Arthur Attwell

This month, in time for the London Book Fair where South Africa is the featured country, Modjaji Books has published their Small Publishers Catalogue 2010 (buy it on Scribd), a catalogue listing about forty smaller publishers in Africa, along with articles on aspects of their work. The catalogue's editor, and tireless champion of small publishing in South Africa, Colleen Higgs, asked me to put together some digital-publishing suggestions for small publishers for inclusion in the catalogue. Here's the article: seven tips for small publishers on digital publishing.

If you're a publisher of any size, you're thinking, and possibly worrying, about ebooks. There is no doubt that the ever-rising tide of the Internet has turned publishing's erstwhile paper hillsides into shorelines. Now the question is, what are you doing about it?

During last year at Electric Book Works, I received more and more calls from publishers (of all sizes) wondering how they should start making ebooks. While I point a lot of people towards outsourcing conversion, I actually don't believe that's a long-term solution for a frontlist. Making ebooks should be a zero-cost by-product of a production workflow, whether it's print- or digital-centric. In real terms, this means that designers and typesetters, and their project managers too, need some new skills.

Some of those skills are pretty straightforward, and some are tricky to learn. And each designer or typesetter will need to develop their own toolkit around these skills, depending on the kinds of books they work on. That may take years to perfect, just as it takes years to get really good at, say, designing magazines or book covers. But at the heart of that toolkit will be a few fundamentals – some conceptual, some practical – that I thought I could offer.

A few times now, I've had that conversation with wary publishers: how do I make my epub (or other reflowable) ebooks look the same as my paper editions? I usually explain that, technically, you can't and don't want to. I've learned (at some cost) to make it very clear from the start that epub ebooks are not supposed to look like their paper editions. The medium (the screen) is an entirely different way of presenting and distributing content. The design must suit the new medium, not match the old one.

That's all very well, but what I really need is a good analogy that makes it clear to non-technical people why this is the case.

This is my best attempt so far: Paper and epub is like paint and stained glass: if you wanted to do a stained-glass version of the Mona Lisa, you wouldn't expect it to look exactly the same as the original. The stained glass allows for different tricks with light and tone, so while the finished window may look something like the original Mona Lisa, in many ways it will look very different, and beautiful in its own way -- the new medium (glass, not canvas) must be treated differently to make the most of its own features.

Do you think that would help? If you have other useful analogies, let me know.

The Harvard Business Review November magazine includes an article on clean tech that opens with a story about Thomas Edison. It explains how technology does not replace technology â€“ systems replace systems.

Edison … realized that the technology he envisioned—no matter how innovative—couldn’t by itself sweep aside the kerosene-based lighting industry. Instead of asking how he could solve the technical problem of inventing a lightbulb, Edison asked how he could get consumers to switch from kerosene to electricity. He understood that despite the many advantages of electric light, it would replace kerosene only if it had its own, economically competitive network.
So, while scores of people worldwide worked on inventing a lightbulb, Edison conceived a fully operational system. His technical platform included generators, meters, transmission lines, and substations, and he mapped out both how they would interact technically and how they would combine in a profitable business.

That is, of course, exactly what the publishing industry needs for ebooks. And many large companies are certainly trying to get such systems right. In its own monopoly-ridden way, Amazon has done this well, setting high standards for a simple, integrated acquisition-to-reading system.

Edison first rolled out his system in Lower Manhattan, where buildings were close together and potential investors lived and worked. If it was going to work anywhere, it was going to work there, and be a model for expansion elsewhere.

The Kindle, and its US market, is that Lower Manhattan to the rest of the world, where digital publishing in many forms will enable massive leaps forward for the sharing and selling of information. iBooks may be another. They are precursors to a much greater revolution, perhaps as fundamental as electrification itself; and for all our grumbling about their flaws, we're lucky to have them.

(Thanks to Michelle for the HBR article.)

Late last year writer Carolyn Meads interviewed me for a newspaper article on ebooks that, sadly, ended up mostly on the editing-room floor. It was a nice chance to cover some digital-publishing basics, so we're putting it up here.

Book Industry Communication (BIC) has published a code of practice for assigning ISBNs to digital content. (I've included the full text below. Here's the original PDF.) The code is sensible in some ways, and less so in others, as I'll explain in a moment. On the whole, though, it's good to see efforts like this towards industry standards.

At the Frankfurt Tools of Change one-day conference last week, Brian O'Leary presented the results, to date, of a study into the impact of piracy on book sales. It generated quite a little storm, helped along by some misunderstandings. So I recommend reading Brian's level-headed response to it all. The study itself needs the participation of more publishing houses, and let's hope that more join in.

Here is my presentation from this morning at TOC Frankfurt. You can also see and download the slides (in slightly better quality) on Slideshare here. I've put all the URLs of projects, companies and issues I raise first. Incidentally, I've changed the title of the talk to refer to southern Africa, since that's what I can be confident about – though I hope much of what I say can be generalised, with care, to other developing countries.

As publishers (and other industries I'm less familiar with, like this one) look to adjust their business models to cater for a digital world, they have to find business models that don't rely on controlling copies of their work. (Cf. Cory Doctorow: "any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb".) Copying is at the heart of anything digital: when information moves from one place to another, it replicates. (Nod to Kevin Kelly's important piece on this.) The Internet itself is made of copies and copies of copies, all of them essentially zero-cost, bar the raw materials of cables, terminals, bandwidth and power. And yet it's still hard to think of business models, especially in the creative industries, that don't control the distribution of copies, where each copy is sold for a unit price or a subscription. So I am trying to imagine a world where all copies are essentially zero-cost after raw materials. What would that world and its business models look like? Here is a stab at describing it.

In that world, there was an appliance called a fab, and every family had one. A fab, for fabricator, made stuff. Anything, really: musical instruments, furniture, medicine, books, stationery, toys, food, even other fabs. There were also fabs in classrooms, hospitals, waiting rooms, offices – anywhere a fab could be useful.

Scribd is having to deal with another irate copyright holder, who according to theBookseller.com alleges that Scribd has "built a technology that's broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale". The complainant, Elaine Scott, is absolutely right in a way, because Scribd has built a technology that's broken many barriers on a global scale. And many of those barriers, natural to an analog era (warehousing and shipping physical copies, geographic distance, slower communications), have been the rug beneath conventional notions of copyright law. That rug's getting pulled, whether we like it or not.

Last month I gave a one-hour presentation on ebook basics at The Book Lounge in Cape Town. A few people have asked for the slides, so here they are.

I was hugely honoured to be invited by Robin Malan to speak at the launch of English Alive this week. The magazine of high-school writing has been published annually since 1967, and does an incredible job of promoting and inspiring young writers around the country. Here's what I had to say.

If you haven’t heard, in an Orwellian faux pas Amazon recently deleted (and refunded) purchased copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers’ Kindle e-readers. It was the wake-up call the anti-DRM lobby was probably hoping for, and it’s raised a storm of discussion (and confusion) about the evil that is digital rights management.

The annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference has just closed in New York and as usual it was a digital-publishing feast. Though I didn’t get to go myself, the flood of blogging and tweeting that came from the conference kept me happy right until my brain exploded.

As more and more of our world is digitised — sales, maps, encyclopaedias, books, music, phone calls, radio, TV, you name it, it travels digitally — companies constantly have to choose what to automate and what has to be done by human beings. In other words, what can be templated, and what requires project-specific creative input. This is particularly the case for publishers, who are all battling to make decisions about ebooks, and worried about their future in this digital world. Should they be getting into the IT-based, ebook-making business?

The internet, and particularly the ebook industry, is littered with debates about aggregation and monopoly, and in many of those debates the two concepts are confused. Let’s be clear: aggregation is good, monopoly is bad.

Here in the ebook-making world there’s a lot of to and fro about how much design matters when text is getting reflowed in different screens and applications, from tiny phones to 22-inch LCDs. Will book designers have jobs in a publishing world dominated by ebooks?

What do you do with those wasted minutes in a queue, waiting for a train or a meeting, or staring at the cereal box wishing there was something new to read there? I usually reach for my phone to read, in an activity that's come to be called 'interstitial reading'. Over at Tools of Change, Joseph Esposito has posted a great outline of what interstitial reading could add up to.

On October 28 2008, Google announced a huge development in the course of its work with books. It is potentially the biggest single development in the book industry since the founding of Amazon. As a result of a settlement agreement in a class action suit involving authors, publishers and libraries, which has been hanging over the Google Books programme for three years, millions of books will soon be available to read online. Many will be accessible for free, and many for a fee that will compensate publishers and authors for their work.

Much of the buzz at Frankfurt Book Fair this year was about ebooks, and particularly the impact that the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have had on that part of the industry over the last year. According to IDPF spokesperson Michael Smith, ebook sales this year are up 53% in the US, and for August they are 83% higher than last year. Distributor Ingram Digital has reported the third quarter of ebook sales double last year’s.