Eoin Purcell's Blog

Those of you who have read any of my posts to date will have noticed no doubt a certain duality. A belief that technology offers an interesting and exciting future for book publishing combined with fears that new and different gatekeepers will be ready to choke off the opportunities that present themselves.

The gate keepers I most fear are search engines who have managed through foresight and perseverance to place themselves between the audience and content. Yes there are challengers to the crowns of Yahoo and Google and their few mega companions but in truth they are few and they serve to prove the rule.

In pondering this I have been reading widely about how search works and was guided by “Melanie’s Round Up” in John Battelle’s Searchblog to a fascinating article in IEEE Spectrum on pagerank and how:

While search engines do not make for a level playing field, their use partially mitigates the rich-get-richer nature of the Web, giving new sites an increased chance of being discovered.

It is tough but rewarding read and can be found in its entirety here. I am still torn between a dream and reality but I am perhaps a little easier in my dreaming.

Those of you who read my links post yesterday may have seen my link to Plagiarism Today which I praised highly. Author Jonathon got back with a comment that I think it only fair to post on the front page:

Jonathan Says:
May 31st, 2006 at 4:31 pm e

I just wanted to say thank you for the link and for the review. It means a lot. However, I am probably not the world’s best choice for balance. I do support the Creative Commons initiative and most sharing of content, it’s just plagiarism and outright content theft that bothers me.
Still I am very glad that you enjoy the site and found it useful. I hope that I can continue to please.

I seem to have gotten back into the swing of these links posts recently. I wonder how long they last!

An interesting link this one. The Publishing Spot is an excellent source of comment, interview and other posts relating to publishing.
Here

I think I may have linked to Open Access News before but I don’t mind. It’s an excellent website and offers a slightly academic view on some of the challenges ahead for trade and mainstream publishers as their customers demand more “Open access” to content just as some in the scientific community are now.
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It wouldn’t do to post two links that were pushing the openness of the web without linking to somewhere else for a little balance. Plagiarism Today is quite honestly one of the finest sites on the web I have come across. It is passionate, dedicated and honest. It sticks to its core mission and seems intent on informing the world. From it’s About Page:

Plagiarism Today (PT) is a site targeted at Webmasters and copyright holders regarding the issue of plagiarism online. Though it deals with many legal issues, in particular the DMCA and copyright law, it is not a legal blog and is, instead, a blog regarding a societal ill that’s effects may never be fully understood or comprehended.

Here

Publishing News has a report on an amusing hoo-ha between American and British publishers at the BEA last week. As they report it:

Carolyn Reidy, President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster, told the packed ‘Turf Wars’ session at the BEA last Friday. She said UK publishers were scare-mongering in their concerns over territoriality and that agents should ask themselves whether an exclusive grant of English-language rights in a non-English-language territory helped or hindered an author’s career. Reidy has no doubts that it’s a hindrance.

Do go and read the piece in full. I cannot help but feel that it is a sad comment on publishing that British Publishers fear the challenge of American Imports. Surely they can out compete their American rivals in the EU at least and if they cannot then they should really be searching for alliances across the water to protect their lead authors and to offer comprehensive book deals.

There is an intriguing story on thePostChronicle today about comic books:

Comic Book Resources, an online magazine, found more than 30 percent had downloaded a comic book at least once, and 12 percent said they downloaded comic books regularly.

Not even comics are immune to the changes in the industry. The sooner publishers, of all types, realize that and go with it, the sooner they will see the benefits. At least that is what we hope.

One man’s project to

document how to turn our blogs into books, or ‘blooks’

read it all.
Here

Scott Wallick is an editor with a very good blog. Read his “An Editor” tagged posts.
Here

A used and rare booksellers blog.Very readable.
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There is a fascinating post called Shaking Up tech Publishing on David Heinemeier Hansson’s blog Loud Thinking. It is from several months ago so you may have heard about it before. At first blush it might seem like just a rant against the publishing industry.

I’ve been talking to a lot of friends and acquaintances who are writing tech books for a wide variety of old-school publishers and I can’t believe the deals they’re taking.

It seems that the industry standard is something akin to 10% of the profits (which easily take 4-5-6 months to arrive), being forced to write in Word, and finally a production cycle that’s at least a good 3 months from final book to delivery. That’s horrible!

But if you persevere it’s actually quite a read offering an interesting perspective on the development process of books and perhaps a glimpse of the future of book production.

But you don’t have to abandon dead trees entirely to be profitable as a tech author. Look at the Pragmatic Programmers. They use Subversion for revision control and collaboration alongside a tech-powered writing pipeline where authors write book “source code” and are able to produce PDFs straight from that! There is not even an InDesign step at the end. And you get to write in your favourite editor (I used TextMate for my work on the Rails book).

The criticism of the industry is probably a little unfair in some ways but the value of his constructive points outweighs that. Interestingly he heavily praises a company I have mentioned previously The Pragmatic Programmers. Worth checking out the post and the publishers.

Following up on an issue digitisation just touches upon CopyCense is a good resource for getting into the discussion on copyright. Look for a nice links piece on orphan works.
Here

With all the discussion concerning the control of digital content and my own fear that authors will be caught between competing platforms I found an interesting project which is advocating an open reader standard and will soon launch and Openreader.
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Last but not least Richard Charkin lauds ExactEditions a website dedicated to bringing magazines into the digital age. They hope to show magazines exactly as they are in print. They succeed I’ll let you decide if that is a good thing or even worthwhile. (I think I will give it a little more time.)
Here

Via TeleRead an e-book blog more form Richard Charkin on Digitisation.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine sure knows how to kick off a conversation online. His post The book is dead. Long live the book raised numerous commenters and responders. He followed that up with a round up of the response call More on books.

As a commenter said on this site in response to my own post on digitisation, Jarvis is almost ignoring Fiction as many of the points he responds to are targeting Non-Fiction books. And the types of changes he envisages in that field seem perfectly reasonable.

It would be excellent if your Biology textbook were hyperlinked to bring you relevant text and images as you cram for some final exam, brilliant indeed to have the entire resources of the web organised for you and connected to from a single source.

I do wonder though at what point the book as such ceases to exist and becomes simply an access point to information rather than the source itself. I am not saying this is a negative rather that at some point you the amount of linking and directing changes the book from the product offering the information to one pointing you in the general direction of the information.

And even ignoring that concern where do we go with Fiction? I think most people think of Fiction when they think of curling up by the fire with a good book. Unless of course, like me, you enjoy just a little too much History, Politics and Current Affairs and read title after title in those fields. They are unlikely to want or need hyperlinked text or resources beyond the text as the author envisaged it.

Are we then creating a twin track of books, Non-Fiction which will whiz ahead and, by the sounds of the current discussion, become something new (I think calling it a book will become redundant if the features discussed become reality) and Fiction tied to the format that has seen it through so many changes already? And if we are is that such a bad thing? I am sure Fiction authors will avail of the possibilities of the new offerings when they emerge. “Choose you own adventure” books for instance would see such changes as incredible feature enhancers.

By the looks of things now we have change without direction and for reasons that are also unclear. We have potential for massive development but no outstanding reason to pursue it except perhaps in Non-Fiction. We have, as I mentioned before, a looming struggle for control of book content and the winners may well decide how we get that content.

All in all, the current environment is confused and confusing. I cannot see change moving ahead too rapidly while the direction that change will take is still so unclear. If the change does come I hope that Jarvis is right. His world seems likable to the extent that it is achievable and remains open. I fear that he may be too optimistic. I think, to paraphrase Mark Twain, that reports of the death of books are greatly exaggerated.