E-Publishing Workshop

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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

World-wide sales figures of Amazon Kindle and other e-book platforms

• 2010: Amazon sells more e-books than hardcovers
• 5-2011: Amazon sells more e-books than printed books
• Adoption of e-books in the U.S.: 25% in 2011, growth of 169% in comparison to 2010
• Estimated 10% of the book market in the U.S., print declines by 25% (Market share in the Netherlands: 1.4%)
• Relative e-book market shares in the U.S.: Amazon 58%, followed by Barnes & Noble with 27%
• Amazon comes to the Netherlands

Electronic magazines and newspapers, quick case study with Libération

• the bundle:
  • as analogue newspaper: for your coffee table
  • as web site: http://liberation.fr for your computer and old Internet
  • as single file: PDF for your software readers and e-readers devices
  • as software: apps for your Android and iPhone/iPad phones and tablets (TV?)

Today's software industry answers to e-publishing infrastructure

• creation and distribution - Digital Publishing Suite, Professional Edition
• collection and aggregation - iOS Newsstand

The other side of e-publishing

• (Semi-)Public resources:
  • archive.org
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Ubu Web
  • textfiles.com
• Outside of the walled gardens:
  • aaaaarg
  • Amazon Noir
  • Monoskop
  • Amateur and "official" ebook piracy scenes

academic and educational e-publishing

• Emerald Insight
• JSTOR
• EBSCO
• Proquest
• Muse
• Elsevier

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.)
• pirate scene, nfos, display hacks, demos and manymany diskmags

1990s 'interactive multimedia' visions

• Hyperland (1990)
• Tandy Memorex Visual Information System (VIS) - 1992
• Voyager Expanded Books, Eastgate Storyspace/hyperfiction, Philips' CD-i, CD-ROM publishing
• Robert Coover, The End of Books

2000s collaborative/cross-media authoring visions

• legal: GNU Free Documentation license, Creative Commons, free culture.
• Platforms and communities: Wiki based books (Wikimedia, FLOSS Manuals)
• Cross-media technology: SGML/XML, Setext/markdown/pandoc/Asciidoc/Woodwing
• Print distribution: Print-on-demand, Espresso book machine
• What to publish: fluidity vs snapshot

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