A simple template that helps you build ePub-formatted books.

“Yes, many of the books on the shelves are available under those options. We can have the publisher drop ship a brand new copy anywhere you like, or you can purchase this used copy. You can also rent the book, but you might want to consider a membership because then the rental is free. Members don’t pay for rentals, though like non-members, if they don’t return the book eventually, the cost of the book is charged to their credit card and we order another.”

“Well, if you invest in a membership and thus in this store, then we can sell you a DRM-free ebook edition for many of the titles in the store. Many of the publishers we work with have been convinced that if you have a stake in the store, you will have a stake in its continuance and your access to the books we offer.  And that, they hope, would be enough for you to use the file only in legal ways. They also get a cut of the membership fee, which they don’t have to pay royalties on, or any other costs for that matter.”

How do we balance the empowering possibilities of the networked public sphere with the dark, unsettling, and even dangerous energies of cyberspace? Matthew Battles blends a deep-historical perspective on the internet with storytelling that reaches into its weird, uncanny depths. It’s a hybrid approach, reflecting the web’s way of landing us in a feral state—the predicament of a domestic creature forced to live by its imperfectly-rekindled instincts in a world where it is never entirely at home. The feral is a metaphor—and maybe more than just a metaphor—for thriving in cyberspace, a habitat that changes too rapidly for anyone truly to be native. This talk will weave critical and reflective discussion of online experience with a short story from Battles’ new collection, The Sovereignties of Invention.

What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe how a public right to hear has historically and implicitly underpinned the U.S. press’s claims to freedom and, more fundamentally, what we want democracy to be. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems—powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware”—that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press.

A lot of aca­d­e­mic work is highly spe­cial­ized, and highly spe­cific. This kind of work is vital to the pro­fes­sion. Right now if you write such a book, a book aimed at a very spe­cial­ized audi­ence, you shop it to presses, and a uni­ver­sity press takes it and pub­lishes it for, say, $75 for the hard­cover and $35 for the ebook. Or $55 for the print ed. and $25 for the kindle/ebook. The press hopes to make most of its sales to libraries, which are A: fac­ing bud­get cuts, and B: likely to be going dig­i­tal more and more. The high price dis­cour­ages both libraries and all but the most seri­ous readers.

Aside from the fact that it’s indeed nice to have a phys­i­cal book, what is the advan­tage of our tra­di­tional meth­ods, to any­one? Do you want an object, or do you want your book read? Ide­ally, you’d like both, but if the book costs $60 dol­lars, get­ting either becomes unlikely. If the AHA pub­lished them as eBooks, and left dis­tri­b­u­tion to Ama­zon and Apple and B&N, or sold them directly its own web­site, your work would be embla­zoned with the author­ity of the AHA, “in print” for­ever, and instantly avail­able at low cost to all read­ers. If you want a phy­isi­cal object, print on demand is read­ily avail­able. In fact, uni­ver­sity presses use it them­selves.

Yes, the AHA would have to do some edi­to­r­ial work, and it’s not triv­ial, but the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is status–publishing with a major uni­ver­sity press con­fers sta­tus; hav­ing a nice look­ing book on your shelf con­fers sta­tus. But really hand­some car­riages used to con­vey sta­tus too, and so did hav­ing a “princess” phone. The AHA should take this on. They could make money, they could re-assert their cen­tral­ity to the enter­prise of his­tory, they could elim­i­nate weirdly, grossly over­priced books.

Most MSs ship with markup, which is then stripped out as part of flowing the manuscript into typeset pages. The typeset pages are then sent for proofreading against the requested markup. Is a verse extract set as such? A proofreader makes sure.

Moreover, she checks to ensure that common typesetting and pagination errors (widows, hyphen stacks, loose lines, too few lines below a head, a figure preceding its callout) have been avoided. Occasionally, the copy is changed to fix said problems. If the book is coming in overly long, and the length is not the fault of the book designer, then the copy will be hacked away at until it fits (there are printing budgets to stick to, after all). And even under the best of circumstances faulty copy will sneak all the way up to this rung of the bookmaking ladder—it needs to be marked, sent to typesetting, sent back to proof, and then OK’d. It is an impressively thorough, expensively fusty process.

Clearly: to fit your proposed standards, all editorial changes should be integrated into the initial MS, and any pagination should be set aside until all parties are completely satisfied with the digital book. Version control then becomes the problem. Will edits for length and typographical sturdiness be allowed? Then the hardcopy book becomes a pan-and-scan to epub’s letterbox. Will the physical typesetting be allowed to suffer in the name of fidelity to the copy? That hurts the book’s reputation as the more-beauteous (and therefore more premiumly-priceable) iteration of a text.

We’ll invent new beauties, most certainly, that aren’t dependent on trim sizes and the like. Or: we’ll accept that paper is costly and pixels are not, so let the page count swell and damn the cost of printing a perfect thing. A certain class of consumer will learn to pay for that perfection.

Christened with the new name last month, the four year-old platform is now much more than a CMS. It comes with nearly every tool that’s needed for publishing, all tightly connected. And it’s already powering hundreds of SB Nation sports fan sites around the country, plus our gadget-oriented pseudo-competitors over at The Verge, forthcoming gaming site Polygon, and whatever else Vox decides to launch (I’ve heard there’s one coming about cars, for example).

The solution, one that I believe we’ll see more often at top online publications, was to create a tight development loop between developers and writers.

One of the most maddening parts of publishing online today is all the data entry related to a story — adding links to previous articles, tags, categories, images, and any other non-writing elements within the text editor. This process often takes up more time than writing the story itself, and the only solutions I’ve seen have been half-functional plugins.

On the topic of photos and videos, Chorus also has some careful solutions in place. The text editor includes a section that shows writers relevant licensed photos to use, whether from the AP, Getty or other services. It also comes with a streamlined photo editor to help writers crop images to their needs, and a tool for quickly uploading videos and photos that they’ve taken at events.

But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.

Publishers also believe that Salinger-like reclusiveness, which once created an aura of intrigue around an author, is not a viable option in the age of interconnectivity. “Particularly now with social media, authors are constantly in contact with their fans in a way that they never were before,” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “Now it seems to make more sense to have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”

It's seen by many as the front of the site, the focal point where people arrive and choose what they want to do. But according to Cohn, only 13 percent of visits to TheAtlantic.com start on the homepage, which "suggests the homepage is overvalued as a mechanism for generating visits to interior pages".

So although it sounds counterintuitive, featuring something on your front page is only one way - and not always the most effective - to boost traffic and get your content in front of the right people.

Same thing for music: people still find new music through Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, but services like Spotify and Rdio actually replace music journalism for many. More music and less bullshit. Better recommendations and you can start listening right away.

There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

We haven’t found the right ways to get people to pay for news and media online, but they have. We are crying but they are having a party on the other side of the river with their not-really-reporting and sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.

Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper.

The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

We’re living through a much more radical shift from narrative and stories and reporting to entirely different and entirely unrelated ways of sharing knowledge.

According to an upcoming study from the Book Industry Study Group set to come out in a month, 95% of publishers have had the experience of creating their e-books with one set of metadata and seeing an altered set of metadata at the point of sale, online booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple*.

What’s different this time? The network seems to be taking a page from agile software development, the philosophy that products should be released early and iterated often. The shows are live (cheap) and/or adaptations of existing shows (easy), all produced in six- or 10- or 13-episode pilot runs instead of as permanent offerings. Listeners and local program directors are invited to help shape the sound of the programs, making it something of a public beta.

Ask Me Another, for example, is perfectly designed for social media (which, remember, barely existed when Bryant Park Project began). Because it’s a live show, every member of the audience is a potential Twitter or Facebook connection.

“What we did before was we were just creating shows that occupied space in that larger circle without really paying attention to how well it connected to the inner circle. These shows are much more an attempt to have something that connects both to the larger circle and the inner circle as well.”

How does the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart production team search for the archived TV clips they use so effectively to expose hypocrisy, prejudice and just darn funny moments of unguarded honesty?

To what extent do they record and tag programming; use commercial archives; and search program closed captioning?

Simple investigative search combinations using TiVo or a similar tool (now we know it's Snapstream).
He also mentioned that they use LexisNexis and plain ol' Google extensively.

In this final part, we are looking at some other roles that guardian.co.uk tags play, including linking them to the wider web.

Every tag belongs to a site section, though in some cases a tag could belong to more than one section: Media law (Media or Law?), Social networking (Media or Technology?), Allen Stanford (Sport, Business or World news)?

If a person refuses to settle into one area of activity we sometimes find as neutral a place as possible for their tag (the Culture section is very useful for polymorphous polymaths like Russell Brand). Sometimes tags must be moved: cricket promoter turned Ponzi scheme operator, Allen Stanford, started in Sport and currently resides in World news (Business seemed too specific for such a colourful character). There was a dangerous moment recently when it looked like Wyclef Jean might have to take the long walk from Music to World news.

If a tag is set up in the wrong section, or doesn't reflect style, or clashes with our values, then we'll either delete the tag, merge it into another tag, or remake it completely. We have tools that allow us to move all the content associated with a tag onto another tag, setting up redirects and even replacing links across the site with the new tag.

Because these links are generated based on frequency of tags in common, they will change over time to reflect our output, without any editor ever having to intervene. Categorising travel keyword tags into "Types of trip", "Trip planning" and "Places" makes obvious sense, because users tend to browse travel content with very clear goals in mind.

We also use parent/child tag relationships in our tools to propose parent tags when a child tag has been selected. So if an editor picks the "London Evening Standard" tag, the tags "Local newspapers", "Freesheets", "Newspapers", "Press and publishing", and "Media" are all proposed and can be applied with one click, saving the editor from having to mentally climb a taxanomical tree and speeding up the process of adding tags.

While not being the most fun part of production, tags are an important part of our publishing platform, and drive a lot of the behaviour that users see on the website and other devices. In a series of posts over the next couple of weeks, we'll be looking at some of the features that tags deliver.

Then Amazon releases a simple and free GUI tool for styling reflowable epubs. Nothing fancy like iBooks Author or whatever Adobe is planning. It just gives them the ability to create really beautiful text-oriented ebooks. It imports ePub, doc, rtf, and HTML files. They can set the backgrounds, borders, and margins. Float some images here and there. Embed nice fonts. Add a movie or two. After that Amazon begins to add support for CSS font-feature-settings and updates the GUI tool to support it.

Most publishers of text-oriented books then face two choices: 1) A ubiquitous platform that supports exactly the features they want (floated images, full-bleed page backgrounds and borders, embedded fonts, opentype font-features). Cheap to develop for. Cheap to use. Has a most of their customers. Supported on all major devices and OSes. 2) A diverse set of heterogenous platforms that differ in a multitude of small ways (most of them non-technological, like B&N’s decision to override publisher stylesheets). A pain to test. Hell to develop for. Most of the tools will be either very expensive (Adobe’s) or proprietary to one platform (iBooks Author). The only way of getting the designs they want is to use a more complex spec that involves more work and isn’t supported by either web browsers or the Kindle. Together, these platforms have a minority of the market, but represent the majority of the publisher’s development costs.

Complex layouts, intricate flow, and extensive design capabilities aren’t a big concern for the makers of the kinds of ebooks that are easily over ninety per cent of the ebook market today. Text-oriented ebooks are the current ebook market and they are being abandoned by ebook vendors because they think they are commodities that neither need nor deserve any differentiation.

The problem is that ‘content’ – books – resists commodification. You can’t exchange Twilight, the Harry Potter series, or J.A. Konrath’s books for a generic slush-filler ebook during a sale and not expect an uproar.

If you think that Amazon is winning just because they were early to the ebook game then I can guarantee you that Amazon will eat your lunch.

The clearest value a publisher has to an author is when they offer design, sales, marketing, and public relations expertise that can take years to develop. A publisher with a strong skill set in those areas, and stable relationships to build on, should never have to worry about the ebook transition.

Pssssst! It's still a secret, but this exists:

Book Deals, Writer Meet-Ups, New Publisher Blogs, and More from Tumblr HQ

Why is it that ideas for creating new narrative forms around print media inevitably involve adding sound and video to it? It’s like print is some kind of backward child who needs remedial education, or a bicyclist who should instead be driving a race car.

How does the Storycuts series – an overarching brand to sell short stories and as singles out of their collections – fit into this theory? Well, adhering like it does to the iTunes sales model of songs versus whole albums, I think the digital short story can (and should) be the pop music of literature.
That’s not to say that it’s an inferior form compared to the paper novel – many would argue a three minute Beatles song matches anything Brahms composed. A story, like a great pop song, creates a rich interior world within its own parameters. What’s exciting for me is that the impulse to spend 99p or so on a short story (or bundle of stories) to download might open up a new market for stories, much like iTunes and song downloads opened up albums to a more casual listener.

The STORYCUTS series launches with over 250 digital short stories from across the Random House Group.

The series takes stories out of their parent collections and makes them available as singles or small bundles, along with a selection of previously unpublished or hard-to-find stories.

Taking a range of our best writers, across multiple genres, it’s an exciting new digital brand and a new era for the short story form.

I’m very interested in how reading behaviours operate across the two platforms, but to call interactive thingumabobs ‘books’ makes the same mistake that mired us in Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation dead-end for fifteen years. In fact, that’s largely why I get a sense of disquiet about calling them books – that’s remediative, reductive thinking and it gets everyone nowhere. Take a look at what’s worked in recent months – Random House’s Story-cuts – short, lovely, well conceived incursions into a digital-led realm, that address the particular branding and design principles that are required to exploit the app store. It’s not remediation, it’s not transfer, it’s transposition, and that’s important.

The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open source reference book for anyone interested in the emerging field of data journalism.

Speaking of a thousand things: As of last week, it grieves me to say, our book collection has finally broken a thousand. The tally as of this writing is one thousand and three. Some are hers, some are mine, some are ours. Regarding the mine-and-ours: Don’t ask me how many of them I’ve read or will read or will even ever crack open and flip through in search of something, I beg you. Don’t ask me how well I remember or understand the ones I have read. Just don’t go there. The answers will reflect poorly on all involved. The shame of the high books-bought-to-books-read ratio is of course comfortingly widespread among us of the book-nerd persuasion. Let’s just round down and say I haven’t read any of them. I don’t want to read them. I just want them around. I require them in my home. And I must have more.

This demo is an experiment in augmenting video with additional information [in the sidebar].

What that made me realize is that if you designed a publishing enterprise to support scholarly communication de novo, aggregating content from a range of sources but also developing direct publishing and reader/writer services, you could do it with very different constraints than Muse, JSTOR, and other platform providers have to grapple with. A new entrant, not unlike the Public Library of Science, could actually turn its back on existing publishing practice and design a direct-to-faculty or direct-to-discipline infrastructure that was wholly divorced from existing players.

The coming change in how we publish the humanities and social sciences, and in fact, what we can publish, could be even more transformative than the re-invention of STM. Building a new digital humanities infrastructure will mean interacting with visual interpretations of historical sites, hearing ancient or less common modern languages in linguistic treatises, and grappling with philosophical quandaries in a gaming environment with virtual goods. Ultimately this may reshape how faculty think about doing their research, as well as how it is communicated.

Earlier this week, Yale university student, Emmanuel Quartey, posted a video interview with the school's librarian, Susan Gibbons, in which he asked her about open-access publishing. Her response was far more ambivalent than the Harvard faculty council's. Though she noted that open-access journals are more accessible, she worried that asking younger faculty to publish in open-access (presumably less prestigious) journals could jeopardize their chances to attain tenure. In essence, prestige would stay put but tenure would move away from younger Yale professors. So, the library would continue to support both open and closed-access journals.

The publishing and ebook industry is completely in reaction mode. Publishers reacted to Amazon by colluding to set up the agency system. Kobo and B&N reacted to Amazon by mimicking its strategy. Even the IDPF’s EPUB3 and FXL standards are reactions to the runaway train that is HTML5 and Apple’s format extensions, respectively. Google’s publishing plans seem about as coordinated and planned as a piece of driftwood’s path through a hurricane.

I’m already on record as believing that ebook distribution and retail should be based on a modular ecosystem, open file formats and standardised services. I should be able to buy a book from any retailer, have it automatically download to any ereader (app or device), have that ereader use any bookmarking/note service I want, and have that service sync my notes on to Simplenote or Dropbox.

A writer should be able to open up a Scrivener or Word document – one that has been thrown back and forth between the writer and the editor until both are satisfied – click on something like “Export to EPUB” and have a ready-made EPUB file that works everywhere. Maybe have a bit of preferences and stuff to adjust but no fuss. No rendering errors. No worries about whether that blockquote is too long or whether the margins on that list will disappear for no reason. Maybe a quick conversion with kindlegen, but even that can be done automatically.

A tool that is unlimited by media, supports print design, iPad magazine app design, ebooks, ebooks with layout, etc., is a tool that will drive you to drink and suicide through frustration. These apps do deliver on the power and flexibility they promise but their complexity and expense will make that power a lot less useful than you think.
A tool that only works for one ereader app on one device type is amazing to use and fills you with joy, all of which is drained away once you realise that only people with iPads can read your work.

The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

If top-down approaches to the problem don’t work, then what about bottom-up approaches? Why do any of us publish papers in Elsevier journals? Let me answer that question in my own case. I have a paper in the European Journal of Combinatorics, which I submitted about 20 years ago, before I knew anything about the objections to Elsevier. And what’s more, I didn’t know it was an Elsevier journal until a few days ago. (Part of my reason for listing the journals at the beginning of this post was to make the second excuse less valid for anyone who reads this. A more complete list can be found here.)

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

The biggest change, of course, was the title. We talked—a lot—about what we had to offer in a crowded print and online magazine field, and why we felt it was important to publish the kind of stories we do. What we came to was this: there are few magazines that look deeply at the work coming straight from academia and other research centers, and even fewer that do it from the West Coast, home to seven of the world’s leading research universities, most of the world’s top technology companies, and the gateway to a rising Asia.
We aim to cover that terrain with a mix of short and long pieces—and quick, easily digestible blog posts—that showcase original research, foreground primary-source data of national importance, and, sometimes, are just fun to read.

Recently, I began chatting with a publishing industry executive about this. This person — who I’ll call Exec — was interested in learning how to break DRM on e-books. About a month later, Exec is a convert and was ready to talk about the experience, albeit anonymously. I don’t think Exec is the only person in the publishing industry breaking DRM on e-books they buy…and those who aren’t doing so already might want to give it a try, if only to see what readers go through. Here is Exec’s story.

But what happens when Amazon decides not to support a platform? Or what if it rolls out new features on Kindle e-readers but doesn’t make those features available on the Kindle apps?

I had thought about breaking DRM before, but had never done so. A key reason why I didn’t is that I want to honor the IP rights of publishers. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized: I bought the book, and now I want to be able to read it on any device I choose.

A month or so in, breaking DRM has become a regular part of my e-reading experience. I don’t even think twice now whether I can only read this book on that platform. They’re all options for me. I plan to unlock every book I buy from now on.

The New York Times now has 454,000 digital subscribers, and the company’s Boston Globe another 18,000. These subscriber deals were structured — essentially providing free digital access to Sunday subscribers — so that there was minimal cannibalization of print.

The worse news is that digital advertising — ideally an eventual replacement for some share of print advertising losses — was down in the first quarter too, actually by a higher percentage (10.4 percent) than print.

nother bit of context for today’s good news is that the Times Co. remains not very profitable with an operating margin for the quarter of about 4 percent.