Entries tagged with “tools” from Tools of Change for Publishing

New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System

Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs:

Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.

You can see the system in action at the site for our upcoming book Programming Scala.

Authoring Tools from Alpha Geeks

Andrew Savikas
May 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) has posted a nice article covering some of the tools he's built or borrowed to make his writing life more manageable. I'm especially intrigued by the Flashbake project, which augments simple use of version control (something many of our authors have been using for years, and which we use extensively in our production toolchain) to automatically capture contemporaneous data about the writing process:

Now, this may be of use to some notional scholar who wants to study my work in a hundred years, but I'm more interested in the immediate uses I'll be able to put it to — for example, summarizing all the typos I've caught and corrected between printings of my books. Flashbake also means that I'm extremely backed up (Git is designed to replicate its database to other servers, in order to allow multiple programmers to work on the same file). And more importantly, I'm keen to see what insights this brings to light for me about my own process. I know that there are days when the prose really flows, and there are days when I have to squeeze out each word. What I don't know is what external factors may bear on this.

Thinking about content like code opens up a wealth of tools and techniques for managing that content. After all, programmers spend more time than just about anyone doing what can very easily be called "creative writing" with text, so it's no surprise they've built tools to make their lives easier and more productive. We're getting ready to announce a new project over at O'Reilly Labs, one also built on top of version control (Subversion in our case) and another example of using software tools to improve the writing (and in this case reading) experience.

StartWithXML Research Report Now Available for Sale

Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

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:

1. Where am I and where do I want to end up?
2. How much benefit do I want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing?
3. How much work do I want to do myself?
4. 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:

• Introduction to XML for Publishers
• XML in Practice: Formats, Tools, and Techniques

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.

Webcast Video: Essential Tools of an XML Workflow

Mac Slocum
January 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Below you'll find the full recording from the TOC webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow," with Laura Dawson.

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Presentations from the StartWithXML Forum

Mac Slocum
January 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The following slides accompanied many of the presentations during the StartWithXML forum, held Jan. 13, 2009 in New York City.

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XML--Why Bother?

David Young, Hachette Book Group USA

As Chairman and CEO of one of America's leading trade publishers, David Young presents the executive perspective on the role of XML technologies in the increasingly complex business of creating and selling books.

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An Introduction to StartWithXML

Michael Healy, Book Industry Study Group

Introduction to some of the key terms and concepts needed to understand the day's program.

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ROI Drivers for a StartWithXML Production Process

Brian O'Leary, Magellan Media Consulting Partners

Overview of the key components that provide the return on investment in an XML workflow.

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Saving Money by Adopting an XML-Based Meta Data Workflow

Werner Fischer, Klopotek North America

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Savings" panel.

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Starting with XML:The Benefits of Automating Composition with Standard Stylesheets

Rebecca Goldthwaite, Cengage Learning

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Savings" panel.

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Leveraging XML for IP Rights

Steve Kotrch, Simon & Schuster

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Savings" panel.

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Marketing Books In A World Of Discoverability

Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Revenues" panel.

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Supporting Multi-Format Publishing

Leslie Hulse, HarperCollins Publishers

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Revenues" panel.

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Online Licensing Strategies: The Path to Digital Revenue

Bill O'Brien, Copyright Clearance Center

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Revenues" panel.

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Digital Book Printing: The New Economics Of Print-On-Demand

David Taylor, Lightning Source Inc.

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML ROI: Revenues" panel.

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The View from the Front Lines

Ken Brooks, Cengage Learning

As a publishing technology pioneer and SVP, Global Production and Manufacturing at one of America's largest educational publishers, Ken Brooks presents lessons for the publishing industry at large based on his experiences implementing successful, large-scale XML production processes.

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StartWithXML Solutions Overview

Brian O'Leary, Magellan Media Consulting Partners

Overview of the many publishing technology solutions providers and how their offerings support an XML workflow.

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XML Workflow Foundations: Efficient Title Management Practices

Doug Lessing, Firebrand Technologies

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Tools" panel.

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Building an XML workflow: Tools and Key Considerations

Steve Waldron, Klopotek North America

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Tools" panel.

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DAM for ProductionvsDAM for Distribution

Scott Cook, codeMantra

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Tools" panel.

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O'Reilly XML Toolchain

Andrew Savikas, O'Reilly Media

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Tools" panel.

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StartWithXML Readiness Checklist

Brian O'Leary, Magellan Media Consulting Partners

Checklist of the key issues publishers should consider before implementing an XML production process.

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Tagging and Chunking Best Practices

Laura Dawson, LJNDawson

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Methods" panel.

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The Evolving Role of Authors and Editors

Phil Madans, Hachette Book Group

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Methods" panel.

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How Wiley Uses Word to Invite Authors, Engage Editors, Improve Production, and Put XML at the Source of Its Content

Frank Grazioli, John Wiley & Sons

Presented as part of the "StartWithXML Solutions: Methods" panel.

Slides from "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow" Webcast

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Laura Dawson has made her slides available from the recent TOC Webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow." A complete recording of the event will be posted here soon.

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Why You Should Care About XML

Andrew Savikas
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (26) | Listen

Since we began talking about the StartWithXML project, a few offline comments have come in suggesting that imposing XML on authors (and editors for that matter) won't work.

When framed that way, I'm in violent agreement. I would never argue that authors and editors should or will become fluent in XML or be expected to manually mark-up their content. I naively tried fighting that battle before, and was consistently defeated soundly. It is simply too much "extra" work that gets in the way of the writing process.

But there are several reasons why it's really really important for publishers to start paying attention to XML right now, and across their entire workflow:

• XML is here to stay, for the reasonably forseeable future. While it's always dangerous to attempt to predict expiration dates on technology, I think it's fair to assume XML will have a shelf life at least as long as ASCII, which has been with us for more than 40 years, and isn't going anywhere soon.
• Web publishing and print publishing are converging, and writing and production for print will be much more influenced by the Web than vice-versa. It will only get harder to succeed in publishing without putting the Web on par with (or ahead of) print as the primary target. The longer you wait to get that content into Web-friendly and re-usable XML, the worse.

Many in publishing balk at bringing XML "up the stack" to the production, editing, or even the authoring stage. And with good reason; XML isn't really meant to be created or edited by hand (though a nice feature is that in a pinch it easily can be). There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."

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