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 e-book formats appear down the road, Skurnik suggests the intermediary stop of converting books into a generic XML format that can then be converted directly to any or all formats of your choice. Even when a new standard comes along, he suggests, it will probably still retain enough backward compatibility with XML to make conversion simple.

He goes on to suggest a few possible XML standards, including NLM, DocBook, TEI Lite, and DITA.

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 That’s because their production processes are traditionally rooted in outdated print publishing practices that are severely inadequate for tackling today’s publishing challenges.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

To become lean and robust, publishers have to recognize the shortcomings of undertaking each new publishing challenge from scratch. For example, considering eBook creation as a project at the end of the print publishing lifecycle artificially and exponentially increases production costs. Continuing such practices misses the essential benefits of digitalization. It condemns the company to the past, forgoing the future while ignoring consumer demand.

Freeing content from formatting and making it possible to easily deliver content to any device on any platform in any format—print, web, or mobile—is not a new idea. Organizations have been doing it for years through leveraging the power of XML.

It’s time for traditional publishers to follow suit − with a content-centered XML-first publishing approach. Getting there is not the difficult or disruptive process that many publishing executives have assumed. For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word. (XML is an open content standard that drastically reduces the effort required of publishing houses to create eBooks — and every other type of content. XML is designed to help publishers break the dependency of content on proprietary formats and specific devices. XML content can be easily repurposed, reused, shared, sorted, aggregated with other content, and automatically processed, published, and delivered, often on-demand.)

“Fortune 1000 companies have been adopting XML publishing not because it’s cool and trendy, but because doing so saves them millions of dollars and provides measurable benefits,” says content management guru Ann Rockley. “It’s seen as a competitive advantage; an approach designed to help publishers respond quickly to both new business opportunities and threats from competitors.”

Technical communications departments in the aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, life sciences, financial, and publishing industries use a content-first XML publishing approach to create, publish, and deliver their own version of books: product-specific user guides, product manuals, support Web sites, and online help systems from a single repository of content, thanks to XML. Corporate training departments and universities use the same methods to create role-specific XML-based training and eLearning content. Some publishers may be surprised to learn that their own organizations are already using this approach to create in-house documentation and training materials.

Though there are few examples of Trade publishers adopting XML-first workflows, below are two examples of Educational publishing houses that are thinking creatively and benefiting:

John Wiley & Sons has re-engineered their approach to publishing with the advent of Wiley Custom Select (http://customselect.wiley.com), an online portal that provides educators with the ability to create their own custom text books. Teachers select content they desire from any of the products in the Wiley library, arrange it in the order they desire, upload their own content (should they desire to do so), and, with a few clicks, automatically format, publish, and deliver the content into a custom eBook. All of this is made possible using XML.

O’Reilly Media and the Pearson Technology Group joined forces to create Safari Books Online (http://www.safaribooksonline.com/Corporate/Index). The premise was simple: compile the best technology books from the leading authors and publishers into an on-demand digital library that technology, digital media, and creative professionals could quickly and easily search for reliable, definitive answers to mission-critical questions. Content downloaded from Safari Books Online is optimized for mobile devices, computers, or other reading devices, and many titles are available as eBooks. All of this is also made possible through XML.

“It’s both surprising and ironic that trade publishers, in particular, have yet to adopt XML-first or XML-centric workflows,” said Fred Ciporen. “Surprising, because they have the most to gain from re-engineering their publishing approaches, and ironic because their titles and products are more ideally suited for such workflows than most other types of publications.” The benefits to the publisher — and the reader — are many, including:

Faster time-to-market

Indefinite extension of products’ shelf-life

Greater and more nimble responsiveness to competitive threats and new business opportunities

Cost savings through more efficient utilization of human and financial resources

Ability to automatically combine and deliver various types of content on-demand

Flexibility in preparing content in new formats (Web, mobile, social media, eBook) for inclusion in fast-growing third party eBook distribution networks like Amazon.com, iTunes, app stores

Ability to quickly develop enhanced and engaging interactive reading experiences that are not possible with print-based products

Regardless of publisher type, there’s no avoiding today’s bottom line: in order to compete in the digital age, publishers must design a process that allows them to sustainably profit from digital content distribution.

Although eBook challenges may be new, thankfully their solution already exists. The Trade industry is well armed with proven multi-channel, content-centered publishing approaches that deliver sizable, real cost savings and increased margins.

It’s time for Trade publishers to take a fresh look at XML-first workflows. It is the best and only content strategy designed for the present and the future – while establishing a solid foundation on which to profitably operate a publishing business in the digital economy.

“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.

In addition to Paul’s comments regarding accessibility and calculations, I would like to point out that other other publishing processes exist that regularly benefit from marked-up content. One example that comes to mind is a pivot table that is not based on numerical data—like the kind of data that is often collected for clinical data reports in large clinical trials.

Another example comes directly from learning content—Test Questions and Answers. Not only can you deliver this content more intelligently with markup, the IMS QTI standard has designed markup to handle automated processing of test question scoring, as well as logical delivery of further test questions based on real time information submitted from users.

But not everyone needs or wants to consider going to this level of detail if the financial side of things does not make sense, or the need to reuse doesn’t exist (which I find hard to believe these days with the number of different ways to publish a single book), or the need for a process adding additional value to content is just not there.

The business process for publishers who work with narrative content, that is fiction, and other “soft” side subjects—basically, anything that is not related to science or math, or content such as certification test preparation guides—does not currently require identifying content in minute detail to get an acceptable end result: a hard bound, paper back, and/or e-book (which, just to reiterate, are products of the now, but not necessarily the sum-total of products that will be available in the future).

The near future ROI for soft-side publishing does not exceed the costs of converting narrative content from authored originals to XML, cleaning up the content so that it can be consistently processed, and building automated workflows required to maintain and process the content in the future.

Unless… Unless you want to do something innovative like automatic composition of content that aggregates relevant content from a single source based on audience (think of the original version of Marley & Me vs. the children’s book Bad Dog, Marley!, or a student/instructor version of an English literature anthology), or the ability to single source products with dramatically different presentations (think of Cesar’s Way Deck: 50 Tips for Training and Understanding Your Dog and Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems; the first is a deck of cards, the second, a bound book. Much of the material could have come from the same source.)

But narrative, soft-side content is only one facet of the publishing community.

Educational publishers are required, by law, to create accessible versions of their products. What has become the de facto standard for accessibility in the U.S.? The DAISY standard, which is, you guessed it, has more than one part based on XML.

The FDA has its own standards in which they want to receive New Drug Application submissions from pharmaceutical companies. The officially approved standards? Yep. XML.

As a good friend and former co-worker once said, “When the federal government stands between your product and the market, you tend to do what they say…”

I could provide additional examples from other industries, but I think you guys get the point. XML is here, and it is useful in all sorts of publishing scenarios – if the business has the requirements to go there. So instead of asking “Why XML?” Lots of people are out there asking “Why not XML?” It’s my experience that people don’t really think about what they can do with XML content until they have some to play with and experiment upon. Experimentation can lead to innovation. Innovation can lead to new ways to realize ROI. Dismissing a technology because it’s not useful in one facet of publishing, or because the content is authored in Word (or on a typewriter – some professors are really old school), or because it can be expensive, does not mean that there isn’t a community out there that can greatly benefit from the technology right now, as is the case with books converted to the DAISY standard to provide accessibility to information. There’s also an innovative community out there that is thinking about how they will come up with new and different approaches to looking at, analyzing and learning from content, and how this innovation can be turned into published products.

By the way: The normative narrative content model in the ePub can be either XHTML or the Daisy DTBook standard. The metadata and processing parts of ePub are either XML-based or XML-related.

Bio: Jean Kaplansky is an avid P- and E- book reader who just happens to also have a history of working in publishing, with publishing tools, or for someone who wants to get something published. Jean is currently a Sr. Consultant for the PTC Arbortext Business Unit. The opinions expressed in this post should in no way be attributed in any way to Jean’s employer.

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 that balanced the extra costs of adding markup at about 1.8 uses of the content.

What’s that mean? By Bosak’s rule of thumb, if I were to publish ten books with ten chapters each, the additional cost incurred by structured markup like XML or SGML would be met by the simple re-use of 80 of the 100 chapters — on the web, in advertising, in custom publications, in re-purposed derivative works. If I remember correctly, Jon’s data came from Sun’s own experiences, in which material describing computer subsystems would be used in documentation for many different final products, with some descriptions even making their way into marketing handouts.

Trade publishing doesn’t have so many opportunities for repackaging, but re-use is as simple as utilizing the same source for different editions. So the added cost of XML markup is met if, say, I publish four of my ten texts in hardcover, mass-market and large-print editions. Fifteen years after the internet’s appearance and well into the second coming of e-books, this seems rather crude justification. But fifteen years ago, those three editions likely would have been produced — keyboarded, formatted, proofed — in three entirely separate editorial workflows. In 1994 I was working with Ballantine Books, and even then setting the paperback from the hardcover text files was the exception rather than the rule.

Single-source “P- and E-” publishing appears to drive the publishing industry’s slow turn to XML workflows. Markup is expensive, and the uncertain economics of our electronic future means the sight line for pay-back on that extra expenditure must be short, direct and obvious.

Perhaps this is one reason “electronic” books are scarcely electronic at all, but only scantily draped in the most superficial of markups, our ever-present HTML. With its ready use in even the most rudimentary web-pages, HTML markup must seem like a no-brainer to those publishers venturing into e-books. Who wants to invest millions on markup with no way of assuring its return?

To return to my opening question — Why XML? — we won’t understand the answer until we first realize that the responses publishers most often rely upon are really answers to Why HTML? or Why single-source? Years ago, Bob Stein argued that we couldn’t exploit the electronic side of publishing unless authors understood what that meant (and then he set about building new authoring tools).

Today, I would argue that we can’t exploit E- (yes, “E hyphen” is my abbreviation of e-publishing and fiddle for anyone else’s use of “electronic” as a situational attribute) until 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.

This is only the first broadside of many which I will be launch here from Teleread’s ramparts. I also splutter as @eReadster on Twitter.