Entries tagged with “production” from Tools of Change for Publishing
CSS in an XML Workflow
Laura Dawson
July 17, 2009
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At the StartWithXML Forum in New York in January, Rebecca Goldthwaite of Cengage gave a great demonstration of how Cengage uses CSS in their XML workflow. Many publishers regard style sheets as an invitation to create cookie-cutter book production, with the fear that all their books will look the same. This is emphatically a myth. Have a look at her seventh slide for examples of how one stylesheet can actually create many different looks.
CSS Zen Garden has been up for a while (Liza Daly used this model to create the EPUB Zen Garden a few months ago). It's a sort of CSS sandbox where graphic designers can play with style sheets and render the same content in very different forms. Clicking on the four links below will demonstrate what CSS can do:
It's well worth checking out and maybe having some graphic designers play around with it.
StartWithXML Research Report Now Available for Sale
Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009
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If you weren't able to attend the StartWithXML Forum last month in New York, the accompanying research report is available for sale. The report covers topics like:
- Where am I and where do I want to end up?
- How much benefit do I want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing?
- How much work do I want to do myself?
- How much time and money will this take?
When you purchase the report, you get it as our full eBook Bundle, including PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket formats.
If you're ready for a deeper dive into XML, there are two very complementary tutorials lined up during next week's TOC Conference:
And if that's still not enough angle brackets for you, check out the Introduction to XML course from the O'Reilly School of Technology, which earns you four CEUs (Continuing Education Units) and a CEU letter from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education. Save $50 with discount code SWXML09.
For a Workflow Change, Support from the Top is Required
Mike Shatzkin
November 5, 2008
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Last week Laura Dawson and I spoke about StartWithXML to a group of IT and operations people from publishers at the User Group meeting for Global Turnkey Systems, a company owned by one of our lead sponsors, Klopotek.
We got some great questions afterwards. On reflection, we realized that they touched an important theme: the need for CEO-level support for the change initiatives to put XML into the workflow. There are savings of time and money to be made by doing this, but that's not the immediate result. In the short run, the changes require more work, more effort, and, sometimes it would seem, generate a less desirable result.
This echoes what we've heard from Andrew Savikas of O'Reilly. Instead of characterizing the two elements of a publishing organization as "hard (production, accounting, ops) and "soft" (editorial, marketing), Andrew says that for XML change they are "hard" and "harder." Trying to get the most creative people in a publishing company to do something that is "harder" requires a top-down understanding that doing it is important to the business.
That's why we asked David Young, the CEO of Hachette Books in the US, to deliver our keynote address. He'll be speaking on the topic "XML: Why Bother?" That's the question every CEO must answer to get the collaboration up and down an organization that large and systemic change requires.
Open Question: How Can Publishers Capitalize on Hot Topics?
Mac Slocum
October 15, 2008
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You can't fault Newsweek and Amazon for cashing in on pre-election interest with a series of Kindle-only candidate biographies. There's certainly nothing wrong with profitable aggregation of content, either. But the efficiencies gained from ebooks, e-readers and print on demand raise secondary questions I'd like to explore with the TOC Community:
- Can long-form content (print or digital) effectively capitalize on trendy subjects?
- Is there still a market for quickie books? Can they compete with Web content?
- Should publishers use Web/digital as a testbed for hot topics, then provide long-form content down the road? Or, will this technique spread them too thin?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)
Laura Dawson
September 30, 2008
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Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for ... well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging -- all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."
So no wonder people get confused. Particularly people who are in the business of creating content, not formatting, categorizing, packaging and marketing it.
So what are we talking about when we're throwing around this term? It depends on what you do for a living.
If you're a writer, it might mean using Word a little differently, quite possibly according to specific author guidelines given to you by the publisher. It might also mean including lists of keywords along with your manuscript. It may mean including lists of keywords for each chapter.
If you're an acquisitions editor, an XML workflow may mean deciding whether you want a book to merely exist as a print product (as a single source of revenue), or whether it's also appropriate as an ebook, to sell by the chapter (as numerous textbook publishers are doing), to publish iteratively (as O'Reilly does with its Rough Cuts), to make excerpts available for free download, etc.
If you're a book production editor, an XML workflow will be very concrete -- you tag a manuscript according to its format ("chapter heading," "illustration," "copyright page"), and those tags are applied to a pre-defined style sheet.
If you're in marketing, an XML workflow allows you to work with the author's keywords, target specific audiences for the content, and package the content in appealing ways.
Could you do all of this without XML? Sure. You could use a relational database and shove your manuscript, chapter by chapter, into tables in SQL. You could assign keywords in a relational database. But you couldn't do formatting. You could use InDesign or Quark to do your formatting. But you couldn't break up your manuscript into "chunks" and repackage those "chunks" into new products with those programs. XML has the capacity to handle both, and handle them well.
Like most acronyms, XML is a tool. It's not a goal in itself, but a way to get to your goal.
StartWithXML: Why and How
Andrew Savikas
September 12, 2008
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XML-related sessions and tutorials have proven quite popular at our annual TOC Conference, and recent developments including the introduction of the Kindle, the iPhone 3G, and the IDPF's EPUB standard have made understanding XML more important than ever for smart publishers.
But to get the most from an XML workflow, it must be seen as much more than just a tool or a technology: there are serious organizational and cultural issues that are in many ways even more challenging than the technology itself. To better understand these issues and to help publishers deal with them, we've teamed up with the Idea Logical Company on a project we're calling "StartWithXML: Why and How."
StartWithXML is an effort to understand and spread the knowledge publishers need to move forward with XML. It's about the business issues driving the "why" of XML in publishing and the technical and organizational issues, strategies, and tactics underlying the "how" of getting started. The project includes:
- An open online survey meant to capture a broad overview of the issues surrounding XML for publishers.
- A one-day forum scheduled for Jan. 13, 2009 at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York. Through panels and presentations, you'll spend the morning understanding the "why" of XML, and the afternoon learning about "how" to move forward. (Space is limited, so save your seat now.)
- A research report that will include background info, case studies, best practices, technology and vendor profiles, and interviews discussing the factors that make a "StartWithXML" workflow both useful and tricky.
- An online conversation, including a blog, an open comments area for you to weigh in on the report's outline while it's in progress, and a general discussion forum (built out as a group within the new TOC Community).
Idea Logical CEO Mike Shatzkin is detailing the project at today's annual meeting of the Book Industry Study Group, which is providing support for the project and forum. Mike will be blogging on the StartWithXML website, alongside Brian O'Leary, Ted Hill, and Laura Dawson, who are all participating in the research behind the project.
We're trying to cast a wide net with the survey, so even if you're not currently doing much with XML, we want your input.
Going Digital Gives Publishers Safety Net
Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008
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Sarah Lacy provides an articulate and approachable list of digital lessons for book publishers. Her passage on going "electronic from the get-go" is an important reminder about the vital efficiences of digital content:
You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version. The manuscript is FedEx'ed back and forth with Post-it Notes. If FedEx were to lose it, publishers lose months' worth of copy edits, legal edits, and other elements of the painstaking publishing process. There's not even a photocopy. No joke.
That makes publishing the book in other digital formats a challenge at the outset. Publishers would do well to keep the book electronic-- even if it's PDFs of typeset pages. That would help them blast teaser chapters around the world (engaging bloggers and the long tail of the press). Presumably it would help get the book on Kindle and other e-books from day one.
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.
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