E-Publishing Workshop

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Evening 1

Part 1

• Summary / outline of the three workshop evenings

• Quick working definition of e-publishing: e-books, e-journals vs. web sites, blogs, social media; publishing/long-term access/stability vs. communication/short-term access/instability; self-contained files in stable formats vs. distributed content in unstable formats

• Summary of e-publishing status quo 2012:
  • World-wide sales figures of Amazon Kindle and other e-book platforms;
  • electronic magazines and newspapers (iOS Newsstand);
  • academic and educational e-publishing; JSTORE, Muse, Elsevier;
  • e-publishing as gadget (children's books, multimedia apps);
  • community & underground e-publishing (archive.org, Project Gutenberg, textfiles.com, aaaarg, Ubu Web, Google Books / Amazon Search Inside, Amazon Noir, Piratebay, Monoskop...)

• Historical comparisons: e-publishing vs. DTP revolution in the 1980s, e-publishing vs. mp3 revolution in the 1990s/2000s

Part 2

Electronic book utopias of the 20th century

• El Lissitzky, 'electro library'
• Vannevar Bush/Ted Nelson, hypertext (explain the difference to what the web is today)
• troff & Unix manpages
• BBS/hacker txt files 1970s-1990s (principia discordia, anarchist cookbook etc.)
• disk mags
• 1990s 'interactive multimedia' visions:
  • Hyperland
  • VIS
  • Voyager Expanded Books, Eastgate Storyspace/hyperfiction,

Philips' CD-i, CD-ROM publishing

• • Robert Coover, The End of Books

Developments since 2000

• 2000s collaborative/cross-media authoring visions
  • GNU Free Documentation license
  • Wiki / Wikipedia / Wiki books
  • Cross-media publishing: SGML/XML, Setext/markdown/pandoc/Asciidoc/Woodwing
  • Print-on-demand, Espresso book machine
  • FLOSS Manuals booksprints and booki
• 2010s commercial breakthrough of e-books
  • Amazon Kindle - why did it work? What does it tell about successful e-publishing? (portability/simplicity vs. multimedia, platform strategy; compare to mp3 & iTunes business model)
  • E-publishing as indie publishing; break-up of traditional book formats

How do electronic documents work

• executable vs. non-executable formats/apps vs. epub: advantages/disadvantages
• paginated vs. reflowable content: advantages/disadvantages
• problems: reader compatibility, business models, DRM, limitations of multimedia integration
• Status quo of epub design: IT services vs. graphic design, how graphic designers need to rethink

Homework

• Download a number of e-pub readers, experiment with reading epubs
• Download & install epub editors: Jutoh & eCub, try to design a simple e-book with Jutoh