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New ePub-friendly publishing app targets publishers struggling with both E and P
January 1, 2009 | 10:26 am
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By David Rothman
What a hassle it is to create and correct e-books while also being able to serve up PDF efficiently for the printer!
The horrors are built in. ePub and other formats are reflowable. PDF isn’t.
I griped about this just a few days ago and proposed a new open source app called ePubWriter to remedy such problems.
But might ePubWriter already exist, in effect—and be a decent alternative to pricey Adobe solutions that don’t get the job done well enough?
Infogrid Pacific, based in Singapore (photo), claims to “have just such an application,” with capabilities not just in ePub but also in other formats. What’s more, it has a new e-reader on the way called IGP:FLIP-eReader. The reader prototype is due out early this year.
But of most interest to publishers would be Infogrid’s new creation-related tool for ePub and more. The company’s Richard Pipe has written TeleRead about IGP:FLIP, which stands for Front List Interactive Publishing.
It allows a manuscript to be imported (.doc or .odt), templates applied, editorial processes to be carried out and at any time a PDF can be generated, HTML and ePUB. Alternatively it can also be used as an authoring and editing environment. It also outputs preconfigured packages for MS Reader, Mobipocket and Palm eReader.
We are just setting up a public sandbox site for people to experiment, and for feedback, and hopefully kindly criticism. We are not quite ready for prime time yet and the launch is planned for 2nd week of January. If all goes well we intend to put up a site for registered users at no charge if they are making non-commercial books. We are looking at a low cost SaaS model for self, small and boutique publishers on a low monthly price.
“Editing is WYSIWYM – What You See Is What You Mean,” according to the IGP site. “This is a necessary paradigm shift for multi-format editing where WYSIWIG presents just one expression of the work. For example, you are authoring or editing the text in a Notebox. In the print edition it will be flowed to the top of the page; in the Online & eBook edition it will maintain its position in the text.”
I’d encourage TeleRead community members to help IGP and supply the constructive feedback that Richard is looking for. How about WYSIWYM vs. WYSIWYG, for example? Which would you prefer in creating multiple formats?
Room for different biz models
Although I’d still love to see ePubWriter because it could build on OpenOffice‘s popularity and be absolutely free to typical users, I’m in favor of any efforts to give small publishers an alternative to the current mess. The best of luck to you, Richard. And no meanness toward Adobe. I’m rooting for it to do much better than it has at satisfying the needs of small publishers—part of which means lower prices. With outfits like IGP out there, the last thing Adobe needs is a Detroitish, SUVish approach. That would be a self-imposed death sentence.
More on IGP:FLIP-eReader: First off, I wish the company would go for a shorter name for the reader, and in fact it is open to alternatives. Second, as with the creation tool, I haven’t checked the thing. But I’ll be very excited if the claims pan out.
Now some more from IGP:
ePUB can be effectively used for corporate and government communication, training and education material, and is an excellent substitute for documents where layout, images and interaction is important. Dynamic text is cool and useful. (ADE doesn’t even have a link back button and justifies the exclusion as not required!) The current crop of readers are not designed to deliver for complex content. They are generally trying to look and act like books, or deliver scrolling text reading experiences to mobile devices (all of which is excellent and we want to be part of that too). Images, SVG and layout are distant and poor relatives.
We work with a lot of education and training content, producing it for print, multi-market reprint reflows, Online and special packages such as SCORM. ePub appears to be a very useful way to ship out education and training packages (encrypted or not/customized or not). It just has to be demonstrated. To be demonstrated there has to be a reader that goest that little bit further in content presentation. Is it possible to have an ePub reader that will do it all?
Right or wrong, we decided it was our mission to develop an ePub reader that would reasonably handle more complex content and layout than the current batch, was highly standards compliant, and would push the ePub concepts and constraints to the limit. That is, show what ePub is capable of in loving hands.
So, gang, what do you think of the creation tool and the e-reader as depicted? Nothing like open standards, eh? E-books are too important to be entrusted to proprietary formats and DRM cartels. If the publishing industry can resist the temptation to hobble e-books with DRM, imagine the possibilities before us—with all the IGPs out there, ready to compete. We’ve seen big publishers teetering on the edge; maybe they need to rethink their ways of doing business and stop treating e-books as only semi-legitimate, which is exactly what a DRM-oriented approach does.
Technorati Tags: IGP,InfoGridPacific
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Comments:
Good news indeed. After taking a first look, I think this app looks very much like a French project called La Poule ou l’Oeuf (http://www.lescomplexes.com/pouleoeuf/) which deserves some attention too.
I think with licenses beginning at $650 per month it will not take off. Publishers already have a lot invested in their current workflow and are cutting costs as it is. Plus, unlike software such as InDesign and Word which can be found on many computers (and thus are familiar to prospective hires), this product will require a learning curve, adding to the cost. I may be wrong, but I don’t see it succeeding among US publishers.
Is there really some reason to reinvent everything instead of using LaTeX with suitable e-book classes and output modules? After all, TeX supports pretty much all analog and digital typesetting needs people might have.
All xml applications merge output formats. This makes paper or screen equivalent options and sets us up for some kind of re-development of the transmission ecology generally. I sense that this has already occurred; that all books are purely digital and that one unintended consequence can be a re-preference and re-convenience for paper output. Has anyone noticed the recent innovations in copier papers?
Rich, the $650 a month (IF it stands) just shows the need for ePubWrite
I totally agree with you on the need for lower costs.
Thanks,
David
IF $650 a month is correct, this will not gain traction among small publishers in North America. Factor in likely staff training costs and over a just a couple of years this makes Adobe’s suite look a lot more attractive.
Yes, ePubWite _is_ needed!
A closer look at the InfoGrid Pacific website leaves me uncertain, just what the $650 a month license includes … the editing tools hosted by them? More than that?
Depending on what is included, this could be an attractive proposition. The collaborative environment is very interesting, as I think more publishers will be looking at reducing some of their fixed office costs this year by “home sourcing” editorial and creative functions.
Despite my earlier comment, I will be taking a close look at this package.
Huh? What are “xml applications” and what do you mean when you say they “merge output formats”? XML is kind of a suite of formats to be used as containers of semantic expressions. The latter are not compatible by default, and certainly not interchangeable. Furthermore, paper is not even similar to screens, and the only way for the same typesetting format to support both would be if the format supports a superset of both the requirements for paper and the requirements for screens, but this is orthogonal to what container format is used (or if any at all). I think you might be a bit confused about the nature of XML and.. umm… about formats in general.
David on the reader name thing: We are a small team of people saturated in Content processing for the last decade, can’t say we have seen it all, but we have seen a lot. I am a New Zealander in Pune, India, and the rest of the team are Indian. We have been working together for around a decade through Versaware, Digital Publishing Solutions and 20M plus pages of content converted to every publishing format conceived by mans evil mind. We are competent at content, but not so great at the “marketing brand image thing”.
All our products end up being called things like IGP:Encode XML or some other adjectival or adverbial phrase. We were thinking Azardi, which is Hindi for freedom (with a little license in the spelling to make it work on world tongues – phonetic correct is Azadi) and as a nod to the development team.
However any name suggestions are welcome and if anyone gives us a great one, we will enshrine their name forever in the help about. That is about all we can offer.
And just to clear up the cost thing; as mentioned on the previous post we are going with $19.95 per month for the small publisher – two users.
Because I am a long-winded git, I just have to make a comment about the LaTeX thing. IGP:FLIP isn’t a reinvention of yesterdays flow based composition environments, its a collaborative publishing environment in which multiple people can be doing different things on a book at the same time. Pretty important in time and labour intensive education publishing (as an example). That means authors, editors, indexers, reviewers, designers and composers can all be doing their thing at the same time. Anyone, from anywhere can generate a PDF, eBook, or view the content Online whatever its state, at any time. It also handles content objectization, customization and personalization on the fly.
And it also handles groove things like instant large print reflow, reflow for alternative market editions (usually page count reduction), localization of content and many more things. Of course all that takes a little learning and technique development, but that is why we are here.
@Richard Pipe: If your pricing will be $19.95 for 2 users (not sure how you count a user), you need to amend your website which states pricing begins at US$650 per month. It’s a long way from $19.95 to $650.00.
Perhaps the education market is different, or even the non-U.S. market, but there are a lot of players that will need to come aboard for the kind of collaboration your system supports. It is almost impossible to get, for example, an author of the books I work on to use the simple Word template I provide. Authors tend to “know” best about everything (just like, I guess, everyone else in the chain) and simply do their own thing.
Of the many hundreds of books I have done editing and composition of, perhaps 1 or 2 authors actually followed instructions on how to prepare their manuscript. None, FWIW, used OpenOffice; all used Word, WordPerfect, MS Works, or AppleWorks (roughly 95% used Word, 4% used WordPerfect, and 1% one of the others).
The problem I see with all of these collaborative endeavors is that they are generally contrary to way the publishing process works. They are good during a negotiating process, but not so attuned to the authoring process. In 25 years of editing, I have only once sat with an author and had a live back and forth about his writing, and that was an attempt to reduce the material because the author seemed to be incapable of doing it alone.
I do not wish to suggest that my experience is the norm other than to say that among my small circle of colleagues it is the norm. We all have our tales of difficulties in getting authors to do simple things in software they are already familiar with or in getting authors to alter bad writing habits.
I think this will be a problem of top-down imposition. Publishers will have to be willing to impose — and pay for — a set procedure on authors, editors, indexers, in-house and freelance, something that is unlikely to occur. Plus publishers and each of the chain participants will have to be convinced that such a change is actually beneficial — in terms of both time and money — to displace the current system.
Umm… LaTeX supports all that, too. Actually, most of that is orthogonal to the content format, but the simplicity of LaTeX being based on “plain text” and externalizing images/bibliographies/etc makes is particularly suitable for collaboration and 3rd party generic tools such as versioning systems, image editors, etc.
If you do decide to make your own toolset, then why would you invent your own typesetting system instead of basing it on (La)TeX? E.g., it would take me less than five minutes to set up a simple webpage for generating a PDF/html/etc from LaTeX source. That’s the nice consequence of not having to reinvent/reimplement things.
Is there some particular feature that (La)TeX doesn’t support? (OTOH, I bet there are tons of nifty stuff (La)TeX supports but your system doesn’t.)
Well, had you used LaTeX you could easily force them to use your class, and complex custom formatting would be too tedious for most of them to bother even learning. And it wouldn’t even matter what text editor they would use (but for WYSIWYG they’d have to use LyX or somesuch).
Works, WordPerfect, Word and OpenOffice all make it way too easy to do formatting The Wrong Way(tm), but with LaTeX semantic markup is the easiest, simplest and quickest way (besides being The Right Way(tm), of course) to do formatting.
Rich, Richard and Marcus:
Rich: I’m hardly your typical writer, but I at times use OpenOffice and would use it still more often if it were better. I wrote parts of The Solomon Scandals with OO. Further progress in format standardization should help. So should the growth of linux.
Richard: Continued best wishes for the project. You might want that $19.95 to allow for one more user to bring the total to three. The other thing is to make sure things are very, very simple at the writer’s end. Otherwise, it’ll never fly for, say, mainstream fiction where the publishing houses can control the writers only so much. Rich is right. Authors are stubborn creatures, at least outside fields such as tech writing.
Marcus: I doubt that today’s writers of fiction will want to mess with LaTex. See above comments to Richard. But who knows about the writers of the future? I just hope that technical priorities will not replace literary ones in situations where it matters.
Thanks,
David
What do you mean? LaTeX is really easy to use for the author. The author just uses the class provided by the publisher. All hard stuff is done by the publisher or whoever does the typesetting/layout.
Anyway, that’s not the point. Even if you make a new system that is even easier for authors you could still use (La)TeX as the underlying typesetting format instead of creating a new, buggy, less flexible and less precise one. Sometimes it’s good to reinvent stuff, but not when the main reason is a bad case of the NIH syndrome.
Marcus, the problem begins with “The author just uses the class provided by the publisher.” STM authors are sometimes willing to accomodate and do that; most authors simply are not and they want to “compose” their book because they “know” the best design for it. I agree that Word and the other WYSIWYG word processing programs make it too easy to do formatting the wrong way, but there are publishing realities that have to be dealt with, and one such reality is that authors do as authors want.
LaTex may be great and it may be the perfect solution, but reality is that it is not the solution that will prevail. It has been around for a long time and its use is declining, not increasing. Sometimes the best solution is not a practical solution.
Rich Adin wrote:
So what you are saying is that most authors are so incredibly moronic that they want to screw up the formatting of their books or at least make it harder for the typesetter to make it look good, while at the same time doing more work than needed and focusing on formatting (a field they don’t master) instead of on content? And also that publishers are so desperate that they can’t afford to say: “If you don’t want to use our system which makes books easier to write, easier to publish in multiple formats while looking awesome, then go ahead and find yourself some other publisher, that is willing to make your books look like crap and charges for all the extra work you’re making them do while you’re doing extra work yourself for no reason what so ever.”?
Really?
I bet many authors would love it if the publisher said: “Just mark where the headings, titles, etc, are and focus on the story and let our typesetting experts do all the work to make your book look great. In fact, with our program you can always get an immediate preview of how the final output will look in any given format/device.”
Besides, even if some author would insist on using some inferior system you can probably convert it to LaTeX anyway (after all, you’d still have to convert the text to some other system if the document was written in Word, Works, OpenOffice or somesuch that makes awful output). At least OpenOffice can output LaTeX directly (although I’m not sure if you can use any custom classes for it).
What does its popularity statistics have to do with anything? And if some new solution uses (La)TeX internally the user wouldn’t necessarily even know about it. It would just be there, bugfree, simplifying things and producing fabulous output. (In fact, I don’t even know whether those IGP things use (La)TeX (or even DVI) internally or not, I’m just guessing that they don’t.)
Why on earth would you be against using an existing, free, rock solid, super-flexible typesetting system for your typesetting needs instead of creating a much worse “alternative” yourself?
I’m confused; you’re neither making any valid arguments for your case nor refuting any of my arguments, so what is your point?
Marcus, it is not unusual to hear that the Mac OS is the best desktop OS, better than Windows but Windows controls 95% of the market. The best solution doesn’t always win out. LaTex may be the best solution but it is not going to dominate publishing.
Authors are not moronic, they are simply human and do not follow instructions as simple as “do not use Word’s automatic numbering to create numbered lists.” Author’s don’t believe, no matter how often they are told, that they make typesetting more difficult by formatting their manuscript. And even if they believe it, they don’t care.
And, no, publishing is very competitive so a publisher is not going to tell an author do it my way or go elsewhere. Perhaps a small publisher might occasionally do that with a particularly troublesome author, but it rarely happens. I have sat at meetings where an author has told the publisher that if the publisher wants to publish the author’s book, the publisher will use XYZ font because the author’s 12-year-old likes the font and the publisher has agreed.
I’m not against using LaTex; I am saying it is unrealistic to think that LaTex, no matter how good it is, is going to take over the publishing industry, replacing Word, Quark, and InDesign. It just ain’t going to happen.
[quote]STM authors are sometimes willing to accommodate and do that; most authors simply are not and they want to “compose” their book because they “know” the best design for it. [/quote]
This is a big part of the problem most non techies just want to see IT as some sort of magic that just solves everything, and not something with limitations you need to respect the same way you do with any other technology. If you want to format in great detail without dealing with stylesheets and fallback defaults, you have to accept that you don’t get perfect convention filters. It’s not magic just technology.
If your willing to work inside the limitation put up bu standard software you can get really good convertion filter.
I do however think that Lampert’s tex macros are well past their prime and should be replaced by xml format more suitable for What you see is what you might get editors. you can get the same output from jadeTeX and similar.
To go back on tread, that thing does look like a re branded enterprise content management system for corporate documentation and not really an Ebook system though using a ECMS as backend is a really good idea.
I think we have gone way off the subject. The original question was not whether to replace existing systems, but whether to use (La)TeX or something else (that is probably a lot worse) when creating a new system (that IGP thingy).
Daniel, you should use html instead of bbcode, and you can use blockquote-tags to quote.
True. Well, a perfect system might let you format in great detail while still maintaining the ability to output to different form factors, but Word/Works/OpenOffice certainly don’t.
The best thing a publisher can do IMHO is to use some good system that is also easy to use for the authors. Then they can tell the authors: “If you want less work for both yourselves and us then use this system.” and if authors in their cluelessness instead use Word or somesuch then the publisher will just have to convert it to their system anyway (just like they do now).
The pricing thing. I was pre-emptive in putting the first announcement up about the small user model, but that’s the price of anxiety. I will be ammending the pricing on the website for the Small accordingly.
Number of users. Thanks for the feedback Rich. I don’t think it will hurt to allow three simultaneous users. We will do some calculations. The way it works is that each person registering/paying will get a dedicated portal, with them as the admin. They can add/authorize two more usernames and IDs. They can give these to anyone they like to log in and work on their portal. Eg. UN:Editor1 PW:edit123. It’s theirs to control. So it would be three simultaneous users, we don’t care who they are. We will certainly keep an eye on this requirement, but the practical reality is bandwidth for bucks. bandwidth is consummed fast With lots of people generating and downloading 1MB PDF’s and ePubs every few minutes.
ECMS System Back End – Daniel.
The files have to come and go from somewhere, so the user/group/oganizational issues are handled from the ECMS system, and you can put your other assets such as images, finished files, etc there as well. The private portal mechanism above is an example of the standard organization tools. The ECMS system is actually called PublisherDAMS – a publishing specific ECMS.
IGP:FLIP is a stand-alone web services application, purpose designed for interactive content authoring/editing and multi-format publishing. The formats on Demand (eBook creator) is another separate web service. This architecture means services do not have to be reinvented. It also connects to a lots of other services.
We first developed IGP:FLIP (then creatively named IGP:Reader/Writer) starting late 2006 for our own production requirements. (over 1M pages in 2008). We spent 2008 working with a major educational publisher to get a working product.
Jordi thanks for the link to La Poule ou l’Oeuf.
I have always wondered where the brother/sister project was. A good looking app, certainly with similar objectives. They have used a Wiki approach very nicely, and the multi-lingual handling is wonderful.
I just tried Azardi and although it still lacks much as a full featured ebook reader, the epub rendering is fantastic. It beats Digital Editions and FBReader hands down.
Keep up the good work, guys.
Thanks for the report, Joseph. Further specifics welcome re Azardi.
Big frustration: The TeleBlog’s missing images associated with this item. But we’re working on that.
Thanks,
David
For creating and/or editing epub format ebooks on a smaller scale, Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ is a decent tool.
For managing a personal ebook collection and converting between various ebook formats, Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ is good.
For an all around large-scale solution to re-flowable text, publishing to multiple media formats, etc, etc, I must agree with the folks suggesting (La)TeX as an underlying framework for a solution. The TeX format has been used for typesetting for ages now and has had a long time to mature and stabilize, and is already entirely capable of solving all the issues regarding publishing to nearly any output format one might need. Reinventing the wheel will only delay the arrival of a real solution.