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The new thing in bookland is the eBook. It doesn’t seem new, ebooks have been around for a long time, but early 2010 Amazon announced that there were 115 ebooks being download for every 100 paper book sales. Ebooks had come of age. 2011 bookland was in a hurry to take ebooks seriously and discussions at publishing events changed their tone from “what will happen?” to “what just happened?!”.

To undertstand what just happened, and what is about to happen, it helps to understand what an ebook actually is. An ebook is a digital file (also called ‘format’) that can be read by devices like iPads and Kindles. There are many different kinds of ebook formats and each has its own strengths and, consequently, weaknesses. Some are made to be viewed in the Kindle, others in the iPad, still others for reading online. Kindle, for example, works with the MOBI format, whereas the iPads iBook reader works only with iBOOK or EPUB formats.

EPUB is one of the most popular formats because no one owns the format like, for example, Microsoft owns the .doc format. Anyone can produce an EPUB without having to pay royalties. That makes EPUB a popular format for publishers.

The most interesting thing about many of these formats is that they share a lot in common with the webpage. EPUB, for example, in the words of the International Digital Publishing Forum² (the group taking responsibility for managing the development of the format), is:

“…a means of representing [...] Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format.”

An EPUB contains HTML, the language of the web. EPUBs are webpages. 

This change, from paper to HTML, changes everything. Bookland appears to believe that just the format of the book (ebook and ereaders) and the distribution process (net) have changed. These are enormous changes but what about everything else? What about the rest of the bookland ecosystem?

To get an understanding of how this transformation of content medium, from paper to webpage, effects bookland lets first take a birds eye view of the dominant post Gutenberg and pre-Bernards Lee publishing processes. Painting it with very broad strokes it looks something like this:

1. Production - production of the book. Generally a linear process and tightly managed by editors. Editors, proof readers, translators, researchers, and designers are all involved with very clearly demarcated roles.
2. Object - the creation (printing and binding) of the paper book
3. Market - distribution to retail outlets and sales through those outlets
4. Life - after being read the book becomes an archive. The shelf life is connected to the value to the reader or owner (shelf life).

This is the general scenario before the internet and digital books came along. Digital networks of course changed everything and there has been a lot of innovation effecting how publishers work. However the disruption has really been limited to the 2nd (object) and 3rd (market) segments. The current state of turmoil in the publishing industry can be captured in brief by the following changes:

1. Production - no change
2. Object - eletronic books added
3. Market - online sales, devices
4. Life - no change (or reduced)

There has been little or no innovation regarding step 1 – the production of books. There are some notable exceptions. For example OReilly is experimenting with some networked and ‘agile’ (fast moving and iterative) production processes but overall there is no movement in this segment. In the second stage the object is obviously undergoing radical change since the introduction and recent rise in the popularity of the Ebook. Online sales have also been a relatively new addition to the publishing model (preceding the effect of the electronic book) which is also recently having very disruptive effects. New devices have also entered the market and there is a constant ebb and flow of press releases announcing the newest and hottest features or reading device. Whereas stage 4, shelf life, is more or less the same. It could be argued that shelf life has not remained static but has been reduced since digital files have a far shorter expected life span than paper pages and resale or transfer of DRM protected material is not permitted or possible in many cases. The general idea however is that once the book has been sold it sits in an archive on a book reader somewhere, like a paper book would sit on a book shelf.

In general the innovation and change hapennign now is constrained to everything that happens after the book is produced and before the book is archived by the reader.

As it happens this is about as far as the publishing industry can innovate. They are too heavily invested in production workflows, tools and methodologies to change the production process. It is simply too difficult for publishers to change without breaking things completely. The production process, for example, generates single author works which are an important part of the reputation based sales process. You can’t change one without the other. It is simply bad business and logistically too hard for publishers to innovate around production. at the other end of the cycle publishers do not seem to be interested in the life of the book beyond purchase except where they retard life expectancy with DRM, delete it off your device, or surviel your reading habits inorder to offer the next book for your consumption. After reading, the book on your reader, sits there like it would on a book shelf with little value to the publisher.

Ironically for the publishing industry the biggest opportunities are in the areas they cannot address. The new publishing world, one which might be populated largely by those individuals, collectives, ‘groupings’ and organisations that are currently not publishers, looks like this:

1. Production - collaboration and social production
2. Object - paper and eletronic books
3. Market - distribution to retail, sales, online sales, devices
4. Life - living and growing books

The life of the book is also undergoing a lot of change and holds a lot of opportunity. Free licenses are enabling the reuse of content, and new softwares which enable easy reuse are becoming more popular; consequently the life of books are being extended. Books are no longer static objects – increasingly books can be reused, extended, updated, and improved as necessary to meet the needs of a particular audience or individual.

This is entirely unlike the current book industry. Even publishers that specialise in out of copyright materials (Penguin books for example) preserve the texts intact. However books have enormous ongoing value if they are allowed to live and have a life beyond the shelf. Additonally digital technology means we can have both the historical artefact and the improved work existing side by side.

The real problem for the publisher is not that they are just not thinking enough to get out of their own box. Its not that they are just being frustratingly uncreative. The real problem is that their business is dissappearing. Publishers are increasingly relying on ebook sales, just like they relied on paper book sales, and it is likely that ebook prices are going to trend downwards to zero or near-zero. While sales are probably going to increase in volume and decrease in overhead the overall effect will be a net loss for the publisher.

Without innovating outside of commodity based sales and looking to other parts of the value cycle publishers are not going to have a business.

The change in the format of the book from paper to ebook is killing off the foundation for the bookland model. At the same time it is opening up enormous opportunities for people that want to make books.

1. http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader ^{^}
2. http://idpf.org/epub^{^}
3. http://archiv.re-publica.de/^{^}
4. http://archiv.re-publica.de/archive/politics-of-internet-culture-ideas-and-projects^{^}
5. http://e-boekenstad.nl/unbound/^{^}
6. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/^{^}
7. http://www.roughtype.com/^{^}

For some time we have been talking about Iterative Book Development (IBD), so maybe it’s about time to unpack some of the ideas.

IDB is a book production process which focuses on smaller amounts of text (groups of chapters, chapter or chapter parts) and aims to move the content forward quickly through a collaborative process.

At first glance process sounds familiar to a software development process known as Agile Development.  The Agile Development manifesto states

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

These concepts do not map directly onto book production. If there was a manifesto for IBD it might state that the value lies in:

1. Collaborative content production over single authorship
2. Collaboration and facilitation over ‘editors’ and ‘authors’
3. Engaged discourse over isolation
4. Completed chunks over incomplete volumes
5. Here and now production over sometime soon production

The values as such are applicable to a variety of contexts including Book Sprints but they can also be applied to book development of any kind.

Any book can have its contents displayed in a webpage. A books images and text can be transformed into the language of the web, HTML, and displayed in a browser. Any book can be displayed in a browser.

The amazing potential of this idea seems so obvious it requires very little explanation. It is the idea of universal access to knowledge; to restate it these days is almost a waste of 140 characters. When Google captured the value in its mission statement, “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, it feels so obvious to be almost redundant. We know what universal access is, we like it and we want it. We almost believe that we have it, or we believe we almost have it.

However all the worlds knowledge does not reside on the internet; much of it is offline and much of that is locked inside books. Many of these books are so far lost to the web and cannot easily enter it because they are made of paper. Digitising paper books is a very difficult process. Scanning books requires expensive and slow page turning robots with brains capable of understanding the difference between a image and a text, a scratch and a punctuation mark, a liner note and marginalia. These differentiations are so complex succesful conversion requires the help of sophisticated recognition systems that are capable of distinguishing marks from meaning in a great diversity of contexts; it needs human brains. Efforts are heroically underway by organsiations like Project Gutenberg, Archive.org and Distributed Proof Readers but it is a lengthy mechanical, digital and human collaboration. It is a process characterised by latency largely because of the mechanical and manual labour involved.

There is an even greater source of this latency; copyright. Copyright law effectively prevents any book published in our lifetime to enter the digital networked commons in our lifetime. For books published with all rights reserved licenses we must wait for the copyright to expire which is about 73 years after the death of the author. That means there is an enormous lag between books published now and the moment they can be organised and made universally accessible by Google.

Google Books has tried and failed to open this space. The project attempted, and succeeded for some time, to digitise books without permission of the copyright holders and make them available online. It is hard to understand the motive for this obviously disruptive excercise however after reading Steven Levys book “Inside the Googleplex” it is possible to believe that the projects stated aims to make more of the worlds information available were sincere. After a long period of litigation the US court ruled that “While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many” the advantage to Google would go too far and the opportunity to digitise and make available entire texts of in copyright books was denied. A significant part of all the worlds knowledge was placed out of reach of the web.

However in this entire debate there has been little attention paid to how books are being made now. What of them? These books inhabit bookland – the fictious private island of the publishing industry. Bookland was created by the publishing industry when the format of the 10 digit ISBN number was changed to 13 digits to align with other international product coding systems. Since ISBN had no use for the new 3 digit prefix all books carry the country identifier “978” or “979” – Bookland. Bookland, if we were to characterise it, might be an island populated by slow moving inhabitants whose chief job is to produce knowledge and culture. Unfortunately due to the islands remoteness the discourse is lagging behind what is actually happening in the world, its technologies are outmoded, the workflows are stale; it is trying desperately to maintain value of existing products while trying to understand the possibilities and threats a new networked world of production and consumption offers. Bookland is out of date, drfiting off the map, and slowly becoming aware it doesn’t know know how to get back in the game. Unfortunately bookland still produces a lot of knowledge and culture but is invested in keeping these products out of the web.

However we seem to be slow to realise one thing. Since books can be webpages we can produce books ourselves. We know how to do this – we have the tools of production, communication and distribution. We don’t need bookland anymore. What we do need is new paradigms of networked book production that support universal access but still enable knowledge and culture producers to pay the rent. To do this we need to let bookland drift away. Forget it and start over. We need to build a new culture of the book with little regard for what we have had until now.

Marshall McLuhan puts it like this: “We’re just trying to fit the old things into the new form instead of asking what is the new form going to do to all the assumptions we had before.”¹

We have taken too long to realise that the web changes everything about the book. We have taken too long trying to fit old ideas of publishing ‘inside’ the web. Bookland doesn’t fit in the web and we should stop trying to help it find its way. Its over. The web changes not only the format of the book and the available distribution channels, but the cultural context, economic and social processes surrounding the book. The web puts the opportunity to define this in our hands. The web changes the reasons why books exist and our relationship to the production of knowledge and culture.

1. http://vimeo.com/26715900^{^}

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/building-books-with-css3/

Booktype was featured as part of this event at UCL – Working with the Page: Publishing Workshop

On day two we will look at what tools exist for us to produce digital and print publications and how one tool can be used to produce both. We will cover how your book’s content might be realised in a number of different formats depending on distribution. We will look at what “formless content” means: “the page” is no longer a fixed container for the content of books in the digital age. We will present tutorials in both InDesign and Booktype.

University College of London - photo Andy Powell

I was really happy to be asked by Source Fabric to run this workshop on Booktype as it gave me a chance to spread my knowledge of an online tool that I use just about everyday and use the preparation and delivery of the session to deepen my own knowledge and explore the issues involved from other perspectives.

As the workshop facilitator for Booktype in an academic setting, I wanted to give hands on experience as well as an overview of some of the possibilities of Booktype and some of the surrounding innovations.  I took  inspiration from Adam Hyde’s recent presentation at Republica to break the subject up into three areas.

• Before the Book – on-line collaboration when creating the book
• The Book -  The printed book, epub, html and new formats
• After the Book – Re-use, remixing and keeping the book alive

The format was a half day workshop and then a open lab time to help those who chose to use Booktype for their project. I prepared a presentation, discussion and exercise on each of the key areas of Booktype. As it worked out, rather than using remixed, public domain content the participants had been primed to use their own content to work with.

Booktype, Attribution, Ownership & Privacy

Working with real content brought the issues of attribution, ownership and privacy slap bang into the front of the room. The first features we explored were how to hide your work and how to protect it from being edited by other people.

In preparation I thought about ways of sidestepping some of these anxieties by inviting participants to embrace the possibilities for new models of collaboration and the freedoms of open licences. I had some great examples from  Co Design for Civic Media from an MIT group, to Collaborative Futures to an Occupy Movement publication. As we started to use the software it was clear that some of the features and design make Booktype open by default. Especially the default licences that you can choose from. This brought up a fair amount of criticism regarding the lack of choice of licences and quite a few concerns about using a on-line collaborative tool like Booktype.

Through discussions in  the workshop and at break times I picked up a lot of perspectives from academic staff concerning the following; open licences, publishing openly on the web, what control academic journals have on publishing, different cultures of attribution and the importance of publishing impact in academia. This kind of conversation is needed but there was a danger it can de-rail workshops. It would be sad if it limited the extent to which we can experiment and enjoy the innovative practices and outcomes that new technology and new licences can bring. In this workshop I took the concerns seriously and was honest about the fact that this is emerging software in an emerging field. It didn’t take too long before we were able to move forward as a group to keep using and testing Booktype.

On a side note, I’m glad to be able to discuss these issues at a forthcoming research workshop on the Digital Manual in Edinburgh from the perspective of FLOSS manuals (which also uses Booktype) .

Formless Content – Booktype as your flexible, formless friend

Jeremy Bentham is dead but the Book is alive - photo Matt Brown

The area of the workshop that seemed to have the most impact was the position of Booktype as the tool specifically designed to allow multiple outputs from a single repository to many different devices.

The idea that you write first and design later was seen as a key advantage to the Booktype methodology.  This can be compared to the session on InDesign in the morning where the first thing you do is to create your margins and exact dimensions of the container for your text. It also became apparent that this methodology saved a lot of duplication of effort (especially when preparing new editions and translations), lowered the barriers to book production and was going to be important for the future of publishing in general.

The terminology surrounding certain on-line posts on formless content was very useful introducing these ideas. I’ll include the links to materials that I used;

• Craig Mod’s Blog on Books in the age of Ipad
• SnarkMarket’s summary of Mod’s vocabulary and interesting comments
• Building Books with CSS3
• How Formless Content relates to Booktype

Here are links to Book Type resources that were useful to the practical use during the workshop.

• Book Design with css (in Booktype)
• More info on Booktype & css

Possible uses of Booktype

After some initial concerns of open-by-default  on-line working spaces there was a tangible change of mood. There was a lot of enthusiasm surrounding the activity was to generate a list of possible uses of Booktype in an academic context.

• Grammar text books created as a learning exercise for students
• Training community groups associated with the University to create and share their own training resources in Booktype
• Personal publications of University staff and students
• Anthologies of work for departments and courses
• Induction packs for departments
• Lots of opportunities surrounding translations, for community & collaborative translation projects
• Working collaboratively on exam scripts
• Many kinds of teaching materials, including reading lists, and ‘create your own reader’ for electronic reading (many trees are killed creating readers that are sometimes unread)
• Creating new ‘editions’ of old works as a learning experience for students – creating a new forward and giving introductions to works helps give experience in re-framing and re-contextualising works to bring them up to date
• Creating magasine books of blog posts with forwards and commentaries
• Creative writing; a book could be used as a collaborative space for a creating writing exercise or a book could be a final goal in a creative writing task

At the end of our time together, there was good enthusiasm to keep experimenting with Booktype. Marita Fraser who convened the workshop has the understanding, enthusiasm and skills to take the project forward. I would recommend a UCL installation of Booktype to be a very worthwhile project for Source Fabric to support. It is likely to create excellent case studies for how a Booktype install for a university and could be very useful for academic staff & students.

Case study

Novella - 2 books in a day

One of the workshop participants, Novella, needed to take some work that her students had been writing and turn it into a short anthology.  Novella was keen to finish some specific tasks and chose Booktype as a suitable tool for completing them in a limited timescale.

Novella  was able to crack straight on with her task after the Booktype workshop. There were only a limited number of images to insert. One was placed on the first page to create a cover.

There was no need to override the default layout provided by Booktype apart from to output the book to A5 pdf format. To print, we then used the ‘booklet’ setting when which allowed us to fold the outputted A4 paper to create an A5 booklet with the pages in the right order.

With this task completed, Novella then went on to complete and print another short book in a couple of hours.

Unglue it (https://unglue.it/) is a site dedicated to raising money to buy books to put into the public domain. The strategy is reminiscent of the Blender projects successful campaign to buy the software in 2002 and release it into the public domain (http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history/). It was a successful campaign and the public campaign raised 100,000 euro in just seven weeks to purchase the copyright of the software and transfer it to GPL.

Its a great story and very inspiring. It would be interesting to consider utilising Unglue It to buy back textbooks and release them under Creative Commons licenses. It would probably make most sense where the books are out of print or have very little resale value to the publishers…whether the publishers want to negotiate a good price is another matter…

In the days before publishers the Print Shop played the same role as a publisher. Authors brought books to printers and they worked together to produce the book. Printers often used their own product as capital investment in the author. Hence the slow evolution to the publishing industry.

Today copy shops have more book producing technology than the old school print shop and they are used in the same way. People from all sectors of society (students being an obvious example) go to Copyshops to make books by either photocopying paper books or printing out a book from a digital version (these are becoming much more common now books are becoming electronic). Ironically while the print shop gave birth to the publishing industry, publishers now condemn the activities of their modern ancestors. Allowing books to be made this way is participating in copyright theft in their (and the laws) eyes. Better to stop it than encourage it. In a slow historical turn around Publishers are biting the hand that once fed them.

Enter Arthur Attwell and Paperight. In their own words Paperight “Turns anyone with any printer into a print-on-demand bookstore”. Paperight has had a close look at each part of this defacto component of the publishing industry and worked out an ecology to meet the needs of each player – publisher, copy shop, and buyer. Its a pretty ingenious and extremely practical idea.

The core of the idea lies in making legal copying sensible to all involved. Arthur has been to publishers and argued that photocopiers and printers are an extension of their distribution chain and one they do not currently have a role in. It makes no sense to throw away money trying to stop illegal copying, instead Publishers should provide services and generate revenue streams from these activities. How do they do this? Simple – make PDFs available to copy shops to print at a low price and under a legal license agreement.

These PDFs are formatted by Paperight onto A4 for quick copyshop printing. Customers of Paperight registered Copyshops can buy one of the books and the copyshop downloads the PDF and prints it out. Its legal, quicker and less hassle for copy shops and their customers, and publishers get a return.

The fantastic additional outcome is that Paperight can also offer out-of-copyright and freely licensed books through the same mechanism. Infact Paperight already offers a lot of this content – you can source many out-of-copyright classics from their service already.

On the ideological level Paperight is also arguably a pro-literacy and pro-education strategy since it is bringing works to people who would not otherwise afford the full cover price, cannot not otherwise access the material locally, or cannot afford an electronic reader such as an iPad. Paperight is expanding the channels for book content and getting to places an iPad will never get to in the next 20 years.

One of the questions is – does the publishing industry understand the value of this proposition? The proposal is not just addressed at publishers finding sensible ways to facilitate processes that are currently out of their control. The proposal is a future proofing strategy. Digital books are forcing the prices of books down and it seems pretty well accepted that books will go the same way as music. Either live with decreased sales of material products like CDs or printed books while everyone pirates your content or make it cheap and easy to get this material in a digital form. Publishers, like the music industry, are starting to realise they need to make money from services and a greater number of individual sales at a lower cost per unit to the customer. Make it cheap, legal, and easy is the answer to illegal content sharing.

Additionally there is great value for Publishers that adopt this service early since suing your customers (people that photocopy books) is never a good idea, but getting on their side makes for good PR. Add the pro-literacy argument to the mix and Publishers can make very good positive marketing material from such an alliance.

Paperight is offering exactly the service that could end up being of enormous value to the enlightened publisher. It would not be the only distribution channel – digital books in themselves need to be offered in the same way – but the Paperight approach is a strategy publishers would be wise to explore. However I fear that Paperight might be seen as more an antagonist at the moment than a positive move forward. It might take some time before publishers are forced into more of a crisis than they currently are to fully comprehend the value of a service such as this. Hopefully this is not going to be the case and we will see Paperight and similar strategies flourish quickly.

The introduction of the HTML5 canvas means that graphics can easily be drawn on the page with pixel perfect accuracy. The canvas element also brings to the book a ot of other interesting dynamics since Javascript can interact with it and manipulate it in seemingly endless ways.

One interesting Javascript library I have found which came my way via Victor Diaz, who has himself done a lot of very interesting things, is Tangle by Bret Victor.

http://worrydream.com/#!/Tangle

Bret calls Tangle a library for coding Reactive Documents and I like this idea very much. He has a good explanation of the philosophy behind it in his own words:

http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

I don’ t think I can add much yet to what he says already. What I do find interesting is one of his lasts question in the above article.

I released Tangle, the JavaScript library behind Ten Brighter Ideas and the examples above. It’s a nice bootstrapping step, but far from the goal of an authoring tool. What might such a tool look like?

Its a very interesting question. We might also combine this idea and question with other interesting projects online that bring in dynamic authoring functionality. For an example the Mercury Editor is an important step in this direction with its dynamic snippets.

Whats cool about all of this is that all of the interesting stuff, explorations and implementations are Open Source. The benefits of Open Source in this world is really starting to pay off and I think the world of book production is going to blossom in this area while closed source projects get left behind.

Annotation is an interesting world. It has survived the many changes in book technologies until, interestingly enough, the net. Its not that we have never needed it, its that we havent been able to do a good job of it. There have been some good attempts – CommentPress was one by Bob Stein and the Future of the Book Institute. Comment Press was useful, I installed it myself and used it – it was built on top of WordPress. But Bob and crew learned their lessons and improved the idea with yet to be released Social Book.

Ontop of that has been Purple Numbers (by Douglas Engelbart – you know! the guy that invented the mouse!) , and the code known as Marginalia, and their have been three of four attempts using JQuery to get this right. While Marginalia did get included into Moodle, which is pretty cool, it didnt really take off and none of the other attempts got anywhere.

I think that might be about to change with a very nice relatively new project called AnnotateIt. It is build ontop of JQuery and is built by the crew behind the Open Knowledge Foundation which in turn has been supported extensively by the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Its good stuff. Very simple to use as either a free and centralised service, or you can establish your own annotation server. I am trialling it at the moment wíth FLOSS Manuals. You can create an account here:

http://annotateit.org/

And then try it on FLOSS Manuals. For example:

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/a-webpage-is-a-book/_draft/

Looking forward to trying it out. Any feedback on both the book and the annotation tool is very much welcomed.