Ben emailed me last week promising a surprise, which duly arrived in the post yesterday.

He and Russell have published a tabloid newsprint publication featuring some of their favourite posts from 23 friends’ blogs last year. The project came about when they found out how cheap and easy it is to print 1000 copies of a newsprint tabloid. They also wanted to draw attention to some longer written pieces that are more easily assimilated in print than online.

I wonder if the time hasn’t come for the OpenOffice crowd or others in the open source community to consider designing a multilingual program from scratch for ePub creation and other publishing activities. The OpenDocument format has its purposes, but book publishing shouldn’t be regarded as a major one.

ePubWriter, as I’ll call the proposed app, would offer all the capabilities of Writer but also output smoothly into ePub and HTML and, for printers, PDF. Ideally ePubWriter could even help deal with the inherent conflict between ePub (reflowable) and PDF (nonreflowable). Let there be an easy way to see exactly what the finished p-book will look even if the ePub version will be reflowable. And let writers be able to tweak to their heart’s content while seeing the final results of their changes. [more...]

Amen.

[via mikecane]

In its current incarnation, Christoph Benda’s first novel requires that you a) be able to read German and b) have an internet connection.

Benda’s work, Senghor on the Rocks, is a geo-referenced electronic novel in which the text is combined with an embedded map mash-up from Google Maps on a website. [more...]

Several months ago we heard that the Institute for the Future of the Book was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book London on a joint project. The result of this was the realisation of a long-cherished idea from Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute. Bob had recently reread Doris Lessing’s classic novel The Golden Notebook, and wanted to bring it to a new audience by creating a public reading group, composed of younger readers.

With Lessing the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it seemed an appropriate time. We approached HarperCollins, Lessing’s publisher, and persuaded them to allow us to use the full text of the novel online, in the most accessible format we could. We built a website which allows the text to be read, bookmarked and commented on, page by page; a blog for the readers; and a forum where the public could discuss the novel, and the reading of it – all built on free, open-source software. [more...]

Check out Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

I’m also, of course, sort of obsessed with writing and how new media can change the world of publishing.

I’m a fan of the markup language XML, which makes it easy to define specific characteristics of a text. That is you can “name” something as a “title,” a “chapter heading,” a “quotation,” and all sorts of other data that you might want to know about a text (or anything else for that matter). The naming is not seen by the reader – but defines how, say, your browser might read something.

In the world of publishing, the relevance is that XML could make publishing into multiple formats (ebook, html, print, pdf etc) easy with the push of a button. This will be an important move for digital publishing.

This Friday, October 17, you should try to make it to StartWithXML, at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

Mike Shatzkin (Idea Logical), Michael Healy (BISG) and Andrew Savikas (O’Reilly Media) are presenting an overview of this project at Frankfurt Book fair. If you are attending the fair and are interested in our work, consider attending the panel.