Why Adobe may be good for the new ePub standard e-book format

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

and what good does it do to have "one format" if different viewer-programs implement it differently?

will there be a "best if viewed with digital editions" logo that people will use?

Actually, that's the best thing about any common digital format: It allows the reader (you) to pick and choose which application displays the material to your preference, whether your concern be type size, background control, bookmarking ability, or other uses for the device besides reading. Just like you could pick an Apple iPod and I could pick a Cowon iAudio to play MP3s, depending on our desired device features.

The "best if viewed by" bit could happen, IF publishers began using proprietary versions of ePub supported by only one reading device. I'd like to say "hopefully, that'll never happen," but I'm not that naive (see "Browser Wars").

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

writers don't want to code xhtml. they want to write. and re-write. and then re-write some more. but they don't want to code xhtml...

Then they can go out and buy InDesign, click a mouse, and have it done for them. Or they can find themselves a publisher who will.

I've seen ePub markup. Sure, it's more involved than my opening up Readerworks... but it won't kill me. Once ePub becomes more ubiquitous among readers (if not sooner), I'll be releasing all of my novels in ePub. And do it manually. That's a slow weekend's work. Pfft.

[bowerbird]

steve said:
> Then they can go out and buy InDesign,
> click a mouse, and have it done for them.

you just wrote adobe's ad copy for them. :+)
and thus you've summarized their strategy.


> Or they can find themselves a publisher who will.

and therein lies the strategy of the publishing houses.

and ergo, the "choice" the epub foundation would give authors:
buy adobe software or find someone who'll do the work for you.

as for me, i'm sure glad light-markup gives authors another route.

***

> I'll be releasing all of my novels in ePub. And do it manually.
> That's a slow weekend's work. Pfft.

i intend to give authors software that will help them create
beautiful and high-powered e-books without feeling like they
had to do any "work" at all, not even a slow weekend's worth.

but i have seen lots and lots of situations where technoids will
deliberately and intentionally choose the more complex choice.
so be it. to each his own. :+)

***

and i will further say that i am a "live and let live" type of guy.
so despite the fact that i am leery of adobe and the publishers,
i hold no grudge against .epub, or anyone who prefers to use it.
i wish its best success, with lots of viewers and authoring-tools.
i'm just glad there is a simpler alternative, that's all.

i don't mind having a variety of formats around, as long as it is
easy to convert from one to another. that's the kind of situation
that existed early in word-processing; it didn't hinder its success.

-bowerbird

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

i intend to give authors software that will help them create
beautiful and high-powered e-books without feeling like they
had to do any "work" at all, not even a slow weekend's worth.

That's cool... my only point was, the author does have multiple choices, including doing it themselves if they want to. And for the record, if you develop an ePub-generating app that costs significantly less than InDesign, I'll be checking it out, too.

[Hadrien]

On a sidenote: Feedbooks already support ePub and we didn't used any expensive Adobe application. Our ePub files are 100% generated on the fly.

In the upcoming months, we'll be working on improving the experience for the people uploading and editing books. Instead of asking people to input any kind of markup, we'll use an interface quite similar to the box I'm currently using to type this message.

Independent authors trying to show their works to the world will be able to use this simple interface to publish their book in both PDF and ePub (+ any other output that we'll add). No need to buy Adobe InDesign for it.

[bowerbird]

very nice of you to provide that service, hadrien. will it be free?
and does that mean they'd have to offer their book through you?

of course, with the books you've done, you coded them in xhtml,
from which it is a rather short jump to .epub format. i'll be curious
to see how your interface helps authors over the first xhtml hurdle.
(but don't feel a need to explain it here in advance if you don't want.
that would be ok, but i'd be more interested in seeing it in practice.)

-bowerbird

[JSWolf]

bowerbird, why can't you let the forum do the word wrapping and use caps? Is it that hard to do?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

steve said:

> And I don't think ePub serves to "raise the bar" on the small publishers,
> because it's a format that anyone can create, without fancy software
> or hacks, and any reader can be trained to use (because it's XHTML).

you think xhtml can be created by "anyone"?

writers don't want to code xhtml. they want to write. and re-write.
and then re-write some more. but they don't want to code xhtml...

i mean, the publishing companies will try to force them to do coding
if they want to self-publish. because then writers won't self-publish.

I have an assortment of technical documents in Postscript format. Do you think the authors wrote Postscript code to do the formatting?

Nope. They used an editor or word processor that output Postscript, but they did the markup using the WYSIWYG editing features provided by their editor.

Consider Microsoft Word. It defaults to a Word document, but can produce several flavors of that (for backwards compatibility with older versions), Rich Text Format, HTML (though poor HTML...), and a couple of variants of plain text. There are add-ons that will let you output to PDF.

But output format is a choice when saving. The author uses the same editing program in the same way regardless.

Along the same lines, one of the tools installed here is LyX, a WYSIWYG text editor that generates TeX code for typesetting. The author needn't be concerned about the details of TeX. A TeX engine runs in the background and handles that. The author simply uses standard means to indicate how the printed output should look, and the program handles the rest.

As XHTML becomes more popular, we'll see more writer's tools to generate it. I fail to see a problem.

-bowerbird

______
Dennis

[nekokami]

And StarOffice will do all that for free, on Windows, OSX and Linux (and other Unixes, too). So it's not like you have to buy an expensive software tool to get what you need.

I do miss the WordPerfect "markup" view, but other than that, I like the current generation of tools just fine.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

very nice of you to provide that service, hadrien. will it be free?
and does that mean they'd have to offer their book through you?

of course, with the books you've done, you coded them in xhtml,
from which it is a rather short jump to .epub format. i'll be curious
to see how your interface helps authors over the first xhtml hurdle.
(but don't feel a need to explain it here in advance if you don't want.
that would be ok, but i'd be more interested in seeing it in practice.)

-bowerbird

Of course it will be free.
Yes, the books in this case will be available directly on Feedbooks, but in the future we'll have a few other ways to input the content.

[bowerbird]

show me the free authoring-tools that output quality xhtml.
technoids have promised them since xhtml hatched in 2001.

the current crop of software can't even output decent html.
let's see a toolchain, start to finish. is that too much to ask?

-bowerbird

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

show me the free authoring-tools that output quality xhtml. technoids have promised them since xhtml hatched in 2001.

the current crop of software can't even output decent html.

Word is a joke, but there are a boatload of HTML editors out there. For an incomplete selection, see http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HTMLEditorFamily

Many are free and open source.

let's see a toolchain, start to finish. is that too much to ask?

At the moment, maybe. Down the road, no.

Expecting authors who want to just write and write some more to learn a markup syntax, no matter how lightweight, probably is too much to ask.

-bowerbird

______
Dennis

[BKeeper]

I'm absolutely certain there will be plenty of easy and free ways to produce and read ePub documents. Anybody will be able to produce content.
ePub is a great step forward. Proper document structure (which allows reflow) will make the difference.

As Dennis says, most writers just want to write. And if they want to selfpublish they aren't scared of using a couple of apps. Besides, self publishing is much more complicated than just creating digital content, I'd say that's the easy part. We should ask Steve. . .

Any author willing to selfpublish should be willing to invest a little time and money into it. Skilled ones will need smaller investment (actually they invested earlier by learning). If you have even thought about self-publishing then I'd say you can do it.

If somebody thinks that a copy of inDesign is a huge barrier for entering publishing, then well, I'm speechless...
Moreover, those "big-evil-media conglomerates" have nothing against authors and self-plublished authors, or content creators ... guess what, they need them.

But it's true that as the ebook revolution progresses it will be possible to have a much more decentralized publishing market.
The role of current publishing houses in that scenario will shift from production and distribution to quality control (ie: content screening)

Finally, about the possibility of promoting easier lighter standards, well the problem is that no matter how technically sound your proposal is, it doesn't matter. You have to be in a relevant position, in a relevant forum, at the right time. IDPFIDPFIDPFIDPFIDPF

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by BKeeper

Any author willing to selfpublish should be willing to invest a little time and money into it. Skilled ones will need smaller investment (actually they invested earlier by learning). If you have even thought about self-publishing then I'd say you can do it.

Agreed 100%.

Originally Posted by BKeeper

If somebody thinks that a copy of inDesign is a huge barrier for entering publishing, then well, I'm speechless...

Naw... my only point was that InDesign is pricey, and if a cheaper alternative is available, I'll look at it. I may be independent, but I'm not rolling in dough...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BKeeper

I'm absolutely certain there will be plenty of easy and free ways to produce and read ePub documents. Anybody will be able to produce content. ePub is a great step forward. Proper document structure (which allows reflow) will make the difference.

Well, ePub may be a great step forward, if the rest of the industry supports it.

The key is whether it will be a truly open standard that other vendors can produce software to create and view, and not lock you into Adobe as your only option to work with it.

As Dennis says, most writers just want to write. And if they want to selfpublish they aren't scared of using a couple of apps. Besides, self publishing is much more complicated than just creating digital content, I'd say that's the easy part. We should ask Steve. . .

A couple of apps is the easy part.

Any author willing to selfpublish should be willing to invest a little time and money into it. Skilled ones will need smaller investment (actually they invested earlier by learning). If you have even thought about self-publishing then I'd say you can do it.

For appropriate values of "doing it".

SF writer Norman Spinrad commented back in the late '60s that there should be enough magazines being issued that everyone could get published.
That's very nice, but my question then was "Who is going to read it?"

Now, we have the web, desktop publishing, print on demand, and everyone can get published. I still ask the same question: who will read it?

Creating an electronic or paper version of your work is the easy part. Marketing it, and letting the potential audience know it exists and might be of interest is a far greater challenge.

Even authors published by major houses face the challenge. Unless you are an established best seller, support from the publisher will be minimal. SF author Wen Spencer treated the advance from her first novel as a marketing budget, and used it to attend SF conventions and place targeted ads promoting her work. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in her first year, and her career is coming along well, so I'd say she was onto something. Of course, she was helped by the fact that her husband was a well paid executive, and she could afford to devote the advance to marketing and promotion, instead of paying bills. But she recognized that it was up to her to get her name and her work known, and set about doing so.

If somebody thinks that a copy of inDesign is a huge barrier for entering publishing, then well, I'm speechless...

At $700 MSRP, it is not an impulse purchase for the majority of folks.

Moreover, those "big-evil-media conglomerates" have nothing against authors and self-plublished authors, or content creators ... guess what, they need them.

They do, but not all equally recognize the fact.

But it's true that as the ebook revolution progresses it will be possible to have a much more decentralized publishing market.

The role of current publishing houses in that scenario will shift from production and distribution to quality control (ie: content screening)

That has always been the principal role of the publisher: to attempt to seperate the wheat from the chaff, and publish the work worth reading. Manufacturing and distribution are necessary links in that chain, but first you must have something to manufacture and distribute that has a decent chance of selling.

Decentralization of publishing shifts more of the effort to the reader. There are a couple of publishing houses from whom I may buy a first novel by an unknown author, because I've learned to trust their editor's taste. If they publish it, it's a better than even chance I'll like it. Self publishing offers no such assurance. It may be great, or it may be excrement, or it may be something in between, but it hasn't gone through the filter medium of a professional editor. I've read some good self-published work, and more that made it obvious within a couple of pages why it never sold to a regular publisher...
______
Dennis