While researching my primer post on e-book formats, I happened across an interesting article from a month ago by David Skurnik on the DCLnews blog. Skurnik advises publishers on how to “future-proof” their e-books. Skurnik notes that e-books have only just begun the process of evolving away from their common ancestry with print books into something more complex. Given how many different formats are competing for primacy, it is difficult to know which horse to back, or indeed whether (or how) to back all of them. To stay prepared for whatever e-book formats win, or whatever new...

Editor's Note: the following article is written by Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of Aptara. The results of the media survey published just below seem to corroborate Dev's comments about content consumers. PB Today’s content consumers are voracious digital omnivores, desiring to feed on all types of electronic content -- from Twitter tweets to YouTube videos, from iPhone apps to Facebook updates, from mp3s to eBooks. Yet traditional publishers, particularly trade book publishers, are not prepared to serve digitally savvy audiences the variety of electronic products they demand. That’s because their production processes are traditionally rooted in outdated print...

One minute I was reading Roger Sperberg's "Why Do Publisher's Need XML?" post, and the next time I looked, I was typing like a mad woman. "Wait!" I thought to myself. "He's only talking about one facet of publishing, but making it read like this is true for all of publishing! What about all of the other acts of publishing that do need XML?" Huh? Publishing has facets? Well, yeah. I've worked in multiple facets of the publishing community: University Press, Journals, Technical Publications, Textbooks for K-12, Higher Education, and Continuing Education, as well as Enterprise Publishing at some very large...

When editors understand XML as well as English grammar, and regard metadata as valuable as a plug on Oprah, only then will the structural elements exist in e-books that will make them more valuable than p-books....