E-Publishing Workshop

<slidy theme="aa" />

Evening 1

Summary / outline of the three workshop evenings

1. General introduction to the world of e-publishing
2. My first Epub and distribution models
3. Inside an Epub and roundup

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

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

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