Entries tagged with “hyperlinks” from Tools of Change for Publishing
New York Times Settles Linking Suit
Peter Brantley
January 27, 2009
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In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated aggregation of Gatehouse content on Boston.com's affiliated properties (Boston.com is owned by the Times Co.). It is not clear why the settlement was reached, since precedence was on the side of the Times' operation.
Mathew Ingram examines the settlement at the Nieman Journalism Lab:
Because while the settlement is not a legally-binding precedent -- the one piece of what might be called good news -- it still involves the New York Times voluntarily refraining from what many would argue is perfectly defensible behaviour. As Joshua Benton notes in his post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, that could well embolden other publications to launch similar cases, on the assumption that if the NYT caved then someone else might too. [Links included in original post.]
Links: The Simple Solution for Context
Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008
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A recent report from the Associated Press finds that news consumers are engaged in a futile search for depth and context. Ethan Zuckerman offers a different perspective in his excellent analysis of the findings:
The [report] authors argue that news fatigue is a function not just of negativity, but of too many headlines. Some of the people in the study (basically, everyone who has internet access at work) report restlessly reloading news websites waiting for something new to appear. This is a pretty unsatisfying experience with most news stories, which don't change all that fast, but it's an easy form of news to get and one that cable news networks now appear obsessed with. It was less clear to me than from the researchers that this constitutes a consumer desire for depth - it simply looked like boredom with the same old headlines to me. [Emphasis added]
My take is that these seemingly insurmountable and divergent needs -- avoiding boredom and finding context -- can both be served by one simple tool: hyperlinks. A series of well-placed, hand-picked links expands the boundaries of a particular story without affecting the core narrative. No other medium offers such an elegant and powerful mechanism. No other medium gives readers a choice to go deeper.
Unfortunately, that choice is only available if editors aggregate and embed links. Simply making content available through Web sites, mobile devices, newsletters, RSS feeds and Twitter isn't enough. As the AP report suggests, consumers want something deeper (or less boring), and editors are uniquely positioned to provide that service by exercising the unique curatorial skills they've developed in the news trade. Ignoring links -- or relegating them to rarely-read closing paragraphs -- is an egregious disservice to the audience because it withholds the very things consumers crave.
Readers Already Picking Up the Interactive Slack
Peter Brantley
July 11, 2008
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Harlequin announced this week the launch of Enhanced Edition ebooks, which link out to Net resources that augment the value and experience of the books. At Electric Alphabet, Kate Eltham notes that, in a way, this has already been happening by the readers, not by the publishers:
Last year I read Spook Country by William Gibson ... I remember Gibson saying in an interview at the time that "every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it ... all of the Googled information that found its way into the book but which isn't available to the reader as a literal hypertext unless you're willing to be the animator of the hypertext process ..."
Blogs and social media are already making this spectral hypertext less quasi and more actual. But as Gibson predicted, other text was destined to follow.
Harlequin Embeds Hyperlinks in New Ebook
Mac Slocum
July 9, 2008
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Harlequin is adding interactivity to its ebooks under the banner "Enriched Editions." The first title to get the enriched treatment is Unmasked, a romance story chosen for its historical tie-ins. From a Harlequin press release:
Unmasked ... has been enriched with interactive buttons that hyperlink to Web sites containing photos, historical commentaries, illustrations, sound effects, maps, articles and more ... The interactive buttons have been designed to be unobtrusive, so if one prefers not to access the bonus material, the reading experience remains uninterrupted.
The Harlequin release says Unmasked and future Enriched Editions will be sold at the same price as the publisher's regular ebooks.
Seth Godin: Community and Interactivity Would Benefit Kindle
Mac Slocum
June 19, 2008
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Seth Godin weighs in with random thoughts on the Kindle, including:
The Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book.
Godin says the Kindle reading experience -- particularly with non-fiction titles -- would benefit from reader recommendations, Digg-style voting, and hyperlinks.
The post also examines the Kindle's pricing structure ("The pricing of books is whacked") and Amazon's strategy to market the Kindle to women rather than techie early adopters. It's worth a read.
Publisher Offers Tips for Embedding Web Links in Ebooks
Mac Slocum
June 4, 2008
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Morris Rosenthal, owner of Foner Books and author of the Laptop Repair Workbook, is blurring the line between books and Web content by embedding clickable hyperlinks within the margins of his PDF-based ebooks. Rosenthal discusses his linking process in the following Q&A.
Q: What inspired you to insert links into your ebooks?
I was forced into large margins for the Laptop Repair Workbook due to the flowcharts that make up the meat of the book, and I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to include the links if I hadn't been staring at all that white space.
Q: Do you recommend inline links or links in the margins? Is one form or the other easier, from a production standpoint?
For a large size book, 8.25 X 11 or 8 x 11, I think links in the margins make the most sense because they can do double duty as design elements. Since the ebook is printable and since most people will be printing on letter size paper, I kept the design nearly identical to the soon-to-be released paperback version. Inline links would be much easier from a production standpoint, but they would tend to interrupt the reader, making people stop and think "should I click on this?" In the margins, they are clearly labeled as supplementary illustrations of procedures. And since the printed book requires full URLs to be shown, it would make the text pretty ugly to show them inline. For the ebook, I could have hyperlinked words without showing the URL, but again, the ebook is printable, and seeing that some words are underlined in blue doesn't get anybody anywhere.
Q: How much time did it take to create separate Web pages and insert links into the Laptop Repair Workbook?
Around half of the Web pages were created before I even started on the book. But in general, a photo illustrated page takes anywhere from a few hours to a day to create. A test procedure takes longer, as there's quite a bit of experimentation behind any given test.
Inserting the 25 or so links, once I settled on the large-margin format, only took a couple hours. I used the text box tool in Word.
Q: Are you able to track visitors from the links?
No. I suppose it would be possible to add an extra anchor argument that would separate the PDF visitors from direct traffic and bookmarkers, but I haven't done it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more sophisticated ways to identify visitors through links, and it certainly would have been possible to link to duplicate pages that are excluded from spidering, but I didn't see a reason.
Q: Do you think embedded links help thwart or offset piracy?
I don't think anything short of full DRM helps to thwart piracy, and then, it's really a question of thwarting casual vs professional pirates. The embedded links may help offset some unauthorized distribution in two ways:
First, anybody who clicks on the links will find out that there's a book for sale, and that might be the first time it hits them that the file they downloaded from site X or received as an attachment from a friend is really a published book that they haven't paid for.
Second, if the links aren't carved out of the PDF, they should help the search engines keep track of who the originator is, if the PDF should end up hosted for a while on a university domain or other authoritative site. When I published ebooks a few years ago through Lightning Source, I went with full DRM primarily to impress upon the customer that the ebooks were a commercial product protected by copyright law. This time around, I've gone with no DRM beyond my embedded copyright notice, but I do send customers through a click licensing agreement.
I should mention that shortly after the New York Times quoted me and mentioned the ebook in an article on laptop repair, I saw signs in Google that some people had been checking filesharing networks for it, as the queries sometimes result in an indexable page. While I take my copyright rights seriously and have the Federal court experience to prove it, I know that the majority of my potential customers will only find out about the ebook through visiting my site, and I'm sure most of those who are willing to pay for an ebook will get it from me. I don't think that most people go trawling through pirate sites when they're looking for a book, but maybe I'm out of touch. I did get some grief from customers during my full DRM years, and while I'm not a knee-jerk "customer is always right" type, I understand that customers have a valid point of view that a publisher ignores at his peril.
Q: What's the upside to embedded links?
For the reader, there are multiple upsides. I'm able to illustrate troubleshooting and repair procedures on my Web site with color photos, updating them at will, without having to charge an arm and a leg for the book ($24.95 paperback, $13.95 ebook). While I could have embedded quite a few photographs in the ebook, most of them would have been irrelevant for any given reader with a different laptop model, different problem, or information that they already knew. When all of those illustrations appear in a book, the customer is paying for them one way or another, and many publishers (especially of textbooks) load up on color pictures just as an excuse to up the price. In this case, it's all supplemental material, a fraction of which may be useful for most readers, but none of which is necessary for core troubleshooting procedures of the text and flowcharts. And from a practical standpoint, I'm able to create a larger number of illustrated procedures because the standard of photography and editing required for a Web page isn't the same as for a book, or ebook.
Q: Any downside to linking?
The only downside I can see is if some readers conclude that the links represent material that has been left out of the book, and that the links are a sorry excuse to make up for it. The book simply wasn't designed that way, but you can't please everybody.
Q: Do you have any formatting best practices?
I did keep all of the links in the root directory of my fonerbooks.com domain, and all of the file names are less than eight characters, though in truth, that's an artifact of doing most of my Web design with my old GNN Press editor (thanks O'Reilly) from 1995. Since the links appear in the margins, I ended up breaking them over two lines, with the domain on the first line and the filename on the second line. I could have force-fit them on a single line; it was just a visual design decision.
Q: Will links be a standard part of your future books?
Certainly a part of future ebooks. For print books, it would depend on whether there was a large enough amount of supplementary material on my Web site to justify a page layout that supported links.
Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2008
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I spent most of this morning reviewing several O'Reilly books in Adobe Digital Editions that we've converted into EPUB format -- we've been working to get our heads fully around the spec, and figure out how to best fit some our content into the constraints of the ebook medium. And the more time I spent scrolling and clicking through the books -- a very Web-browser-like experience -- the more I realized how frustrating it was that the books don't take full advantage of something we take for granted on the Web: outbound hyperlinks. The constraint sword cuts both ways (at least for now).
I can't really blame the authors -- they wrote their manuscripts for print, after all. And there's much we as the publisher can do to retrofit at least some links prior to distributing books in a digital form.
But this issue is a great example of the changing nature of book content, something nicely described in a great post from Martyn Daniels (link via Peter Brantley) about digital text and non-linear thinking:
We have long promoted that ebook readers and the current conversion of 250 pages of text into 250 pages of digital content is transitional. The challenge is not just to adopt the technology but adapt it to do things differently, exploit its true potential, learn from the experience and move on to the next step change. Merely taking today’s content and converting it into digital content follows the logic that digital is merely just another format or manifestation and that it will be read the same way. This is the greatest challenge to many genres: travel, reference, religion, art and design, craft etc, who can do things differently in the digital world and must not be drawn into mere replication.
That's very much in line with Thursday's post on the AAP's EPUB stance: publishers must begin making the transition from creating books to be consumed primarily in print with ebooks as an afterthought, toward designing books intended to remain digital throughout their lifecycle -- in particular, adding new value that leverages the potential of digital content. Of course, that also means that sometimes they won't be building "books" at all -- but instead whatever does the job best (here's Tim O'Reilly on the subject):
The failure to think about what job your product does for the customer, rather than the tools or approach you've historically used to do that job, is the reason why many established companies fail to make the transition when there is a technological change. Hence the old saw, "If the railroads had realized they were transportation companies, they'd be airlines today." (Well, maybe yesterday, as the airlines are suffering their own business transition. Maybe they'd be Fedex/Kinko's today. Or Google/Skype.)
Martyn's point about transitional forms is a critical one, and a simple example illustrates Tim's point about the transition: Encarta on CD-ROM was a transitional format from printed encylopedias to Wikipedia. Note that's three completely different players: Brittanica sold encyclopedias; Microsoft sold software; readers were looking for comprehensive general reference, not encylopedias or software.
We're experiencing this acutely at O'Reilly, as more of our audience finds the information online they once sought in our books. We've historically sold books; readers are looking for answers, information and instruction. We've found other ways to do those "jobs" and remain relevant, but it's not an easy transition.
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