisher (for small companies publishing newsletters and the like) Such programs took care of layout issues and, combined with graphic design programs for illustration, formed the backbone of publishing technology (at least in terms of editing and page design). When a publisher needed a freelance editor, the adverisement would almost invariably request expertise in FrameMaker or QuarkXPress.

But technology is evolving, and the need to produce electronic and print products (a kind dual-format imperative) changes the technological landscape. Here's what I mean. In a dual-format environment, an editor needs to make decisions with a single text that can be translated quickly and easily into a variety of formats. A format decision should make global changes in the text, and those changes should take effect in all the chosen formats -- and in new ones that are not yet designed.

I want to take a cue from the technical publisher O'Reilly (they produce some of the best computer books around) and suggest that would-be editors and publishers Start with XML. I think this might be a good idea even though I'm not an XML expert myself. My one real experience with XML was a freelance project in which I used the XML language DocBook. The project was a manual for a computer application. The manual ended up existing in three formats: as a physical book, as a set of web pages, and as a Help file (the kind that pops up as a window in a computer program). With DocBook, I coded the text semantically -- that is, I marked the text elements for their purpose -- rather than textually. So, for example, I wouldn't mark a word as "bold" or "italic," the way you'd do it in Word or in Blogger. Instead I'd mark it as a certain kind of word: a keyword, for example, or a cross-reference. This is signficant because if you make a text italic, it's italic in every format: book, web page, help file, Kindle, etc. But if I mark it as a keyword, then the style sheet recognizes the keyword and changes all the keywords in the format according to a specified style sheet. For various reasons, you might do this differently in different formats (perhaps keywords are in italics in a print book but bolded or even linked to a glossary in a help file). With XML, you can do this.

The point is this: by coding for content, XML allows editors to mark a text so that it can be changed in different formats more cleanly and easily. In a sense, it separates the practices of editing and layout. As multiple-format publication becomes the norm, this will be more and more important, and XML skills will be something to seek out and develop.

Kindle 2!

A new version of the Kindle will debut February 9. According to Brad Stone of the BITS blog at the New York Times,

the biggest changes may be inside the device. The new Kindle likely uses the new Broadsheet microchip from Epson and E-Ink, which makes the display technology for the Kindle. E-Ink’s chief executive, Russell J. Wilcox, described the technology to me a few weeks ago, saying that it breaks the screen into 16 pixel sets and can update them in parallel, allowing for faster screen refreshes and a generally more responsive screen. He added that the technology was somewhat analogous to putting a better graphics card in a computer and would help e-readers become better full-featured devices.

So what does this mean for publishing? For the future of the book? Feel free to speculate in the comments or in new posts.