Baldur Bjarnason has an article with this title on his blog. He makes a lot of sense. Here’s the beginning:
A bit of an utopian fantasy but, I think, an essential one. We need visions of where we’re heading with this.Everybody knows what it feels like. You’re thrown from crisis to crisis, locked into solving problems, resolving issues, keeping things from breaking down, grasping the duct tape with one hand, and your sanity with the other.
Every time you look up, you see more trouble coming your way and no time to avoid it.
It’s hard to think about long-term problems when you’re up to your neck in shit and you’re losing your toehold.
The publishing and ebook industry is completely in reaction mode. Publishers reacted to Amazon by colluding to set up the agency system. Kobo and B&N reacted to Amazon by mimicking its strategy. Even the IDPF’s EPUB3 and FXL standards are reactions to the runaway train that is HTML5 and Apple’s format extensions, respectively. Google’s publishing plans seem about as coordinated and planned as a piece of driftwood’s path through a hurricane.
The only two companies that seem to have a plan and try to act on it are Amazon and Apple, both tech companies. Unsurprisingly, they are the ones who are going to control the future of ebook publishing. Unless there are dramatic changes the rest of us can do very little except play along and accept that it’s their playground and their toys, leave, or have the patience to wait the decade it might take for somebody to disrupt them.
Or, we could stop reacting to what they are doing, take a moment, and figure out what the ebook industry should look like. Picture the ideal and then figure out how to get there, step by step.
I’m already on record as believing that ebook distribution and retail should be based on a modular ecosystem, open file formats and standardised services. I should be able to buy a book from any retailer, have it automatically download to any ereader (app or device), have that ereader use any bookmarking/note service I want, and have that service sync my notes on to Simplenote or Dropbox.
What we have in the ebook world is worse than the days of ‘best in IE’. It’s crazy that we don’t have one ebook file format that works in all readers.
Even the EPUB world is a mess. Try getting a complex book working in iBooks, Kobo, and Nook. More often than not, you’re going to run into problems.
What’s even more insane is having to open up an epub file to edit it by hand just to make it work or accomplish a design effect. It’s nuts.
So what’s the ideal?
Bjarnason has a vision of quality books on multiple platforms from a one-step automated publishing program, starting from the author’s Word document. That won’t happen. It can’t happen because WYSIWYG tools like Word do not permit the author to explain “what” a piece of text is rather than “how” the author thinks it should appear.
Bjarnason’s own example of blockquotes getting rendered as ordinary paragraphs is a case in point. How many writers restrict their use of blockquotes to blocks of quoted matter, rather than using a blockquote for any material that the author thinks should be indented, whether it be a quote, an example, a figure, an equation, etc. It’s just not reasonable to expect an automated formatting system to know how to render a block of text unless the human author supplies the information about what that text really is.
“Logical markup” languages exist, but they aren’t popular. (It’s possible in Word to create new named paragraph styles for a limited form of logical markup, but how many people have you ever seen do that?) WYSIWYG tools have trained a generation of writers to worry more about what looks good on the screen NOW rather than worry about how it might get reformatted later.
The problem with Word is that it generates messy, non-standard code. Create your ebook in a free ePub editor like Sigil, and you have standard code which any program can understand. Write the story in a text editor, if you like, then format it in an ePub or HTML editor (ePub is just HTML in a wrapper). Most ePub or HTML editors will show you both a code view and a reading view, so you can see how your text looks before publishing.