NaNoWriMo Now Underway

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out the website for ways to support and participate.

Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online

Andrew Savikas
October 2, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel).

Keith also offers up a nice post-mortem on the first book to go through the system, Programming Scala, where "over the months, nearly 100 people left a total of 543 comments. Ten contributors stood out in particular, giving more than a third of the total comments."

Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper

Andy Oram
June 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (38) | Listen

Bookbuilders of Boston, a nonprofit membership organization for publishing professionals, held a panel on June 11 about open publishing. It attracted an usually large number of attendees--about 60--revealing the curiosity its members have toward the potential changes created by this movement.

I was one of the panelists, along with managers from MIT Press and Harvard University Press. In addition to a discussion of the core topic of open publishing--that is, distributing documents free of charge, often under a license that permits free alteration and distribution--I laid out a larger vision that places the publisher in a context where contributors hold conversations online and share large amounts of material freely among themselves. That vision is the center of the following remarks.

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When trade publishers are invited to speak, we seem to be expected to follow a certain script. We must stress the importance of finding new ways to distribute and market our material online. We have to point out that only 15% of a book's cost goes to shipping and printing. We champion the importance of supporting authors financially, shed a tear or two for our sister industry, journalism, and so on.

When staff from O'Reilly Media are invited to speak, we defy expectations by throwing out all of that stuff, talking instead about the excitement exploring new technologies that can change people's lives, about working together to educate each other, about how sharing information in communities can help us all grow. This is the open source movement in a nutshell, as it were.

Tonight I'll take a somewhat in-between position: I'll talk about business models, but from the standpoint of open online content.

The bedrock principle in this environment is that the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper. Anything can go online to be linked to, rated, berated, or anything else people want to do with it. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

Sound nice--but that puts us in a real quandary, because the elements of quality we have seized on so proudly over the decades no longer matter as much. We have to recognize the new environment we're in and find new meaning for ourselves.

This is a classic application of the principles from The Innovator's Dilemma, the classic book by Clayton M. Christensen, where he talks about changes caused by disruptive technologies. In our case, disruptive social norms are just as important.

In many areas of publishing--including certainly my own, computer books--there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Much of the material can be edited and redisplayed instantly, particularly on wikis. That is the context in which we have to define the publisher's new roles.

I won't discuss marketing in this talk because I'm not a marketing person and because the rules are changing so fast that I'm afraid of making any predictions about what works. Focusing instead on content production, I've divided the roles publishers play in adding quality into four parts. For each one, I'll discuss how we're affected by the presence of so much online material.

Proofing for grammar, syntax, and consistency of usage

Publishers spend a lot of time making documents look professional and enforcing standards. We're obsessed with getting every comma and semi-colon right, ensuring that capitalization is consistent, and so on.

I think this as a valuable contribution to quality. Sometimes someone reading an article will stop and as me, "Here's an abbreviation spelled two different ways--does it refer to the same thing or two different things?" And sometimes I'll read a sentence that's missing a word, and have to go over it two or three times to see how the parts fit together. Proofreading can resolve real problems in comprehension.

But many modern readers don't value proofreading, because it comes at a cost. This cost, of course, is the extra time proofreading adds to publication. The modern reader would rather have the document right now, so he can get his tweet out before his colleague does. First tweet wins.

Proofreading is also like cleaning the Aegean Stables. I've found myself in the situation where I edit a whole book and get it looking really professional, then find that someone goes in the files the next day to make some updates--and there goes all my hard work.

But publishers can still offer professional proofreading. The time this is useful is when an organization needs a professional looking document--for instance, when it wants to print an online book in order to show off the organization's capabilities to a potential client. In the same situation where you take off your T-shirt and don a pants-suit, you want a professional-looking text. And publishers may be able to get revenue in such situations.

Fact-checking

A more significant contribution publishers make to quality is fact-checking. Many newspapers and magazines hire staff to do it; technical journals and book publishers such as O'Reilly pay outside experts a few hundred or couple thousand dollars to perform the same service.

Few authors and readers online hold the view expressed by a blogger in last Sunday's New York Times who said, "Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap." But there is an attitude among responsible bloggers--which I adopt myself--that if you've gathered enough of the facts to propound a valid opinion, you can go ahead and put the opinion out for debate. If other people see errors or have evidence that weakens your argument, they can cite them in comments. If you write a wiki, they can edit it. In any case, you're encouraged to express yourself so long as you're sure you're heading in the right direction.

This approach is more limited than many of its adherents think, though. In the computer field I work in, especially, a lot of online participants hold to an essential philosophy of logical positivism. They believe that if enough facts are brought to bear and enough people comment, we will all converge on the truth. If this were the case, most of the articles in Wikipedia would be perfect by now.

But if course this is not the case, because new information, new opinions, new interpretations get added all the time, and with them new errors are introduced as well.

So there may be a role for publishing professionals in fact checking. It will probably not be a large part of our work, though because in the Internet age fact checking is a lot easier than it used to be. Just don't rely on Wikipedia.

Editing unclear and ambiguous passages

This task is probably where publishers create the most value, and where they can make some of their biggest contributions to Internet content. I find it sad when I read a document by someone who is clearly brilliant and knows his material well, and come across a passage that doesn't make sense because no editor said, "You have to work on this."

And every editor knows the work involved in making text comprehensible by ripping up paragraphs, rearranging points in the proper order, introducing connecting or transitional material, and even adding facts that the author took for granted but that the editor knows have to be explicitly told to the reader.

I've noticed that the give and take of modern online media compensates even for poorly argued text. If someone doesn't understand a point, she can just post a question. The author can come back to cover it in more detail, and after a couple rounds of discussion they work out the meaning. Other people can join in to offer explanations.

Still, I look at these exchanges and think, "A lot of people could have saved a lot of time if someone had just edited the document." And some projects are recognizing the value of having an expert eye look over a document, something few amateurs know how or take time to do.

Integrating facets of a large-scale text

We all know the difference between reading an anthology of diverse articles for different audiences, written from different points of view in different tones of voice, and reading a 250-page book so well integrated that you start on page 1 and can't put it down till you reach the end. Achieving this quality is where publishers shine, and I haven't found any process or mechanism in collaborative, online document production that can carry it off.

But even this has diminished value in the Internet world, because hardly anyone reads a 250-page book at once. No one has time. If we read chunks of a few thousand words at a time, we could just as well read documents the way they usually appear on the Internet: many small contributions by different people scattered among different web sites. (This very article, topping 1,500 words, is about as long a text as most people would tolerate.)

That doesn't mean the problem of integration has disappeared; it has just shifted. Now the public needs help finding their way among the different documents. Hints are needed as to what to read first, where to go when they encounter a new concept they need to learn, and how to harmonize documents that use different terms or approach a problem from different angles.

I think publishers can play a major role helping to organize content culled from around the Internet. But the process is a lot different from organizing material into a book. It requires a new online tools and a type of different interaction between experts and those tools. I will leave you with a pointer to an article I wrote proposing some tools, and another pointer to my collection of articles about community educational efforts.

In summary, publishers still have roles to play when we are no longer gatekeepers. But we have to renew our relevance in environments where enormous amounts of information are put online by different participants, with ample facilities for commenting and linking. These new technologies and norms force us to look at every area where we traditionally boast of adding quality, and to find new ways to apply our skills.

Authoring Tools from Alpha Geeks

Andrew Savikas
May 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) has posted a nice article covering some of the tools he's built or borrowed to make his writing life more manageable. I'm especially intrigued by the Flashbake project, which augments simple use of version control (something many of our authors have been using for years, and which we use extensively in our production toolchain) to automatically capture contemporaneous data about the writing process:

Now, this may be of use to some notional scholar who wants to study my work in a hundred years, but I'm more interested in the immediate uses I'll be able to put it to — for example, summarizing all the typos I've caught and corrected between printings of my books. Flashbake also means that I'm extremely backed up (Git is designed to replicate its database to other servers, in order to allow multiple programmers to work on the same file). And more importantly, I'm keen to see what insights this brings to light for me about my own process. I know that there are days when the prose really flows, and there are days when I have to squeeze out each word. What I don't know is what external factors may bear on this.

Thinking about content like code opens up a wealth of tools and techniques for managing that content. After all, programmers spend more time than just about anyone doing what can very easily be called "creative writing" with text, so it's no surprise they've built tools to make their lives easier and more productive. We're getting ready to announce a new project over at O'Reilly Labs, one also built on top of version control (Subversion in our case) and another example of using software tools to improve the writing (and in this case reading) experience.

Indigo's Shortcovers Launched Today: A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement

Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

The Shortcovers website and companion iPhone and Blackberry apps launched today (we posted a sneak preview back in January). Put simply, it's a website for buying ebooks. But there's a few interesting twists that (for now) set it apart.

Though most of the current content is books, the primary unit of the service is the "shortcover" -- things like an article, a blog post, and a book chapter. That means publishers have the option of making individual chapters available for sale (or as free samples). But perhaps the more interesting consequence of that is something they're calling "mixes," where readers can combine multiple shortcovers into a single "mix" (think iTunes playlist), and share that with other readers. Though my search was admittedly brief, I wasn't able to find any for-pay content available for inclusion in a mix.

They also definitely understand the social aspect of reading. Beyond the mixes, readers can also upload their own content, rate content, and share content (via Twitter or email).

On the downside, right now although some content is downloaded locally to the iPhone, most of the service only really works when you're online. Also, the navigation within books isn't very intuitive, and the interfaced doesn't drop away while reading (the navigation and settings bars at the top and bottom remain on screen while reading).

And (sadly unsurprisingly), the reader appears to have trouble displaying complex content like lists and tables, and computer code (the ones I looked at either didn't display the code at all, or displayed it in regular variable-width font). I've sent a note to the Shortcovers folks to try and learn more, but I'm continually surprised with how poorly many of these reading systems (including the Kindle, until very recently) have handled kinds of content that have been part of standard HTML for well over a decade. Here's some screenshots of the problem:

I'd be more sympathetic if the iPhone SDK didn't already include the WebKit framework for rendering HTML. Sigh.

But overall it's a decent start, and an impressive first real entry into the mobile reading space from an existing print retailer.

Several more iPhone screenshots are below:

At TOC: Best of TOC Writing

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

One of my favorite books of 2007 was The Best of Technology Writing, edited by Steven Levy. We decided to try something similar for this year's TOC Conference, and over at the O'Reilly booth we have (hot off the Espresso Book Machine) the Best of TOC, a collection of writing from on publishing from around the Web:

It includes writing from TOC speakers:

• Bob Stein
• Kate Eltham
• Kassia Krozser
• Peter Brantley

... and more from around the Web, like John Siracusa.

Because all of the writing in here was born on the Web, it's full of hyperlinks, which we've presented in the print version as footnotes (done automatically, BTW). The shear number of links (there are more than 600 in 126 pages) illustrates how differently we write when it's for the web. Now that all writing is really writing for the web, it's important to both incorporate more links within the content you create, and be sure your print designs and workflow can easily accommodate those links in print (footnotes is one way, but not the only way).

For the digital/production geeks among you, we used DocBook XML and a customization layer of the open-source DocBook XSL Stylesheets. That means we can use the same source to get print, web-friendly PDF, and EPUB, here's a snippet of the source XML:

As soon as we can, we'll also make this available for free download, so don't worry if you don't get a copy from the booth. Thanks to all the writers who agreed to let us share their work.

StartWithXML Research Report Now Available for Sale

Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

If you weren't able to attend the StartWithXML Forum last month in New York, the accompanying research report is available for sale. The report covers topics like:

1. Where am I and where do I want to end up?
2. How much benefit do I want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing?
3. How much work do I want to do myself?
4. How much time and money will this take?

When you purchase the report, you get it as our full eBook Bundle, including PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket formats.

If you're ready for a deeper dive into XML, there are two very complementary tutorials lined up during next week's TOC Conference:

• Introduction to XML for Publishers
• XML in Practice: Formats, Tools, and Techniques

And if that's still not enough angle brackets for you, check out the Introduction to XML course from the O'Reilly School of Technology, which earns you four CEUs (Continuing Education Units) and a CEU letter from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education. Save $50 with discount code SWXML09.

"None of this is good or bad; it just is"

Mac Slocum
January 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But [Lisa] Genova and [Brunonia] Barry and [Daniel] Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• Book Publishing's Scale Issue
• Lamenting the Digital Decline is a Dangerous Path
• I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead)
• Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations

Slides from "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow" Webcast

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Laura Dawson has made her slides available from the recent TOC Webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow." A complete recording of the event will be posted here soon.

Read more…

Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution

Bill McCoy
November 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (30) | Listen

Last week my friend and International Digital Publishing Forum board colleague Peter Brantley, Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, published a thoughtful article on TOC arguing that "digital book DRM is bad bad bad."

I rashly volunteered to offer a counterpoint. Now, let me say up front that I don't think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, ...). Peter's post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it's better or worse than the likely alternative.

To me, it's pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty -- so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.

Read more…

Change Always Leaves Someone Behind

Mac Slocum
November 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Seth Godin discusses the realities of digital change and free distribution in an interview with HarperStudio's The 26th Story:

... the market and the internet don't care if you make money. That's important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It's not "how can the market make me money" it's "how can I do things for this market." Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It's entirely likely that many people in the chain WON'T make any money. That's okay. That's the way change works.

(Via Differences & Repetitions and Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter Stream.)

Related Stories:

• Calling Out Risk-Averse Publishers
• How Do Publishers and Authors Get Paid in a "Free" World?
• Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?
• It's Time to Accept an Ambiguous Digital Fate

The Barack SlideShow

Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."

Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.

Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.

I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.

When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.

Related Stories:

• Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire
• Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One
• Sulzberger: "Be of the Internet, Not on the Internet"
• Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo

Report: Random House Shifts Ebook Royalties to Net Receipts

Mac Slocum
October 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Richard Curtis says Random House has announced a shift in its ebook royalties in a letter recently sent to literary agents. From E-Reads:

Commencing December 1, 2008, the new royalty rate for sales of ebooks will be 25% of the amount received for all sales, Random's letter goes on to state. What does Random House actually receive? Most e-book retailers take a discount of approximately 50% of an e-book's list price. Therefore, the amount received by Random House -- the amount on which the new royalty will be based -- is about half of the list. [Emphasis included in original post.]

(Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream)

Related Stories:

• Pricing Digital Book Content: Where's the Sweet Spot?
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• Survey of Publisher and Author Reaction to HarperCollins Move

How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?

Kate Eltham
October 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

As the director of an organisation for writers I was curious about the announcement of Random House's new Web toolkit to assist RH authors to set up and maintain their own Web pages.

booktrade.info reports:

... the toolkit allows authors to customise their pages with a choice of backgrounds, fonts and colours. Authors can then select different types of content to add to their pages, such as profile or biography information, links to favourite sites, audio and video clips, book reviews, bibliographies, photo galleries, blogs and newsletters.

The web pages will be hosted on a community-based website called AuthorsPlace and once authors have created their web pages they can choose whether to interact with other authors on the site, or whether to use their pages as a standalone website.

There's a couple of things worth discussing here. Firstly, a system that allows users to set up their own page and add content such as audio, video, images, etc. sounds awfully like a blog platform. If the goal is to put this power in the hands of your authors, why bother to build your own, possibly expensive, proprietary Web architecture instead of educating your authors to use Wordpress, Movable Type or Blogger for themselves?

The obvious answer would be to control the platform. No matter how much customisation users can achieve with colours, fonts, images, etc., the pages will ultimately be constrained by the limitations of the platform. This could have both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, if Random House wants to drive attention to their authors' Web sites they only have to concentrate on doing it for the one online community instead of dividing their efforts among titles or writers. If Random House gets good at SEO this could be a powerful benefit to RH authors. On the minus side, it would presumably be very costly to keep a platform like that up to date with relevant features. Why bother to invest in the software development cycle when other companies are doing it as their core business and a lot faster? Some, like The Lazarus Corporation, are even offering artist-tailored solutions free and open source.

Secondly, I'm interested in the idea of the AuthorsPlace, because alongside Authonomy, this is another example of a community where writers talk to other writers. I question the value of this to Random House and to its authors, at least in terms of book sales. Obviously there are a lot of benefits to writers who can be supported by professional communities of interest. But I think publishers' efforts are best spent on assisting authors to connect with readers. That's a much harder task. It means you have to understand and be good at search. You have to to stick with the conversation long after the book is launched. You have to be open about, and even encourage, sharing and spreadability of digital content, even when that content is the book. (See what Paulo Coelho thinks about that.)

Finally, all this raises the much broader question of how authors should be promoted online for best outcomes. I'm a firm believer that nobody can do this better than the author themselves, but what is the role of the publisher in online promotion of their authors and titles? How long can they realistically commit resources and energy to any one particular title or writer? Who controls the message? Given that, as Mac suggested in this post earlier this week, the shift is towards two-way conversation, it would seem that the best results will be achieved by authors who are genuinely prepared to put in the time to engage in that conversation.

What do you think authors should do to promote themselves online? How much should publishers get involved?

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Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation

Mac Slocum
October 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, co-authors of the upcoming book Trust Agents, share a few ideas for drumming up pre-publication interest in a title. Some of their suggestions are straight from the Web publicity playbook (ebook previews, blogging during the writing process), but they're also exploring engagement through online events and workshops -- two things that usually happen after publication.

I hadn't considered this until reading Brogan's blog post, but many social media publicity techniques aren't particularly social. Podcasts, blog posts and Facebook groups are technologically progressive, but there's a significant difference between a publicity update and an open invitation.

Twitter serves as an example here: The best Twitter users engage their audience through curated links, retweets, commentary and discussion. This stands in contrast to the auto-generated Twitter blasts employed by many media organizations (they're easy to spot -- look for the abrupt truncations).

Brogan's post -- and efforts from people like Seth Godin -- show that Web-based publicity is following the same developmental trajectory as blogging (and Twitter, although it hasn't reached puberty just yet). The top-down messaging that marks the early days of a Web effort eventually matures into a two-way conversation -- and that's when things get interesting.

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O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures

Andy Oram
June 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

My goodness, the Internet certainly brings transparency to every human interaction these days. One of my authors, Baron Schwartz, has posted a long blog about his personal experiences writing for O'Reilly, and a lot of it is scary. So I suppose I need to provide an editor's and publisher's perspective (developed over 15 rapidly changing years) to Baron's recorded experiences.

Over the past several years, many publishers and other content-centered firms have been feeling incredible pressures from the increasing speed at which information travels (and ages). Publishers inevitably transfer some of these pressures to the authors, who in turn sometimes react with frustration. Authors and publishers are at risk of a growing disconnection.

For instance, just a few days ago the Boston Globe printed an article highlighting the anxiety felt by successful novelists (those fortunate few). Many of their publishers are asking them for a new book each year. It's obvious how convenient this strategy is for budget-makers at the publisher, but the novelists are rarely happy with the expectation.

In the computer book industry, these universal pressures are felt mostly in terms of author motivation and the threat of books slipping, which can cause canceled orders or loss of relevance in a fast-moving market.

The key take-away in my response to Baron is that some books do slip a lot and have enormous, unpredictable demands -- but many don't. It's hard to know in advance. If you want to be an author, don't be scared, but be prepared. (In short, I pretty much endorse everything Baron says.)

I'll organize my comments under three categories: unpredictable time commitments, external market pressures, and staff responses. I've run these comments by Baron.

Read more…

Cautious Optimism for Britannica's Hybrid Web Community

Mac Slocum
June 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Encyclopaedia Britannica continues to take baby steps into Web-based collaboration. In April, the Britannica Web site began offering free subscriptions to bloggers, journalists and other link-friendly folks, and now the company is cautiously embracing community collaboration. From Wired:

Britannica is going halfway to where it's never gone before: it is opening up its site to the crowd, but keeping the gates up against the barbarians as far as the official version of the publication [is] concerned ...

Members of the company's community of scholars and registered users will be able to post about new topics without intervention, but the company says all articles on new topics will be fact-checked and vetted before appearing in the main edition.

It's easy to toss off Britannica's conservative Web initiatives, but in this case they deserve credit for bridging the gap between top-down "expert" articles and user-generated content (UGC). In fact, Britannica's efforts might finally reveal viability in the commingling of crowdsourcing and editorial content. If the company can successfully attract useful UGC and then bubble the best of this content up into its core editorial products, we might finally see the beginnings of an actual UGC business model (other than OhmyNews).

That's an optimistic attitude, especially in light of failed citizen journalism efforts. But the Britannica model appears to acknowledge -- in a general way -- two common UGC pitfalls: lack of editorial guidance and little/no incentive to participate. Learning from past mistakes is certainly a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, Britannica's official announcement has a number of red flags that could undermine this initiative. Vague talk of incentives only seems to apply to Britannica experts, not the regular folks who make successful Web communities vibrant. In the same vein, the company's messaging continues to push non-experts to the sidelines. Here are two recent examples:

Example 1: The level of quality and professionalism among Web publishers has really improved, and we want to recognize that by giving access to the people who are shaping the conversations about the issues of the day. Britannica belongs in the middle of those conversations. [Emphasis added.] -- From Britannica's free subscription announcement in April

Example 2: These efforts not only will improve the scope and quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but they'll also allow expert contributors and readers to supplement this content with their own. The result will be a place with broader and more relevant coverage for information seekers and a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors. [Emphasis added.] -- From the recent community project announcement

Neither statement is egregious, but both show a misunderstanding of community. The goal with any Web community is to create an inclusive, interactive platform for discussion and collaboration (Wikipedia knows this). Marginalizing a community with pats on the head and "lay contributor" branding will stifle Britannica's project.

My criticisms are certainly nitpicky, but I'd hate to see this promising UGC effort fail to gain traction because of easily rectified communication issues. Even if Britannica only sees a modest success, we're bound to learn techniques that can benefit a variety of Web community initiatives.

Related Stories:

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• German Wikipedia Coming in Book Form
• Steve Outing: "An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media"
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Publisher Offers Tips for Embedding Web Links in Ebooks

Mac Slocum
June 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

Morris Rosenthal, owner of Foner Books and author of the Laptop Repair Workbook, is blurring the line between books and Web content by embedding clickable hyperlinks within the margins of his PDF-based ebooks. Rosenthal discusses his linking process in the following Q&A.

Q: What inspired you to insert links into your ebooks?

I was forced into large margins for the Laptop Repair Workbook due to the flowcharts that make up the meat of the book, and I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to include the links if I hadn't been staring at all that white space.

Q: Do you recommend inline links or links in the margins? Is one form or the other easier, from a production standpoint?

For a large size book, 8.25 X 11 or 8 x 11, I think links in the margins make the most sense because they can do double duty as design elements. Since the ebook is printable and since most people will be printing on letter size paper, I kept the design nearly identical to the soon-to-be released paperback version. Inline links would be much easier from a production standpoint, but they would tend to interrupt the reader, making people stop and think "should I click on this?" In the margins, they are clearly labeled as supplementary illustrations of procedures. And since the printed book requires full URLs to be shown, it would make the text pretty ugly to show them inline. For the ebook, I could have hyperlinked words without showing the URL, but again, the ebook is printable, and seeing that some words are underlined in blue doesn't get anybody anywhere.

Q: How much time did it take to create separate Web pages and insert links into the Laptop Repair Workbook?

Around half of the Web pages were created before I even started on the book. But in general, a photo illustrated page takes anywhere from a few hours to a day to create. A test procedure takes longer, as there's quite a bit of experimentation behind any given test.

Inserting the 25 or so links, once I settled on the large-margin format, only took a couple hours. I used the text box tool in Word.

Q: Are you able to track visitors from the links?

No. I suppose it would be possible to add an extra anchor argument that would separate the PDF visitors from direct traffic and bookmarkers, but I haven't done it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more sophisticated ways to identify visitors through links, and it certainly would have been possible to link to duplicate pages that are excluded from spidering, but I didn't see a reason.

Q: Do you think embedded links help thwart or offset piracy?

I don't think anything short of full DRM helps to thwart piracy, and then, it's really a question of thwarting casual vs professional pirates. The embedded links may help offset some unauthorized distribution in two ways:

First, anybody who clicks on the links will find out that there's a book for sale, and that might be the first time it hits them that the file they downloaded from site X or received as an attachment from a friend is really a published book that they haven't paid for.

Second, if the links aren't carved out of the PDF, they should help the search engines keep track of who the originator is, if the PDF should end up hosted for a while on a university domain or other authoritative site. When I published ebooks a few years ago through Lightning Source, I went with full DRM primarily to impress upon the customer that the ebooks were a commercial product protected by copyright law. This time around, I've gone with no DRM beyond my embedded copyright notice, but I do send customers through a click licensing agreement.

I should mention that shortly after the New York Times quoted me and mentioned the ebook in an article on laptop repair, I saw signs in Google that some people had been checking filesharing networks for it, as the queries sometimes result in an indexable page. While I take my copyright rights seriously and have the Federal court experience to prove it, I know that the majority of my potential customers will only find out about the ebook through visiting my site, and I'm sure most of those who are willing to pay for an ebook will get it from me. I don't think that most people go trawling through pirate sites when they're looking for a book, but maybe I'm out of touch. I did get some grief from customers during my full DRM years, and while I'm not a knee-jerk "customer is always right" type, I understand that customers have a valid point of view that a publisher ignores at his peril.

Q: What's the upside to embedded links?

For the reader, there are multiple upsides. I'm able to illustrate troubleshooting and repair procedures on my Web site with color photos, updating them at will, without having to charge an arm and a leg for the book ($24.95 paperback, $13.95 ebook). While I could have embedded quite a few photographs in the ebook, most of them would have been irrelevant for any given reader with a different laptop model, different problem, or information that they already knew. When all of those illustrations appear in a book, the customer is paying for them one way or another, and many publishers (especially of textbooks) load up on color pictures just as an excuse to up the price. In this case, it's all supplemental material, a fraction of which may be useful for most readers, but none of which is necessary for core troubleshooting procedures of the text and flowcharts. And from a practical standpoint, I'm able to create a larger number of illustrated procedures because the standard of photography and editing required for a Web page isn't the same as for a book, or ebook.

Q: Any downside to linking?

The only downside I can see is if some readers conclude that the links represent material that has been left out of the book, and that the links are a sorry excuse to make up for it. The book simply wasn't designed that way, but you can't please everybody.

Q: Do you have any formatting best practices?

I did keep all of the links in the root directory of my fonerbooks.com domain, and all of the file names are less than eight characters, though in truth, that's an artifact of doing most of my Web design with my old GNN Press editor (thanks O'Reilly) from 1995. Since the links appear in the margins, I ended up breaking them over two lines, with the domain on the first line and the filename on the second line. I could have force-fit them on a single line; it was just a visual design decision.

Q: Will links be a standard part of your future books?

Certainly a part of future ebooks. For print books, it would depend on whether there was a large enough amount of supplementary material on my Web site to justify a page layout that supported links.

Related Stories:

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Adobe Eyes Interactivity in Ebooks
• Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free
• Open Question: When Will Digital Books Overtake Print Books?

Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks

Mac Slocum
May 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

O'Reilly author and New York Times columnist David Pogue points the way to an April post from author Steven Poole that offers an interesting look at the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding free digital books.

Last year, Poole ran his own experiment with free PDFs of his book Trigger Happy. The result: it was a "pretty good publicity stunt," but it didn't yield any notable revenue.

Although I didn't do it for the money, I was also, of course, interested in testing the idea of giving stuff away and allowing people freely to express their appreciation. So I put a PayPal button below the download. Is this, as some people say, an exciting new internet-age business model for writers and other creative types? Er, not really. The proportion of people who left a tip after downloading Trigger Happy was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%.

Despite meager returns, Poole says the current separation between electronic and print books makes the free digital avenue wortwhile:

... the happy truth is that right now, electronic downloads don't cannibalize printed sales; if anything, they encourage them. In fact, I would gladly give away my newer book, Unspeak, in the same format right now, except that I am contractually obliged to wait until next year to do so.

But -- and this is a big but -- Poole says if/when digital delivery overtakes print as the dominant delivery mechanism, the upside of free drops precipitously:

Giving away your work in the same format in which you hope to sell it is a dangerous game, if that's how you hope to make a living.

Poole's points on both sides of the debate are well put. This is a daunting and exciting time for content creators. It's an odd period that's marked by legitmate revenue concerns as well as new opportunities to build a following. Poole's post does a nice job capturing these dueling perspectives; the entire piece is worth a read.

UPDATE: Mike Masnick at TechDirt has posted a detailed rebuttal to Pogue (and Poole) on the subject:

Just because "give it away and pray" isn't a workable business model, that doesn't mean that there aren't business models that do work. Hopefully, Poole and Pogue will eventually recognize that they're dismissing the wrong thing. They shouldn't be complaining about free (or making misleading accusations about those who simply recognize the economic forces at work) -- they should be complaining about a failure to put in place a real business model to take advantage of what will be free.

Related Stories:

• TechDirt: "'Give It Away And Pray' Isn't A Business Model... But It Doesn't Mean That 'Free' Doesn't Work"
• Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and "Piracy"
• BitTorrent as a Book Publicity Tool
• Piracy is Progressive Taxation ...
• How Do Publishers and Authors Get Paid in a "Free" World?

Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games

Liza Daly
May 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Publishers are experimenting with an emerging form of interactive entertainment known as Alternate Reality Games (ARG). ARGs are mediated by the Web but they also extend into the real world, with players traveling to physical places and interacting with game characters via email, text messaging, Twitter, and even "old-fashioned" telephones.

I spoke to the founders of ARG design firm Fourth Wall Studios, the company that created the first publishing ARG, Cathy's Book. I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.

Q: Do you think the high level of engagement required of an ARG limits the audience? Is there such a thing as a "casual" ARG, that can be enjoyed in the spare moments between soccer practice and dinner time?

A: Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Designer: ARGs up until now have been like rock concerts. Thousands (if not millions) of people come together at one point in time to collectively experience something incredible. They have a good time, sing along, maybe buy a t-shirt, but when they go home to tell their friends about it, there's no action their friends can take other than to hope they don't miss the next one. The traditional ARG is an experience that exists between the start and end date of the campaign, and if you weren't there at the right time, you simply miss out.

To continue the metaphor, think of our games [at Fourth Wall] as ARG "albums" instead of concerts: something you can play when, where, and how you want. Ultimately, it is only through this "album" approach that this new form of entertainment is going to evolve into a mainstream genre of storytelling.

Q: Many ARGs have been developed as promotional tools for other media: music releases, films, TV series, video games, and now books. Is there a perception that ARGs have to be in support of something else, rather than entertainment themselves?

A: Elan Lee: ARGs have had their roots in marketing because frankly, at this early stage, that's a great place to find money. Marketers have a tougher job every day of finding ways to get their message heard above the noise, and they have a lot of money to throw at the problem. It's a great situation for both sides: marketers get to engage their audience in a way that attracts, involves, and maintains an audience around a product. ARGs benefit in that we get to run wild and ground-breaking experiments as we birth this new art form.

Also, at least in the case of Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero and Cathy's Book, the ARG elements were not conceived as marketing, but as an inextricable part of the content. An album or a book was the spine of the experience, but the work of art itself was conceived as an interactive multimedia whole.

Q: Cathy's Book was targeted at a young adult (YA) audience. Do you think YA is a strong market for this kind of interactive entertainment? Would it be possible to engage even younger children?

A: Sean Stewart, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Creative: Cathy's Book and the new hardcover, Cathy's Key, are designed to be first and foremost a fun (and funny) adventure story. We've added a lot of "fourth wall" elements -- you can call Cathy's phone number and leave her a message, investigate clues she doesn't have time to investigate or write to email addresses you find in the book and see what responses come back to you. Cathy even hosts a gallery where readers can submit their own artwork -- the best of which will be published in the paperback of Cathy's Key. The basic impulse behind this series is to make books -- a traditionally passive, solitary activity -- something with an active, social component as well.

"Fourth Wall" fiction -- experiences that play out at least partly over your browser, your phone, your life -- feels somehow very right for this new age; it's a kind of storytelling that arises naturally from the world of three-way calls, instant messenger, text messaging, and shooting a friend an email with a link to something cool you saw on the Web. To that extent, it's going to feel the most natural to the people most comfortable with that kind of wired world.

When I was in New York last year, meeting with the publisher of Cathy's Book, my 12-year-old daughter emailed me a PowerPoint slide deck, complete with music and animations, explaining why I should get her a Mac laptop for Christmas. Yeah, I think her generation finds interactive entertainment more natural than mine. And yes, I think it would be not only possible, but really effective to build interactive, exploratory stories for even younger kids -- but to do that, we need to get away from the traditional ARGs willingness to be confusing. Most people like to have some clue what the heck they are supposed to do next. It won't surprise you to learn that this is another crucial design issue Fourth Wall Studios has set out to solve.

Q: Reading is usually a solitary pursuit, but there's an almost universal desire to "live" in some genres, whether it's idealized period romances, spy novels, or detective stories (murder mystery parties, especially popular in the 1980s, illustrate this). How important are traditional fiction genres in ARG? Can there be an element of role-playing involved? Are there genres that haven't been explored yet that have potential?

A: Sean Stewart: The first paid writing I ever did, actually, was for live action role playing games and murder mystery dinner parties in the '80s. I never would have guessed that writing for those things would turn out to be extremely important training for me, but in fact the intersection of writing and theater, where you try to find ways for the audience to participate in the story, lies at the heart, I think, of the next evolution in storytelling.

We believe that immersing yourself in a world is a fundamental part of what makes fiction fun. Any time I follow a character -- whether in a Jane Austen novel or a "Matrix" movie -- I am imagining what that must be like. One of the biggest pay-offs in an ARG is that you don't just imagine a fictional world, as in a book, or see it, as in a movie: you actually inhabit it. When I read a Harry Potter novel, I get to go to Hogwarts vicariously; when I play an ARG, I get to go myself. I am finding Web sites on my browser, I am talking to characters on my phone: the world of the fiction has reached out to me.

That proposition, by the way, shouldn't be limited by genre. ARGs have often had a thriller/science fiction slant to them, but even inside our games we've done romantic comedies, spy plots, documentary-style slice-of-life experiences, tragedies, and even Westerns. Fourth-wall fiction isn't about a given genre: it's a set of tools and approaches for letting the audience participate in any kind of story.

Q: What happens when the game is over? Is it possible to package up an ARG as a complete work (whether online or in print) to be experienced linearly? Or is the experience meaningless without real-time participation?

A: Elan Lee: Here's where I'm going to try to get as much mileage out of the "rock concert" metaphor as I can. There is no denying the electric energy present at a concert and there is absolutely no substitute for "being there." However, there are only so many available seats per venue, and only so many venues you can play before exhaustion sets in (both for the artist and the audience). For ARGs to evolve into a mainstream form of entertainment, they must create their own version of "albums" to complement the "concert." Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we have to find a way to put a package around these things and call it a day; I only suggest that both pieces of the experience must exist for the real potential of the form to be realized.

Related Stories:

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