ENTRIES TAGGED "production"
Visualizing book production
Applying data viz techniques to study how a project evolves over time
Data visualization is one of the hot topics of the last year or two. So what does this offer publishing and book production?
Open data activists in particular have been lobbying governments for access to databases which they use to create infographics and visualisations for campaigns. It’s not a new science of course, it was here long before the net (for some background on contemporary practice see the wonderful books by Edward Tufte) but the net is made of data and a good mechanism for transporting it. The net is a good medium for scraping and re-presenting data in more palatable forms. Read more…
Changing the culture of production
What role does collaboration play?
Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.
—Tom Clancy
The emergence of online book production tools is of course bringing writers online. Authoring books online seems to bring two apparently opposing dynamics into play – the social web and the author. The production in the context of the increasingly noisy, social web seems at odds with the typical conception of solitary writer and the juxtaposition simultaneously brings into focus the potential for collaboration or ‘social production’ together with questions of authorship.
Metadata is everyone's responsibility
Laura Dawson on why metadata is integral to each stage of publishing.
Publishing consultant Laura Dawson says publishers are starting to come around to the importance of metadata, but they still don't quite get it.
How agile methodologies can help publishers
Bookigee's Kristen McLean says agile techniques from the software world also apply to publishing.
Bookigee founder Kristen McLean explains how lightweight development, flexible teams and other agile methods can help publishers with content development and workflows.
Edits as a storytelling device
Toggling edits on and off in ebooks could reveal deeper layers and intent.
The omissions and alterations behind books are often telling, and with a little technical know-how that information could be woven into ebooks.
Pride and prejudice and book trailers
How Quirk Books puts book trailers to use and measures their success.
The literati may despise them, but book trailers can be effective marketing tools when done right. Brett Cohen, vice president of Quirk Books, discusses the production and tracking efforts behind his company's trailers.
CSS in an XML Workflow
At the StartWithXML Forum in New York in January, Rebecca Goldthwaite of Cengage gave a great demonstration of how Cengage uses CSS in their XML workflow. Many publishers regard style sheets as an invitation to create cookie-cutter book production, with the fear that all their books will look the same. This is emphatically a myth. Have a look at her…
StartWithXML Research Report Now Available for Sale
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: Where am I and where do I want to end up? How much benefit do I want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing? How much work do I want to do myself?…
For a Workflow Change, Support from the Top is Required
Last week Laura Dawson and I spoke about StartWithXML to a group of IT and operations people from publishers at the User Group meeting for Global Turnkey Systems, a company owned by one of our lead sponsors, Klopotek. We got some great questions afterwards. On reflection, we realized that they touched an important theme: the need for CEO-level support for…
Open Question: How Can Publishers Capitalize on Hot Topics?
It's never been easier to crank out a quickie book, but is this the best way to capitalize on a hot topic? Please share your thoughts.