TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘XML’ Category

By a TeleRead Contributor

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 That’s because their production processes are traditionally rooted in outdated print publishing practices that are severely inadequate for tackling today’s publishing challenges.

In order to profit – literally – from the new digital markets, publishers must rethink the way they create, manage, publish, and deliver content. They must re-engineer their processes to create more flexibility and guarantee a sustainable and certain future. They must re-imagine a production process that frees their content to be transformed — on-demand — into whatever new formats, devices, and uses consumers require, now and for the future.

Continuing to retrofit existing print-based content workflows is not only impractical, overly expensive, error-prone, and unnecessarily complicated, it’s also not an efficient, flexible, or sustainable business practice. Fred Ciporen, former publisher of Publishers Weekly, recently echoed similar sentiments to an industry group preparing for the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference.

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Paul Biba

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By Jean Kaplansky

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 companies.

I agree completely with Paul Topping’s comments on the Sperberg article. Accessibility and Process-ability are two huge reasons to not write off XML as a fad or lost cause in the publishing community.

The relevance of markup is a contextual to the line of business doing the publishing, and what the business intends to do with the content in the future.

One thing is certain: if you cannot programmatically get to a piece of content, whether by metadata, or walking a markup tree, the potential to reuse that piece of content or provide value-added any sort of processing is greatly diminished.

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By Roger Sperberg, New York Editor for TeleRead

Part one in a series exploring the state of e-book publishing today. Today’s installment is one of several by New York editor Roger Sperberg about the publishing’s failure to use XML markup as the base for creating an electronic future for the book industry.

What’s XML for? Perhaps if publishers understood that question we would be farther along the road to e-books — and to whatever the thing is that subsumes e-books into a richer medium without forgoing book-ness.

I was speaking with Jess Lawson of Oxford University Press earlier this week about using XML in book production. The desirability of an XML workflow comes across more clearly, I observe, when it’s called “XML first,” as OUP does. Adding XML markup for web or e-book delivery after a standard birth — inception, editing, production — enables electronic delivery but seems to be worth only about as much trouble as it takes. After-the-fact XML brings little additional benefit.

I remember a slide that Tommie Usdin of Mulberry Technologies showed at an XML conference ten years ago. It stated simply, “Markup is expensive.” And about the same time Jon Bosak of Sun did some back-of-the-envelope calculations (more…)