What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?

Liza Daly
May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Penguin's collaborative writing experiment A Million Penguins was launched in February 2007 and completed in March 2007. This month saw its final scholarly assessment published in a research report out of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

The results? Terrible, according to Gawker, echoing a consensus that the project failed as literature. As a study of online behavior, though, it's quite fascinating, and the research paper describes examples of all types of user contributions, from the grandiose and self-serving to the quietly constructive.

But if "every book needs its author," game-like fiction has been shown to be more amenable to collaboration. Each of Penguin's We Tell Stories pieces was co-written by interactive developers and a novelist. This month, the Guardian has launched a participatory interactive fiction project.

Although technically a type of computer game, interactive fiction has a long association with print authors, starting with the commercially successful adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984). In 2003 Adam Cadre (Ready, Okay!, HarperCollins, 2000) wrote the game Narcolepsy incorporating 12 dream sequences written by different authors (of which I was one). In a more experimental vein, the recent UpRightDown project released its first story, which generated submissions in multiple media, including some interactive works.

One lesson from these experiments is that while a work of fiction may not need a single author, it does need a single editor or authority to weave together disparate contributions and reject the obvious vandals. A unified final work has the potential to be a marketable product rather than a research project. (On the other hand, if the printed German Wikipedia sells, all bets are off.) Scale is important as well: two or even three dozen contributors are probably manageable; A Million Penguins had 1,700.

The Guardian's interactive fiction project is being managed using wiki software at textadventure.org.uk. The organizers are soliciting both programmers and non-technical writers. It is scheduled to run through at least the end of May.

Related Stories:

• Q&A with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner
• German Wikipedia Coming in Book Form
• Nabokov's Final Novel: The Perfect Mash-Up Source
• Experimenting for the Sake of Experimenting
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?

EPUB Creation Just Got Simpler

Keith Fahlgren
May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

BookGlutton announced last week that it had developed a Web-based (X)HTML to EPUB conversion form (and API). The form itself accepts HTML or XHTML documents and returns an .epub file (in a couple of seconds) for download. While it doesn't yet support images or CSS stylesheets, it sounds like these features are coming. My handful of tests of the tool have all "just worked." I grabbed HTML files I found on the Web and an HTML version of a recent O'Reilly title and all were happily accepted. The resulting .epub file opened fine in Adobe Digital Editions and was readable.

The impact of this sort of easy-to-use form is huge, as so many content creation tools already support (X)HTML output in some way, from Word to OpenOffice.org to DocBook to Dreamweaver. It should be the first step in lowering the barrier to entry to creating EPUB documents. Bob DuCharme had already showed technical experts how to create .epub files with nothing but free tools and I'm hopeful that the Save as DAISY output from Word will help create more accessible documents, but there's nothing like a simple Web form to bring a complicated standard to the masses.

That said, the lack of CSS and image support really makes this more of a proof-of-concept than a real tool today, unless you're only interested in reading narrative text. With that in mind, let's give it a shot (in Firefox, on my Mac):

1. Find Wikipedia's article on E-book.

2. Save As: Web Page, HTML only (so you don't bother with the images or CSS):

   

3. Now take that HTML file from your computer and feed it right back to the BookGlutton form:

   

4. Hit convert, then open the resulting .epub in Adobe Digital Editions:

   

Here's the resulting .epub, for the lazy: wikipedia_on_E-book.epub. I also tried two other samples: the 3rd chapter from Word Hacks (word_hacks_chapter_3.epub) and the Ebook Format Primer from the TOC blog (ebook-format-primer.epub).

So, given our three samples, what are the current drawbacks? Well, as I mentioned before, the lack of images and CSS supprt as the two obvious ones, especially for the book content (which had images, unlike the blog post). There's also the all-too-common drawback of HTML from the wild-wild Web being rather funky. You can see an example of that sort of oddness on the first page of the Wikipedia sample in Digital Editions (which is including some JavaScript code meant to be executed by the browser) :

// document.writeln("\x3cp\x3e\x3ca href=\"http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration\"
blah blah blah

...but that stuff is ignorable and could be removed from the HTML if one cared. Another concern is that while the internal linking (from the Contents, for example) works, some of the external links back to other parts of Wikipedia don't. Linking is a major advantage of ebooks, so this is a sad one, though this is a common web problem and not really BookGlutton's fault. My final complaint has to do with special characters (n spaces), which seem to have gotten messed up in the book content (look around the "Figure" references). That said, the blog post looks pretty nice, once you find it a little later in the document.

Although at this stage it's just a prototype, BookGlutton's work might encourage the re-use of existing content published on the Web packaged as an ebook. This type of thing should significantly increase the number of .epub files ready to go into (format-friendly) ebook devices and create more pressure on ebook device manufacturers to support EPUB.

It's time for the "regular" folks to step out of the woodwork and give this EPUB thing a try!

Related Stories:

• Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free
• Ebook Format Primer
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

News Roundup: Web Focus Yields Revenue for Tech Publisher, Out-of-Print Books Return Via POD, UK's First E-Reader, TorrentSpy Hit with $110+ Million Judgment

Mac Slocum
May 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Tech Publisher Finds Path to Web Revenue

Tech/trade publisher International Data Group (I.D.G.) rolled one of its largest magazines, InfoWorld, into a Web-only publication in April 2007. A profile of the company in the New York Times reveals encouraging first-year results from InfoWorld's digital transition:

There were nervous months after the switch as the company awaited the reaction from advertisers and readers, but before long InfoWorld’s Web audience was growing and its business improved. Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.

Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success

PersonaNonData talks about the recent story in the New York Times on IDG's transition to digital publishing:

Since their [IDG's] market is technology they have some advantage over other types of magazines; however, their navigation of this transition is instructive and predictive of the manner in which publishers will ultimately become successful.

... In IDG's case they have remained faithful to the mission of providing content their core market wants, aggressively managing the performance of their titles and shutting down those that don't perform and they have combined staff into cohesive and focused groups. Companies that make this transition early and successfully will establish difficult to surmount positions relative to their competitors ...

Faber Brings Out-of-Print Titles Back Through POD

Faber & Faber is launching Faber Finds, a print-on-demand (POD) imprint specializing in out-of-print titles. From The Guardian:

The new titles, which will retail at about £9, and be printed with automatically generated cover designs, will not be stocked in large quantities by booksellers, but will be available to order through most major booksellers and the majority of internet-based book retailers ... The publisher aims to publish up to 20 new titles every month, after the launch list of 100 books to be made available this June. Faber is the first mainstream non-academic publisher to invest heavily in the POD model, and actively to source material previously published elsewhere for a POD imprint.

Iliad Book Edition E-Reader Coming to UK

Just in time for our discussion on the ideal e-book reader comes a new product that will be the first e-reader sold in the United Kingdom.

Trading Wi-Fi for increased storage and an overall price drop, the iLiad Book Edition is a successor to the iLiad 2. Both use the same iRex e-ink technology and feature a tablet-based touch screen. There is no bundled online service or book store, but both iLiads have support for open formats such as PDF. 50 public domain books are preloaded. (Continue reading)

TorrentSpy Hit with $110+ Million Copyright Judgment

Defunct BitTorrent index TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay more than $110 million in damages for copyright infringement. From News.com:

The judge ordered TorrentSpy to pay $30,000 per copyright infringement -- for 3,699 films and shows. That works out to be worth $110,970,000.

TorrentSpy shut down its site in March. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney in the copyright suit, tells News.com the company declared bankruptcy last week, a fact he says will be lost amidst the judgment's large dollar figure. (Continue reading)

Related:

• See more publishing news and insight in the TOC News section

Some Quotables from OnCopyright 2008

Andrew Savikas
May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

I spent last Thursday at Copyright Clearance Center's OnCopyright 2008, and came away with some great lines from the panelists well worth sharing here.

On a meta-level, one of the recurring themes on the panels was the value of using the work of others as a starting point for creative experimentation, as in a pastiche. So it was fitting to learn from the organizers that they found inspiration at the February TOC Conference, both in terms of speakers and in staging. (The panel title "Technology: Confronting the Tools of Disruption" was another nice nod.)

I've enclosed direct quotes in quotation marks -- the remainder is generally faithful paraphrasing, but may suffer from some transcription abbreviation.

Chris Sprigman:

• "Copyright law is not in place to protect business models, it's in place to protect creativity."
• Who controls copyright law? According to a 5th-grade civics class: Congress. According to a cynic: People who care enough to spend money to get Congress to do what they want.
• Intellectual property has nothing to do with what craigslist does, and craigslist has significantly diminished newspapers' ability to create a return on what they do.

Read more…

Web Community Lessons from Stephen Colbert

Mac Slocum
May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Stephen Colbert urges fans to edit Wikipedia and game Google, but instead of Internet ostracism, Colbert's Web abuse has netted a Webby Person of the Year award and, more importantly, a broad and active online community.

Old guard Web folks might frown on Colbert's intentional disregard for Web community standards, but the Webby award is rightfully deserved. Colbert's use (or misuse) of Web-based tools shows how interactivity and brand building can be harnessed, adapted and evangelized in Web communities. There's a lesson amidst all this cheekiness, and Colbert knows it. From the Associated Press:

"The Web is essentially improvisational ... The Internet is the shortest, hardest wall against which your voice will echo back," Colbert said. "It's a big place, but, boy, you get an echo back really fast."

Colbert's recognition of the Web's ability to "echo" reveals a forward-thinking perspective. This same perspective can help book publishers form and engage their own Web communities.

For example, Colbert and his staff take full advantage of their most important asset: the TV show. The creation of a top-down, far-reaching platform -- like a TV program -- is arduous and risky, but this is familiar terrain for book publishers. What publishers need to realize is that the hard part is finished; the expensive infrastructure required to publish books is already built. Now, publishers should take a page from Colbert's playbook and use their established platform -- books -- to engage with the audience through the Web.

As we've discussed before, these book-to-Web efforts can be simple add-ons, such as message boards, blogs, widgets and social network integration, or more intricate initiatives like online/offline meet-ups, immersive games, mash-ups and writing experiments. The key is to pay attention to those "echo" opportunities and then look for ways to use a book's core themes, ideas or characters as community builders.

Related Stories:

• Opportunities in Book Publishing and Web Communities
• Experimenting for the Sake of Experimenting
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?

Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free

Andrew Savikas
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Today brought news of the release of a "Save to Daisy" add-in for Microsoft Word, and while a new Word add-in wouldn't normally be news for publishers, there's a bit more to this story.

Among the benefits of distributing content digitally is that it ostensibly makes the content more accessible to alternate reading devices. It's not difficult to see how -- compared to a printed page -- text marked up for computers to read (think HTML) would be much easier for a computer to read to a human (like Braille readers or text-to-speech). Indeed, for some time now we've offered audio versions of many O'Reilly articles and blogs (including this one). But in reality, format diffusion and DRM has often frustrated accessibility efforts (and by extension, consumers).

The industry migration toward EPUB has the potential to address this -- any (non-DRM) EPUB file should in theory be readable by a variety of accessibility devices, with no added conversion cost or delay.

But first there's a shift that needs to happen, and that's a shift on the part of publishers from building books primarily intended to be consumed in print to building books that are intended to be consumed digitally. When we first learned of the "Export to EPUB" feature in InDesign, there was premature optimism internally that it was the answer to a lot of questions about how to present some of our most popular content in a more digital-friendly form. The reality though is that simply exporting EPUB from InDesign files designed for print created essentially useless output. Our contacts at Adobe helped clarify that a huge part of getting good EPUB out of InDesign is about designing the content with that format in mind -- something very few designers are doing yet that I'm aware of. There's a serious education issue here, in that most people who hear that InDesign can export to EPUB assume it's as easy as "Save as..." and it's not. For example:

... when threading together text fields, they will always be exported in the correct order. However, they will also always be in one flow. All of the layout editing that you have done to place the text boxes with respect to each other or the page is discarded. You will have to style the layout of the EPUB manually, after export.

There's growing inertia behind EPUB (I like to refer to it as the "mp3 of ebooks"), and when ebooks become a primary delivery format, rather than a secondary one, expect to see much more content available in an inherently accessible way. Here's hoping the next version of Word includes "Save as EPUB" from the start. (For now you can try the free DAISY pipeline to convert those exported DAISY Word files into EPUB.)

Related links:

• New DAISY Pipeline Released
• Ebook Format Primer
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)

Trent Reznor Continues to "Get" the Value of Free Content

Andrew Savikas
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Radiohead may have gotten more of the press for their "name your price" album, but Trent Reznor continues to demonstrate that he understands the value of free content as a promotional tool, and perhaps more importantly that what he's promoting can be quite far from free. Content Nation has a nice post on the ultimate goal of free-as-promotional:

In other words, this group of artists is recognizing that content's primary value in media formats is to help people build valuable relationships. While there's money to be had in mass-produced intellectual property, the high-margin business in content is in person-to-person relationship building that results in both executed business and a more multi-dimensional relationship that can be leveraged in many more ways than mass manufacturing can manage.

Related Stories:

• Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
  
• That Was Fast: $300 "Free" Album Sold Out
• The Price of an Album (approaching zero) and the Price of a Souvenir (sky's the limit)

What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

Mac Slocum
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (14) | Listen

I've seen a number of articles discussing the e-reader merits of low-cost laptops like the Asus Eee PC and the OLPC. Reviews say both machines adequately handle e-reader duties, but the overall experience is like reading a magazine through a Web browser: novel, but not really practical.

On the opposite side, the Kindle, Sony Reader and other dedicated e-readers continue to be debated. The screen resolutions and portability of these devices are generally appreciated, but there are broader issues with ergonomics, ebook formats, proprietary quirks, connectivity, etc..

Put it all together and it's clear we have yet to reach the e-reader promised land. But that doesn't mean we can't play with the topic ...

What I'd like to know is, if you had your druthers, what would your ideal e-reader look like? What specs would it feature? What formats would it handle?

Please share your thoughts in the comments area.

Glimmer of Positivity in Media Industry Analysis

Mac Slocum
May 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

A handful of recent media industry reports inject a small but noticeable degree of optimism into their examinations of the current business landscape.

Lauren Rich Fine of Kent State University tells the The Economist that adaptation could guide certain types of newspapers through the industry's rough transition:

Ms Fine also points out that although all newspapers are being buffeted by the internet, their ability to respond will probably depend on whether their audiences are national, metropolitan or local. The first category can afford to invest in distinctive international or business coverage, while the last can prosper by becoming “more intensely local”. But she fears for the big metropolitan newspapers, which may find themselves trapped in the middle.

Fine's analysis doesn't benefit medium-sized papers, but the prospect of success at large and small papers is a shift from typical declarations of "all" newspapers dying.

On the broadcast side, NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman says TV shows will need to exist on multiple platforms to succeed, and variations across formats have to be distinct. From TVWeek:

"Around our new offerings there will literally be shows that end on air and the last scene will continue online," Silverman said at the recent TelevisionWeek Upfront Summit.

Rather than feebly slapping Band-Aids on the established system, Silverman's comments suggest an acceptance -- and an embrace -- of the industry's position. This is a perspective shared by Wired editor Chris Anderson, who, in a recent talk, said the media industry needs to examine the current environment and then find ways to add value. From Journalism.co.uk:

"... we need to do something that the internet has not either not already done or done too well, that may be original reporting, maybe it's investigative reporting. Maybe it's long form narrative; maybe it's the packaging of stories with photography and diagrams ... That's basically our mission, I think, to figure out where the market failure is in the amateur internet and there in lies the commercial opportunity for us to do something that still has value and which people will pay for, either directly or in terms of their attention, which can be monetised through advertising.

On first glance it would seem that newspapers and broadcasters are in a different digital realm than book publishers, but as we've seen time and again, a development in one part of the media landscape often pops up elsewhere. There's also much to be said for a positive outlook in an uncertain environment.

Related Stories:

• Newspaper Circulation Falls to WWII Levels
• "So Change. Or Die"
• NY Times: "Publisher Tested the Waters Online, Then Dove In"
• Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and "Piracy"
• Why TOC is an Idea Much Bigger than O'Reilly

Tutorial: Add AB Meta Tagging to Your Blog

Liza Daly
May 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Many publishers use blogs to promote new products and engage customers. Dedicated blog readers will subscribe and receive every post, but the best way to reach a wider audience is still via search engines.

Embedding simple machine-readable code is a key component of the "semantic" Web, in which search engines don't just treat Web pages as a jumble of keywords, but instead can understand their meaning.

Technology firm Adaptive Blue has recently released a scheme for tagging books, movies and other media to enable search engines to label media products appropriately. Because Adaptive Blue's AB Meta is so new, there aren't yet dedicated tools for it. Fortunately, the scheme is very simple and re-uses basic Web tagging. Publishers can use this scheme -- today -- to enrich blogs and product pages.

Here we provide instructions for adding AB Meta content to a WordPress blog. Examples for integrating the format into other blogging software can be found in the description of AB Meta.

Using AB Meta with WordPress

1. Download the HeadMeta plugin
2. Unzip the plug-in and copy the headmeta folder to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Enable the plug-in in the WordPress Plugin Management page (/wp-admin/plugins.php)
4. When writing a new post, look under Advanced Options -> Custom Fields.

The Custom Fields form will allow you to set two items: a key and a value:

1. The key will always be "head_meta".
2. The value will be in the following general format:
   

   name="an AB Meta field" content="the field's value"
   

Here's an example for a book title:

To qualify as AB Meta content, one field is required and should always be added:

name="object.type" content="book"

After that, you will add fields that are specific to your book content. Here are some examples from the Adaptive Blue site for the book The Kite Runner:

name="object.type" content="book"
name="book.title" content="The Kite Runner"
name="book.author" content="Khaled Hosseini"
name="book.isbn" content="1594480001"
name="book.year" content="2004"
name="book.link" content="http://books.com/1594480001.html"
name="book.image" content="http://books.com/1594480001.jpg"
name="book.tags" content="fiction, afghanistan, bestseller"
name="book.description" content="Story of an Afghan immigrant."

For WordPress, in the Custom Fields option, these would all be entered like this:

In the key field: head_meta
In the value field: name="object.type" content="book"

In the key field: head_meta
In the value field name="book.title" content="The Kite Runner"

... and so on, through all of the metadata fields to be included with the blog post.

What advantages are there to using AB Meta?

At the time of this writing, there are no applications that are specifically indexing AB Meta content. However, the scheme is quite simple, both for human and computer readers, and is likely to see widespread adoption. Tagging content with it now means that when these tools become available, you will already have significant inventory indexed. In addition:

1. Many of the fields in AB Meta correspond to values in the Google Book Search API. This should make it trivial for Google to match articles about books to specific entries in Google Books, where customers can preview content before buying.
2. It's likely that tools based on Amazon Web Services will be built on top of AB Meta to allow those tags to generate direct or affiliate links to the Amazon.com book store.
3. Some XML-based workflows already store book metadata in the Dublin Core schema, and AB Meta supports Dublin Core directly.
4. Simpler blog plug-ins that support or even can auto-generate AB Meta are certain to be developed.

So get tagging! In the meantime we'll continue to monitor progress of AB Meta in terms of adoption and tools.

Related Stories:

• Simplifying Semantic Tagging
• Different Approaches to the Semantic Web
• Google Opens Book Search with API