-bowerbird

http://z-m-l.com

-bowerbird

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$

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

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?

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?

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.

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¢

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…

something like this:

“