E-Publishing Workshop
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
Break
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