The Auricle

Posted in The Auricle (www.auricle.org)
by Derek Morrison, 25 June 2011, updated 28 and 29 June 2011

“Publishing may be in trouble but storytelling is not. Authors such as Amanda Hocking are understandably giving the industry the jitters. Hocking didn’t succeed in getting her young adult novels into print in the traditional way, so she uploaded digital versions on to the web, making them cheaply available. At first she sold only a few copies. Soon, however, she was selling hundreds of thousands of virtual books, and only now has she signed a deal with St Martin’s Press.” (Erica Wagner, Literary Editor, The Times, 25 June 2011).

I would like to share the link to the above quote with Auricle readers but Rupert Murdoch’s walled garden (sorry paywall to his UK newspapers) prevents me from doing so; please forgive me. Some columnists offer a copy of their articles on their own web sites but Erica Wagner doesn’t appear to do so.

As I find myself reading more and more epublications on various mobile devices (and, yes, actually reading more as a result) it’s easy to empathise (but not sympathise) with the growing sense of panic from traditional publishers who must by now see the latest digital tsunami building mass and momentum off-shore.

Viewed from an HE perspective it’s now way past the time to start thinking creatively about the opportunities that this presents; and not just focus on the threats to established ways and vested interests. Personally, I’m getting pretty frustrated with a view of digital publishing and ebooks which risks becoming trapped in a mindset that offering some PDF files for download or requiring that reading devices remain connected to a university network in order to access an “ebook” evidences sufficient progress. It isn’t. Such perspectives appear more aligned to the preservation of existing models than grasping opportunities and, as Wagner’s quote above shows, when a system doesn’t adapt quickly enough the users of said system bypass it and in doing so begin the ever accelerating process of degrading it, perhaps fatally.

Organisations with Higher Education interests have an important lead-by-example role to play here by offering those who access their web sites for public domain content in more formats than the ubiquitous (but information trapping) PDF for download (think Creative Commons licensing plus XHTML, EPUB, or even RSS folks). That way even if one organisation doesn’t want to do the additional work others can then pick up the flag and with the aid of the various format conversion tools and services provide additional renderings more suited to modern mobile devices, including ereaders.

In the global HE sector, however, rendering documents/books in PDF and offering this as the only choice still seems to be the most common approach by organisations and agencies making available “ebook” archives. There are various conversion tools around which attempt to extract and re-render the content into something more reusable but, in my experience, the results are pretty poor particularly when PDF has been rendered as image data. Ironically, I have found such constrained PDF renderings offered by several major organisations whose focus is learning technologies, digital content, or ebook development and who share, but only in this very limiting walled garden way. In this age of open content, open education resources, mobile devices, and ebook readers it’s perhaps now time to think beyond that PDF conversion which is making it so difficult to reuse content; there again, in some quarters, that may be the idea.

But to be fair, ebook development and reading solutions are still immature in that they don’t yet provide all the structures and processes required. For example, take footnotes. Footnotes can be a considerable and problematic challenge in an ebook where they concept of a page may be somewhat different to that paper media, e.g. a ten inch display on tablet device or ereader with a specific resolution may render a page differently from a six inch device with a different resolution. And so what is required is rather a different approach to how the footnote concept is realised on a device where the page size is flexible, e.g. the presentation of the “note” needs to be disconnected from the concept of a standard page size whilst remaining connected to the concept of the entity being flagged by, for instance, an optional graphical callout providing the supplementary information rather than the footnote being automatically located at the end of the chapter or the end of the ebook. At times scholarly work can require footnotes and endnotes in the same document and so we need a generation of ebook generators and devices that can render them, perhaps in an enhanced way in comparison to paper media where such provision was achieved long ago. At the moment most ebook readers present “footnotes” as endnotes to a chapter or book because that is what the underlying web browser type technologies can cope with. Although such constraints can become a convenient excuse for those looking to hold back the leakage of water from the status quo dam, they will not hold back the tsunami; and most publishers realise it. Let me rephrase that; at least those who will survive do.

The Erica Wagner quote that headlined this posting illustrates one possible future, i.e. that of disintermediation in which the provider of a service or resource, in this case the “book”, can reach out directly and build their own audience or network; a possibility that individual scholars, networks of scholars, or special interest communities should perhaps pay more attention to. Another possible future is that the new digital publisher doesn’t emerge as an evolutionary development of the current publishing ecosystem at all, but arises from a different direction altogether. Much has already been written on the blogosphere and elsewhere about the recently “published” iPad app of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (Bryan Appleyard’s analysis and review recommended), but the real point of interest for me was the role of Touch Press in the development. On this occasion the Eliot iPad app was a partnership with a traditional publisher (Faber and Faber). But what if it had been an Amazon? Or what if there had been no partnership at all? And let’s not forget that iPad app wasn’t built around a book but a single poem. Realising something similar around an existing book could be much harder. But there again, what is a “book” going to be in this new digital universe?

“eBook” Downloads
PDF and EPUB downloads of this posting are offered below. The EPUB download should work on iPhone, iPad, and other compatible ereaders. If viewing this posting on an iPad, however, then the EPUB can be opened directly into the iBooks app. At the time of writing the Amazon Kindle, regrettably does not read the EPUB open standard format. There is, however, a “Send to Kindle” option in the Auricle sidebar so if you want a posting converted to Kindle format then just send it to the free Amazon conversion service and it should be downloaded to your Kindle automatically. The quality of the conversion by Amazon can’t be a guaranteed but it should certainly be readable.