This was going to be a short post. It’s turned into a manifesto of sorts! Ah, well …
I don’t like the term “self-publishing.”
Cloud-Publishing
In the emerging world of “cloud-publishing,” it’s meaningless, and does not reflect what’s coming, what we’re already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing — what we’re doing at Book Oven — is providing a toolset, on the web, to publish books; a publishing model native to the web, with all the benefits:
* instantaneous global distribution
* simple, web-based collaboration (editing, proofreading, design)
* networks of creators and collaborators (new and existing)
* networks of readers (new and existing)
How book creation gets organized in such a model will vary greatly, from the lonely writer, to a small press wishing to focus on content & not technology, to collections of colleagues and friends, to professional associations, collections of strangers aligned by topical interest, or financial interest, or just aligned in the interest of making books.
The key here is: cloud-publishing (and Book Oven) will provide the tools to allow groups of people to easily coalesce around the production, distribution and sale of a particular book or books. How those groups organize themselves will look different from book to book. But Book Oven’s tools will mean that book makers can focus on the important thing, the content, and not worry about the technical hurdles of making, printing & distributing books.
What’s Wrong with the Status Quo?
Others of course, will prefer the current model, and that is wonderful and excellent and good. I love publishers, and books, and book stores, and libraries, and they have brought me great joy over the years.
But the web offers new, parallel ways to make books, not necessarily better, but more flexible, more easily global, more connected.
That’s the larger movement afoot. And if all goes well, Book Oven will be a big part of this movement.
Self-Publishing Doesn’t Cut It
So “self-publishing” doesn’t cut it as a description of what we’re building at Book Oven. It’s too limiting, and doesn’t get anywhere near the vision we have of a new, parallel, model for publishing as a whole.
As the availability of web-based tools for making books grows, the distinction will be between what you might call “corporate publishing” — blockbuster, and top-end publishing; commercial textbook production, etc. — and the rest of us. The rest of us are “independent”: the smaller presses, groupings of people who put craft and time into making something with various motivations, and yes, individual writers. That doesn’t mean there won’t be money on the independent side, but the structures around the businesses will be very different than on the blockbuster side.
We’re All Indie Now, or None of Us Is
Though as Richard Nash suggests, we’re all indie now (except the big guys), so even the term indie doesn’t mean much:
So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them. [more...]
Bloggers Suck, Right? And Amateur Talkers?
But back to “self-publishing”: once upon a time, it conjured in some people’s minds a negative slew of adjectives: Bad. Sub-par. Not selected.
Deserved or not, that’s how many react to the term.
They said the same thing about blogging in the old days, and yet I can (and do) now find 10 times as much wonderful, thoughtful, well-written content from blogs than I do from professional outlets. Every time I hear people claim that blogging is “bad” (amazingly, you still hear that), I roll my eyes. As I said to Henry Baum: you might as well complain about bad “talkers.” Some talkers are wonderful. Others insufferable. Some of the worst “talkers” are paid lots of money to talk; some of the best are friends of mine and they do it for free. So you would never consider complaining about “talking” as a method of communicating, just because lots of people talk nonsense. You assume that is the case, and seek out the good talkers. So on the web with bloggers, and music, and indeed, books.
Talking is just a means of transmission of words and ideas.
But for whatever reason, it’s hard for people to think of distributing text in the same way that they think of distributing verbal words. While talking might be free, distributing text, audio, video has only recently become (effectively) free. And just as the world is getting used to blogging, and maybe podcasting, along comes this idea that books can be distributed essentially for free. Think about what happened with blogging: suddenly, the means of transmission of text – to a global audience – became free. When the cost restrictions on producing written text disappeared, so did the power of the established system to decide what was worth printing and what wasn’t. And people did what they are wont to do when systems blocking them disappear: they started publishing text like crazy on the web. That made people very uncomfortable. It meant lots of “bad” writers were publishing their text for global consumption. But more importantly, it meant that we saw a beautiful flourishing of great writing that no one had bothered printing before – the topic was too narrow, the audience too dispersed, the return on investment too low. It turns out that the calculations about what’s “worth” publishing is very different when the cost of publishing approaches zero. And that means that now, if you have an internet connection, you can read just about anything produced anywhere in the world. Lutes and Violins? Bespoke tailoring? Goats? You got it.
In the end though, blogging is just a means of transmission of words. And it turns out that there were millions of people willing to write excellent stuff that for whatever reason the traditional media set up did not, or could not publish.
We expect to see something similar with cloud-publishing.
[We've had easy access to the tools of publishing for a while, see for instance Lulu. But the most important shift we're about to see, I think, is the network of readers and writers and book makers. I'll write more about this later].
Good Books vs. Bad Books
Now, I can guarantee something. As the ability to publish books gets easier, we’ll have more “bad” books than you can shake a stick at. (In fact, we probably already do, published, unpublished, self-published…).
But the lines of distinction will not be, as they were previously, between traditional publishing and self-publishing, but rather just between good books and bad books (with caveats about eyes of beholders etc).
We’ll have corporate publishers making good books, and independents making more good books. And everyone will make lots of bad books too. But how independents organize themselves will change greatly too.
Publishers and the Web
Fact 1: many corporate publishers are having a hard time coming to terms with the web. It’s going to get harder for them – they already are having trouble sustaining their cost structures, and have off-loaded much of the work around the web to their authors.
Fact 2: The web has a wonderful ability to allow people to sort through huge piles of information, and seek, rank and share gems.
Opinion 1: People will find more new writing on the web; so “book publishers” must start to be native to the web, and see the web as integral to their task of connecting readers and writers; they cannot continue to see the web as some kind of add-on to their marketing departments.
Opinion 2: Big corporate publishers will have trouble with Opinion 1; so new publishing models need to emerge.
Nothing Is New Under the Sun
We’ve seen this in music and blogs/newspapers and encyclopedia, where the web, and cheap tools of production have spawned an explosion of creative activity, excellence, choice, and a toiling mass of music and writing of all shapes and sizes (along with lots of dreck, but that’s a side effect of all the great stuff).
We think the same is going to happen for books. With a global audience hungry for content, and cheap easy tools for creation and distribution, and a growing network of creators and readers connected on the web and an explosion of devices that allow people to be reading at times and in places they never did before, the distinctions about where or how books were made will fall away.
Do I Want to Read It?
All that will matter are these two questions:
1. is it any good?
and
2. do I want to read it?
And so “self-publishing” is a term that should be retired.
28 Comments
A: Wish I had written this Hugh. Great post. Now plan to pepper everything I do with “cloud publishing.”
B: Part of the shift will also be a creator’s perception of acceptance, whether that be economic or artistic. Traditional publishing has well-understood machinery for vetting, promoting, and critiquing that has yet to fully materialize in the cloud. But, the more writers that take the plunge, the more they drag with them this sphere of activity.
C: Publishers are the new Flickr groups: liquid and temporal. The abundance issues that Stewart and Caterina sorted out with jpgs is not unlike what publishing must do with stories.
A: Sweet!
B: Totally. The key, the real key is in the network of creators on the web. That’s where the strength of the shift will come from. Which leads to…
C: Yep. Writers/readers/editors/designers coalescing around a book, or books, and their active engagement as part of a social whole (rather than more or less cordoned off, as it is in trad publishing). Book as social object, book as collaborative work, reading as part of the collaborative continuum…. etc…
You pose some really interesting ideas out there. Indeed, the way the Web has allowed innovation, collaboration and distribution to flourish cannot be ignored. How about the careful and extremely detail-oriented editorial process of a novel, however? As a writer sends off his manuscript to an editor, months go by as edits are made, galleys read, proofs reviewed. Does the conventional book editor adapt this via wiki? Can we expect the same level of quality for a novel under cloud publishing? I don’t have an answer. I am actually just posing a question for other readers. I use many of these tools and techniques already, but when it comes to the novel, I am still unsure of what the future holds. However, storytelling is on the Web to stay. I’d love to know what others think.
hugh, really great post. i wish i would have said this.
oh wait. i have said it. for well over a decade now…
anyway, thanks for updating it to the new hip jargon.
clouds are such fluffy dreamy things, i just love ‘em…
anyway…
how do i get to the new tools you’re supposed to have?
-bowerbird
p.s. collaborative filtering answers the needle/haystack
problem, when you’re ready to rewrite that part for me…
which means that your last 2 questions boil down to one:
if i read this specific book, will _i_ think that it was good?
Hi Hugh,
I read about you in the Montreal Gazette and will definitely be watching out for developments. Lulu is the beaten path, and other platforms charge an arm and a leg to self-publish, while still others are unscrupulous.
Where can I find your “operating manual?” Would it be possible to work solo (I still have not cultivated the entrepreneurial spirit) and will anyone from the Oven tell me whether my book is worth publishing?
I maintain 2 blogs at: http://www.francais-anglais.blogspot.com (translation) and http://www.sotsil.wordpress.com (culinary).
Thanks, Hugh. I hope your idea goes on overdrive and you’ll attract good quality people.
@Cesar Torres:
“How about the careful and extremely detail-oriented editorial process of a novel, however? As a writer sends off his manuscript to an editor, months go by as edits are made, galleys read, proofs reviewed. Does the conventional book editor adapt this via wiki?”
No! He/she adopts via http://bookoven.com ! of course.
“Can we expect the same level of quality for a novel under cloud publishing?”
Yes. Cloud publishing is just a set of tools that allow a different organizational structure; they have no particular impact on quality, except that it allows collaboration in new ways. So we’ll have more good novels; and more bad ones too.
@bowerbird:
Indeed, this is “obvious” to anyone who has been working on the web, publishing & collaborating. The slight difference is trying to put the tools together for bookmaking. Re: where to find the tools, some of them are in Book Oven already, but more to come of course. But, really the key will be the network of book makers, and how they drive the development of tools. So: what would you like to see in Book Oven, that you have not seen?
Re: collaborative filtering, amen. Though I think social filtering will be the important part for books.
@quest2008:
Well I guess we don’t yet have an operating manual…Any interest in helping us build one? But in the mean time, feel free to email me to ask questions:
hugh@bookoven.com
Other answers:
Yes you can work solo, it’s up to you. But no one will be able to tell you if a book is good or not until you widen the solo circle a little.
Thanks for the support. We’re pretty excited about the future.
hugh said:
> Re: where to find the tools, some of them are in Book Oven already,
> but more to come of course.
i see “bite-sized edits”, of course, since it’s been up for months.
but what else do you have available now, even if only in beta?
> Re: collaborative filtering, amen.
> Though I think social filtering will be the important part for books.
if, by “social filtering”, you mean things like word-of-mouth, those
won’t scale, nor will they have the accuracy of collaborative filtering,
which has the benefit of tons and tons of data…
-bowerbird
i said:
> i see “bite-sized edits”, of course,
> since it’s been up for months.
> but what else do you have
> available now, even if only in beta?
no answer.
and in spite of the fact that you conceded that
all of this is “obvious” (your word, not mine),
you continue out on the interview circuit, and
i see that you’re now going for a sxsw panel…
you garnered a lot of respect for librivox, and
i didn’t see you doing any grandstanding there.
but now it seems you’re out for twitter glitter.
it makes me sad, hugh.
-bowerbird
Hi Bowerbird, Sorry for the delay in answering,. Actually the glitter is of little interest, except to the extent that it might help us build something great at Book Oven.
So what we have in beta, or alpha, or unfinished and in need of more work is:
* a reading/annotation view for books, that allows editors/author to:
-post comments para by para
-edit paras (almost inline, but not quite)
* a barebones publishing tool, generating an .epub and a generically formatted pdf…
Or, in more detail here’s how it works and what we have planned:
How it works:
-You upload text of a raw manuscript (done, though buggy at times, and not enough formats supported)
-You either invite collaborators (editors, designers, reviewers, proofreaders), or find them on our site (done, though needs a tweak in getting collaborators right into your project in one-step)
-You work with editors/reviewers to improve your text – depending on “permissions” you editors can leave annotations in the margins of your text, or directly edit the text (done, but in need of improvement)
-When you are ready to publish your text, you can generate an .epub ebook file, or (generically-formatted) PDF (done, but buggy, and in need of more formats)
-Eventually you’ll be able to generate a PDF well-formatted for Print-on-demand (to come)
-Eventually you’ll be able to sell the epub AND print-on-demand book in the Book Oven store, and through partner retailers (to come)
-Eventually you’ll be able to find editors, proofreaders, designers etc to work on your book (to come)
As for “social filtering” I think we are talking about the same thing; just that much of the tools of filtering, and the algorithms if there are any, should, if possible take into account your online networks & connections to other people, and their book likes.
Oh and the “obvious” (in quotation marks) just means that if you spend a lot of time thinking about books, and thinking about using the tools of the web, and digital distribution, and ebooks … it’s “obvious” (to those working in this space) that the way books get produced and distributed will soon change dramatically, in some fairly predictable ways. We hope Book Oven will be part of that change. I meant that we are by no means rocket scientists, just trying to bring some of the things we love about the web together with some of the things we love about writing books and reading them … and if all goes well we’ll help make something useful to people.
i like you, hugh.
you don’t get all bent out of shape
when somebody “challenges” you…
this differentiates you greatly from
most of the rest of your twitter circle.
i look forward to seeing your new tools.
-bowerbird
hugh said:
> the glitter is of little interest,
> except to the extent that it might help us
> build something great at Book Oven.
except now i see this essay on the huffington post,
which makes it hard to believe you on this, hugh…
plus there is full-court twitter hype-and-marketing
going on for the sxsw panels, including yours, hugh.
between tweets and retweets and repeats of retweets,
i can’t count all of the times i have been bombarded…
you might be among the best of your twitter circle,
but you’re being tarred by an association with ‘em…
-bowerbird
Dude, I have a start-up called Book Oven! It will be the culmination of many of my thoughts and dreams and aspirations for a new kind of publishing model; added to and matured with my partner Stephanie Troeth’s expertise on the web. It’s a dream that I like to talk about and write about and speak about. But of course some of that talking and speaking and writing is “marketing” … I’m trying to explain to people what we’re doing. If they like what we’re doing, I hope they will come join us. If they don’t, then they won’t. But they have to know about us, otherwise they won’t know to make the choice…
dude, i look forward to seeing your new tools…
instead of being overexposed to hype about them.
(surely, in this age where marketing is a conversation,
we targets are allowed to say “enough, already”, not?)
besides, this is why i contrasted bookoven with librivox.
you didn’t do all this pre-reality grandstanding for that.
it’s as if you hope to short-circuit organic growth with
excessive repetition of hype-and-marketing, which is
a bad mistake that puts you in the quartet vapor corner.
no skin off my nose, dude, i’m just the canary in the coalmine.
-bowerbird
This discussion is really interesting. I’m looking forward to using the platform to see how it compares with other tools I’ve used in the past to write books (XML + XSLT to generate PDF and HTML, but also to display comments…).
i think hugh is on vacation. but here’s
some reaction for when he gets back…
> -You upload text of a raw manuscript
> (done, though buggy at times, and
> not enough formats supported)
chapter-by-chapter uploading is painful…
> -You either invite collaborators
> (editors, designers, reviewers, proofreaders),
> or find them on our site (done, though
> needs a tweak in getting collaborators
> right into your project in one-step)
here’s probably the first place where i
get suspicious of your middleman status.
if i find my collaborators myself, then
i don’t really have a need for bookoven,
at least not in that regard. of course,
if i find them on your site, then you’ve
provided me with a good service, but
how likely is it that you’re going to have
a set of collaborators that are skilled in
the wide range of topics out in the world?
at least richard nash, with his version of
this idea, is specializing on a certain niche,
which greatly increases the likelihood that
he’ll be able to get expertise in that niche.
i just don’t see that same thing developing
on a generalized level, without specializing.
> -You work with editors/reviewers
> to improve your text – depending on
> “permissions” you editors can leave
> annotations in the margins of your text,
> or directly edit the text (done, but
> in need of improvement)
you say this is “done”, but perhaps it’s not
yet exposed to the public, but all i see now
is your paragraph-based editing system…
although paragraph-based editing is one
level at which work is typically done, and
it’s an important one, it’s not the _only_
level, nor is it the only _important_ level.
many times edits need to be done at the
section-level, and even the chapter-level.
(occasionally, even the whole-book-level.)
your system doesn’t make it easy to do that.
and — again, unless this part hasn’t been
exposed to the public yet — there is _no_
easy way to download the full text from
your system in an editable form, and then
re-upload it in that same form.
> -When you are ready to publish your text,
ok, you’re getting a little ahead of yourself.
there are lots of different types of “editing”,
and you’ve subsumed them all into one box.
there are lots of copy-editing niceties that
need to be done in the polishing of a book,
including things — like making sure that
quotes are balanced, as just one example –
that can be checked by the computer, but
i don’t see any such routines in your mix.
> -When you are ready to publish your text,
> you can generate an .epub ebook file, or
> (generically-formatted) PDF (done, but
> buggy, and in need of more formats)
this must not be exposed to the public yet,
because what you have cannot be considered
as “done” even if you qualify it with “buggy”.
> -Eventually you’ll be able to generate a PDF
> well-formatted for Print-on-demand (to come)
that’s not too hard to do even now, with offline
tools, and it will get even easier in the future,
so i’m not sure what is gained by your site here.
maybe they will, and i’ll be happy for you if they do.
i’m just having a hard time seeing _why_ they will.
it seems to me — and i admit i might be missing
something special here — that everything that
you are offering is already available to writers
offline, or from other online websites, and it
seems that the offline tools are more powerful.
(or, to be more precise, that your online tool is
less flexible than it will need to be to do the job.)
> -Eventually you’ll be able to sell the epub
> AND print-on-demand book in the Book Oven
> store, and through partner retailers (to come)
again, stores are available elsewhere on the web.
(and none of ‘em is able to compete with amazon.)
perhaps you will be able to drum up customers
who shop here and nowhere else, and if you do,
more power to you. i’m not rooting against you.
i’m just saying i probably wouldn’t bet on you…
(and if you use that as a challenge to spur you on,
that’s fine by me, although you probably don’t care.)
but otherwise, you’re just another middleman
looking to take a cut. why should authors bother?
> -Eventually you’ll be able to find editors,
> proofreaders, designers etc to work on your book
> (to come)
again, to the extent that you can accomplish this,
it would be great. and it would even gain you the
ability to collect some money as the middleman.
but remember that middlemen have to add value,
or they will be disintermediated, and quickly…
-bowerbird
@leroy: welcome!
@bowerbird: some selected comments below:
>chapter-by-chapter uploading is painful…
you can add some mark-up to your text so that chaps are broken-up automatically, specifically:
\section{Chapter title}
>here’s probably the first place where i
>get suspicious of your middleman status.
>if i find my collaborators myself, then
>i don’t really have a need for bookoven,
>at least not in that regard. of course,
>if i find them on your site, then you’ve
>provided me with a good service, but
>how likely is it that you’re going to have
>a set of collaborators that are skilled in
>the wide range of topics out in the world?
our challenge is of course to find good ways to help that connection happen. you don’t “need” craigslist, and you don’t “need” ebay – you could just call up everyone in the phonebook and ask them if they have a yellow shovel. Or you can search through a big database of people selling shovels. We hope to be able to provide something like that.
>at least richard nash, with his version of
>this idea, is specializing on a certain niche,
>which greatly increases the likelihood that
>he’ll be able to get expertise in that niche.
>i just don’t see that same thing developing
>on a generalized level, without specializing.
Again, it’s a question of building tools to help people connect. If they are good tools, then people will use them, and you’ll start to see people with good kinds of expertise.
>you say this is “done”, but perhaps it’s not
>yet exposed to the public, but all i see now
>is your paragraph-based editing system…
It is done, but our permissions are byzantine. That should improve next week.
>although paragraph-based editing is one
>level at which work is typically done, and
>it’s an important one, it’s not the _only_
>level, nor is it the only _important_ level.
>many times edits need to be done at the
>section-level, and even the chapter-level.
>(occasionally, even the whole-book-level.)
>your system doesn’t make it easy to do that.
Yes you are right. This is a hard problem to address – do you have any thoughts on this? Can whole-book-level work be made sensible on the web? What would that look like? Something we are puzzling over, suggestions and ideas much appreciated.
>and — again, unless this part hasn’t been
>exposed to the public yet — there is _no_
>easy way to download the full text from
>your system in an editable form, and then
>re-upload it in that same form.
Ah yes … you can get it out in html, but we’d like you to be able to export in at least text, ideally word etc. File conversion to certain formats is such a pain in the ass.
>> -When you are ready to publish your text,
>ok, you’re getting a little ahead of yourself.
You can “publish” an epub, but you are right – that doesn’t go anywhere right now.
>there are lots of different types of “editing”,
>and you’ve subsumed them all into one box.
Well, two or three boxes: Bite-Size Edits, para-editing, & document editing (and perhaps annotations, which you have not seen yet I gather).
>there are lots of copy-editing niceties that
>need to be done in the polishing of a book,
>including things — like making sure that
>quotes are balanced, as just one example –
>that can be checked by the computer, but
>i don’t see any such routines in your mix.
Right you are. We have no such routines yet; would be nice to get em in here.
>> -When you are ready to publish your text,
>> you can generate an .epub ebook file, or
>> (generically-formatted) PDF (done, but
>> buggy, and in need of more formats)
>this must not be exposed to the public yet,
>because what you have cannot be considered
>as “done” even if you qualify it with “buggy”.
epub works, the pdf “works” but isn’t useful – but on both counts I’ll take it on the chin and say you are right.
>> -Eventually you’ll be able to generate a PDF
>> well-formatted for Print-on-demand (to come)
>that’s not too hard to do even now, with offline
>tools, and it will get even easier in the future,
>so i’m not sure what is gained by your site here.
It’s not hard for someone who has: a) the skills needed, and b) the tools. I, for one, have neither. Or rather, I can generate a word file into pdf, but that doesn’t translate into a book-formatted PDF for POD. If we can automate that, and make it relatively painless, writers etc can focus on the text, and not worry about the layout. That’s a good thing.
>maybe they will, and i’ll be happy for you if they do.
>i’m just having a hard time seeing _why_ they will.
Just a question of reducing the steps for those who want to publish, but don’t want to design.
>it seems to me — and i admit i might be missing
>something special here — that everything that
>you are offering is already available to writers
>offline, or from other online websites, and it
>seems that the offline tools are more powerful.
>(or, to be more precise, that your online tool is
>less flexible than it will need to be to do the job.)
I think that’s a fair statement as well. But if it is *easier* to use an online tool – even a less flexible/powerful one – then so much the better for people who want to publish books. That is, we can’t compete with the high-end of design tools; we can make a tool that allows for easy collaboration & publishing, to remove the technical complexity, and allow writers /editors to focus on the text/content.
>> -Eventually you’ll be able to sell the epub
>> AND print-on-demand book in the Book Oven
>> store, and through partner retailers (to come)
>again, stores are available elsewhere on the web.
>(and none of ‘em is able to compete with amazon.)
If we were a traditional publisher, would you suggest that we sell ebooks direct from our website? Me too. No need to compete with Amazon – just provide alternate channels of distribution. We’ll need to plug into Amazon as well.
>perhaps you will be able to drum up customers
>who shop here and nowhere else, and if you do,
>more power to you. i’m not rooting against you.
>i’m just saying i probably wouldn’t bet on you…
We think that writers using our system will point their buyers to whichever is the retail space most lucrative for them. Kindle takes a 70% cut of the retail price. We certainly won’t.
>(and if you use that as a challenge to spur you on,
>that’s fine by me, although you probably don’t care.)
Of course I care. You ask hard questions that we need to be able to answer – not just in blog comments, but in what we build. It is always useful to get challenged, and I enjoy your challenges. They make me think – which is usually a good thing.
but otherwise, you’re just another middleman
looking to take a cut. why should authors bother?
>> -Eventually you’ll be able to find editors,
>> proofreaders, designers etc to work on your book
>> (to come)
>again, to the extent that you can accomplish this,
>it would be great. and it would even gain you the
>ability to collect some money as the middleman.
>but remember that middlemen have to add value,
>or they will be disintermediated, and quickly…
There is such a huge need for this on the web right now. If we build it right, I have no doubt that we will add value. But we have to build it right.
@hugh, congratulations for your patience, @bowerbird’s comments are probably true (I haven’t tested the platform thoroughly yet) but a bit hard. I mean you’re trying to build a system so different artisans can work together to build a book without having to go through the normal corporate process. I raise my hat to that.
=== file conversions ===
i wouldn’t go into the trouble of giving users a Word format back to them once the edits are done. Word is complex software and is surely not the best to write long documents because of all the crap it hides behind the formatting.
however, converting XML to HTML or PDF could be an option done through XSLT or another transformer of your choice. editing HTML is rather easy nowadays, and there’s a plethora of HTML to PDF converters out there once can then send to a printer.
=== word, section comments ===
bowerbird’s right: comments on paras are good, but there’s also a need for comments on sections or whole chapters. i’m thinking this can be done comments style like we do in *ML:
this is not the most convenient of ways to comment a text, but it’s the best i know.
oups, my “comment style” got commented out! :)))
something like this:
“
hugh-
first, i’m more than willing to wait for your stuff to get smoother…
so “we’re working on this” is a perfectly good answer for me now…
> This is a hard problem to address – do you have any thoughts on this?
of course i have thoughts on it. :+)
you need to have some thoughts if you’re going to code programs.
and those thoughts then get subjected to some very strict criteria,
which sharpens and improves them, so you grok the subject firmly.
this isn’t just “theory” that i’m spouting here. i know this stuff cold.
> Can whole-book-level work be made sensible on the web?
well, i guess. anything you can do offline you can probably do online.
sooner or later, anyway…
whether it makes any sense to do it online when you can do it offline
is another question entirely, however. once you start dealing with
the entire book as a string, the passing back and forth of that string
from the hobbled sandbox offline to the active components online
seems (at least to me) to introduce lots of unnecessary difficulties.
but, you know, i have a whole lot of respect for human creativity, so
i would never say that someone couldn’t surprise the heck out of me.
> What would that look like? Something we are puzzling over,
> suggestions and ideas much appreciated.
i haven’t made my offline apps available to the public yet, but
i guess i could, in which case you could examine my interface,
but again, it’s a lot easier for me to pull off my nifty interface
with the power i get from an offline compiler at my disposal.
> Ah yes … you can get it out in html, but we’d like you to
> be able to export in at least text, ideally word etc.
> File conversion to certain formats is such a pain in the ass.
you might want to take a look at the file-format i created…
it’s called “zen markup language” — z.m.l. for short — and
it’s designed specifically as a plain-ascii format for e-books.
http://z-m-l.com/
i wrote conversion routines that create .pdf and .html from it,
so i can assure it would be easy for you to clone those routines.
or, if you prefer, you could take a look at “markdown” instead.
like z.m.l., markdown is a form of user-friendly light-markup.
the advantage is that markdown is completely open-source…
> It’s not hard for someone who has: a) the skills needed, and
> b) the tools. I, for one, have neither. Or rather, I can generate
> a word file into pdf, but that doesn’t translate into
> a book-formatted PDF for POD. If we can automate that,
> and make it relatively painless, writers etc can focus on the text,
> and not worry about the layout. That’s a good thing.
what i am saying is that i _have_ written the tools to do that.
they are offline tools. and i will be making them available…
i can’t say exactly when, because i haven’t made that decision,
but once i do release them, i think most people will prefer to
do this type of work offline, rather than online. that’s my point.
(but again, i’m not trying to dissuade you from pursing your
online approach, because you might be able to make it better,
and we’re all pulling here for the betterment of authors’ tools.)
> Just a question of reducing the steps for those
> who want to publish, but don’t want to design.
i see the appeal of that. but i think people will prefer to do it
offline, rather than online. but hey, a difference of opinion
is what makes a horse-race.
> if it is *easier* to use an online tool –
> even a less flexible/powerful one –
> then so much the better for people
> who want to publish books.
ok, well, your work is cut out for you… :+)
-bowerbird
p.s. my e-mail address is bowerbird at aol dot com, if you want
to contact me privately. i generally prefer to interact in public,
even if some observers think i’m being “too hard” on someone,
but if there’s something you want to ask me privately, go ahead…
hey this discussion is getting quite interesting. i wasn’t able to check out your site bowerbird (ZML seems to have a glitch) but that zen markup language could sure be interesting in the context of web publishing collaboration, i think it could reach some of the advantages of using XML/XSLT i was talking about. if you were able to right a simplified markup language we could use in that context, it’s worth the effort of trying them out :)
as for the offline/online dilemma, the digital generations might find it only natural to use online tools instead of offline ones. i’m not that young anymore, but i’d rather use online tools than paper & pen anytime!
my 2¢
yes, my website is screwed up at the moment,
something to do with the wordpress upgrade.
sorry about that.
in the meantime, try looking at “markdown”
as an example of a light-markup formulation.
here’s the classic try-it-out dingus webpage:
> http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus
and here’s “showdown”, the version that i like best:
> http://attacklab.net/showdown/
markdown’s whole purpose is to create
xhtml output, whereas z.m.l. is instead
designed to make xhtml fully unnecessary.
if you can get the same results as markup,
without doing any markup, why do markup?
-bowerbird
p.s. yes, that’s right, i envision the day when
(x)html is no longer the language of the web.
leroy said:
> as for the offline/online dilemma, the digital generations
> might find it only natural to use online tools instead of
> offline ones. i’m not that young anymore, but
> i’d rather use online tools than paper & pen anytime!
except that’s not what i meant by “offline” at all, leroy.
i meant non-networked digital programs, as opposed to
networked ones. (paper and pen are _analog_ tools.)
so if you’re using an offline word-processor instead of
a web-based one (like goggle docs), as i suspect you are,
then you’re acting exactly like i predicted, and probably
for the exact reason i predicted, which is that offline apps
are more powerful and more responsive than online ones.
however, if you _are_ using google docs (or google wave)
to generate _collaborative_documents_, then you would
be acting in a way that would support hugh’s take on this.
indeed, it is precisely because of things like google wave
that i am holding out some hope for the online methods.
then again, of course, if google wave becomes second nature,
then hugh’s tools won’t become of much value to authors,
because google wave will come to be the standard system.
whatever the case, things sure are interesting! :+)
-bowerbird
p.s. i posted another comment, but it hasn’t shown up yet,
perhaps because it contained links to two different sites?
@bowerbird my bad, don’t know why the heck i talked about paper & pen, maybe it’s because i’ve had (many) bad experiences with it, comment wise :)
the idea of having it simultaneously is nice indeed, google docs kinda offers that with some minor lag, and my wave account is not opened yet (at least i didn’t get confirmation) so i can’t see what it would look and fell like.
live editing, live updates, live comments *could* be nice, but is it necessary? do we need as much instantaneous interaction to write and edit a book?
thoughts?
leroy said:
> live editing, live updates, live comments *could* be nice,
> but is it necessary? do we need as much instantaneous
> interaction to write and edit a book?
well, i’m sure that it depends on the author, and the book.
i tend to see most books as the product of a single voice,
but that might be my bias. there are certainly _some_
books, and perhaps some authors, that will undoubtedly
work well — even best — under a collaborative approach.
the institute for the future of the book has run a number
of experiments on this, and authors seem to appreciate it.
and o’reilly has put at least one book into such a system.
plus, the success of wikipedia shows that even a purely
collaborative model can produce a work of substance…
but for the books that i believe most authors will create
in the future — vehicles which tell a story — i believe that
the essence of collaboration will be expressed by editing
done by a small group of fans, perhaps even one person.
and to accomplish this, i doubt an online model is ideal.
but i love to be proven wrong, because it helps me to
correct and thus sharpen my mental models.
also, aside from the technical and technological issues,
there is another iceberg here, and that’s the usual one
– money. if a bunch of fans volunteer labor that then
helps to produce income for the author, is that fair?
probably not. i’ve seen lots of “collaborative efforts”
collapse due to disagreements on how to split the pie.
and usually those disagreements are quite thorny since
everyone thinks the pie is bigger than it really is, and
everyone thinks their contribution is more important
than it really is, with no real way to know who’s right.
-bowerbird
> also, aside from the technical and technological issues,
> there is another iceberg here, and that’s the usual one
> – money.
ah… money.
it’s hard to build projects with volunteers. i’ve worked in enough free software projects to know that volunteers are reliable, until they’re not anymore. i guess if u accept to work as a volunteer, then u understand that u won’t get paid. and that bottom line, no matter how hard u’ve worked to help the book reach its finality, it’s still the author’s baby and he should get the better part of the profits.
money can become the biggest pitfall of such a project, especially if the author has no moral and takes the whole credit (that’s even worse than not getting paid IMHO).
maybe hugh has thought of a revenue model we’re not aware of? i’m sure it’s fairly “easy” to calculate changes done by so and so. i know it was feasible with Borges according to the task u had done on a book:
- writing
- technical proofreading
- pedagocigal proofreading
- copy editing
- translating
my 0,02$
ok, my website is back.
http://z-m-l.com
-bowerbird
by the way, hugh, i advised you to avoid the
hype-and-marketing style of quartet press
on august 19th, and just 3 short weeks later,
they threw in the towel. that was good advice.
-bowerbird