‘Booksprint’ is a working model for collaborative book authorship, and has since inspired a FLOSS tool called Booki. Its genius is that it takes the proven model of the ‘codesprint’ that open source software communities have used so successfully – to develop huge amounts of code in single intense bursts of focussed collective labour over one week of living, thinking, and working together – and applies it directly to book production. Wireless and F/OSS geek and grassroots technology generalist Thomas Krag introduced Booksprint to the Open Source Publishing Tools workshop as an inverse story about the matter-ing of publishing: “..an outsider’s view of this whole book thing.”

Moving On to Bookness

The Booksprint idea came about while Kraag was working with wire.less.dk, a non-profit he co-founded dedicated to establishing internet infrastructure using open wireless technologies in developing countries. Their company model – “two Danish geeks travelling the world” – was not at all scalable to the wireless networking they wanted to see developing. Limited attention was being given to existing manuals and didactic wikis (“it never occurred to us to ask why anyone else would use our modules when we never read anyone else’s modules”) while the labour involved in ongoing “teach the teacher” sessions was unrealistic. The net at that time in some parts of Africa was also so slow as to not handle simple file downloads of didactic materials. What seemed necessary was a singular authoritative book. It was not possible to put one together from existing quality published material because the book had to be on a free creative commons license, legally open to any translator who wished to translate it, and most importantly, it needed to be able to be legally re-sold locally, so that translators could benefit from their investment in translating it. Kraag realized he was not prepared for the task…

I didn’t want to write a book for 18 months, because at heart I’m pretty lazy, so I called a bunch of friends working on wireless networks that were already coming to a conference in London: “Can we stick around for a week afterwards and write this book?” Some of them said, “Are you crazy?” The reason I thought we could do it is through the existing production model of the codesprint. We sit together and it increases our efficiency. So I found 5000K which was enough for tickets, and to pay someone to go on holidays to Morocco and leave his house to us for a week.

The Conversion of a Genre of Text Labouring into Software Tools

The text still needed to be edited for 6 months, but ‘Wireless Networking in the Developing World’, has had 2 million downloads since and is in its 2nd edition. The process was tedious, using emailed and cut and paste files, proprietary software, and open source outputs. Better tools have developed since 2009 when Adam Hyde began using booksprint for FLOSS manuals and has since fully developed the booksprint model in to Bookie software, a robust and customised collaborative authoring tool. ‘How to Bypass Internet Censorship’ was written with Bookie directly in to the browser, with the crew pressing the “publish” button on the 7th day.

It doesn’t really matter if its not completely polished… it still feels great… The first day you write the table of contents and the index… on friday night you upload it to lulu and its done and it feels so good. a week of all nighters is so much more doable than a year of working on something.

Highlights

Because Booki is open source, you can download it and adapt it as you want. FLOSS’ design has beautifully simple READ and WRITE interfaces and PUBLISH buttons down one side, and a chat section down the right, where you can talk with and share material between other authors writing alongside you remotely. It can handle versioning, tracking authorship (for attribution for different licences), Javi, wiki style sheets that generate html, and a whole bunch of other things. (Check out the van that the Booki crew built for Booki that can drive around and print books!) All the licensing is handled by the site itself and built on Hyde’s own licensing expertise.

Discussion

Krag has not received government or local government funding for his work and instead relies on philanthropic investment since 2002. In the closing discussion, the huge issue of translation software was raised. Simon Worthington of Mute has done research into this and states there really isn’t much, especially not open source. A rare strong example is Pootle. Krag noted FLOSS manuals exists in 5 languages already and can do split views, but this is an area that needs a lot of work. One of the main problems is that professional translators have very established workflow methods – the bottom line is that have to send to translations in Microsoft Word as standard. Femke from OSP mentioned that the EU’s translation department has incredible tools – but only in Microsoft!! One of the exceptions is the Spanish local governments, which do some very good work with open translation, including machine translation – they have some of the same remits that the EU have which means they have to translate large amounts of government text. This may be somewhere to look for modelling solutions.

Floss Manuals Booki available here.

Roosje Klap works and lives in Amsterdam where she was trained at the Rietveld Academy. She works as a designer in her studio and as a teacher graphic design, currently at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. She is also a member selection committee Fonds BKVB (Dutch Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture). Roosje Klap is not only a person but also a studio with four other people that create visual communication, mainly graphic design. The studio researches the experimental boundaries of custom fit design, collaborative yet peculiar and mainly work for an international clientèle in the cultural field: museums, galleries, art publishers and artists. Clients include The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, the Mondrian Foundation, The Audax Textile Museum, SKOR, The Royal Dutch Mint, and for publishers like Valiz, Nieuw Amsterdam, Pels&Kemper, Revolver en JRP Ringier. Recent projects lead to collaborations with Krist Gruijthuijsen & Koen Brams, Jan Rothuizen, het Tropenmuseum, Premsela and Mister Motley.

Roosje Klap @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

On the last day of the Unbound book conference, Roosje Klap talked about the importance of empathy as a phenomenon and how it ties people to the book.

Roosje Klap started with outlining some of the work that she has been doing along with the studio researchers that she works with, they are experimenting with the boundaries of custom fit design. These works can be found on her website. On of the works that was highlighted is the ‘Binnen was buiten’, which represented a ‘droste effect’. The design is a metaphor of the research that the writer of the book did in which piles and piles of images and other small notes were found. Another work that was highlighted was ‘Zachte Atlas van Amsterdam’. This design emphasizes the problem that small drawings usually disappear in the middle of a spread. When designers are making the screen design on the computer they forget that the actual bound book has a center that cannot display the picture. Roosje Klap, questioned whether these kind of problems will disappear with ebooks.

Findings in digital design
Roosje Klap had some interesting remarks on the ebook and digital design, emphasizing the advantages of the ebook and issues in digital design. She found something in digital design that, according to her, is really important which is the fact that you have to chunk your text. The readers decide very quick if they like something or not and therefore you have to limit the use of words in the design. Also, the use of introductions provide more clarity when the user reads the text. Other findings were that adjusting the text size and navigation elements on every page is crucial.

When it comes to the ebook, you can add many layers of context. It is first of all interactive, you can look at a movie and play the movie while reading the text. These are elements that you cannot add to the bound book. Other advantages of the digital book are that they are quickly made, they are searchable, and you can add links to the digital books that refer to additional information or can be used for navigational purposes. Furthermore, the speed of publishing has increased with the development of new technology and even the purchase of a digital books happens quickly and with ease.

With unbound books, we are likely to add McDonalds-like generics to design.

The end of the bound book?
However, this does not mean the end of the bound book. Here you see something interesting happening that you don’t see with the unbound book. The bound book has cultural differences that the unbound book does not have. For instance in Germany, the bigger the book is, the better. In Sweden, books that are heavy are seen as more important. Moreover, the book is judged by its cover, it is questionable if the same thing happens with the ebooks. With the unbound book we run the risk of ‘McDonaldization’, creating a generic book.

Furthermore, several elements are not easily transferred to the ebook, for instance tactility, substance, rigidity, shade, color, stiffness, heaviness, paper grammage, time and place, occasion, and memory. She concludes that the ebook nowadays relies more heavily on the design than on the empathic qualities. Not only the design of the pages but also the design of the device itself is what counts for the ebook. Moreover, with the ebook “we loose the individuality and cultural heritage of a ‘normal’ book”, she states. Her concluding remarks of the presentation are that if we can add more empathy in the design of ebooks and if the ebook can catch up on the qualities of the bound book, we might be able to discard our nostalgia on the bound book. In this way the old fashion paper book will be a superhero.

You can view Roosje’s presentation here.

James Bridle is an editor, publisher, writer, consultant, producer, programmer, designer. He has been working in all area’s of publishing: in marketing, publicity, editoring and production.

James Bridle @ the unbound book conference - photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Bridle starts his speech by saying that added value is a hard one to grasp when it comes to future publishing, where might publishing be going in the coming years? The concept of the book is totally unique: it’s a souvenir of its own experience, a gift that you can store and share. Bridle claims that for a long time we have mistaken the temporality of the book! You always hear the same things like “I like paper, it feels right. I like the smell!” Real things, but they are not what we really care about. They deliver us cognitive dissonance! Great interaction with the text is the biggest experience, while living in a time in which recent book technologies can entirely contain the information that we want to add to a book.

Totality of the reading experience, we can capture and contain an archive and spread it: this is social reading. Encoding of the entire reading experience: it lasts and it is shareable! The desire to share and tell others what you are reading! And also the possibility to pass books through in the future as well is an important element which is easily possible by use of social reading.

Social reading is a great opportunity for publishers according to Bridle. Nearly all music is nowadays recorded music. How does this happen to ebooks and literature nowadays? What remains of them ? The experience of them is what we must hang on to. This is where our conversations, which are based on our reading experience of literature are going!

For more information please check:
http://openbookmarks.org
http://booktwo.org/notebook/openbookmarks
http://shorttermmemoryloss.com

Elias van Hees

According to Evan Schnittman, Bloomsbury’s managing director of sales and marketing, enhanced content for narrative-based ebooks is dead. He announced at last month’s book fair: “Enhanced [ebooks] will have an incredibly big future in education, but the idea of innovation in the narrative reading process is just a non-starter.” Faber and Faber’s head of digital, Henry Volans, disagreed: “Apps are a phenomenon of our age and are here to stay.” So are enhanced ebooks an already-dying phenomenon or not?

The difficulties of enhanced ebooks

Carolyn Reidy, President and CEO of Simon & Schuster, points out that they’re difficult to sell: “The enhanced ebook market is not very strong and some of the biggest sellers still are less than 2,000 copies. [It] doesn’t appear that public is enthused by the concept. Apps [… ] are very expensive to make and get lost in the App Store.” Agent and E-Reads publisher Richard Curtis stresses that copyright is another difficulty: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

Confidence in enhanced ebooks

Joost Kircz, director of research of Electronic Publishing at the Domain Media, Creation and Information of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and the main organizer of the Unbound Book conference, disagrees with Schnittman: “Stories can be enhanced. The whole invention of the movie is proof that this statement is untrue. In cinema the narrative, the novel, has been expanded into sound and vision. So the enhanced book has a fantastic future, although we aren’t yet there. It is like saying when the first film started: this will never replace theatre. So this is really a defensive and short-sighted statement.”

Several publishers believe in the future of enhanced ereaders enough to develop them. Enhanced Editions Ltd. specializes in their publication, and Penguin, Random House and St. Martin’s Press are jumping in the mix too. Fionnuala Duggan, Director of Random House Group Digital, sees the enhanced ebook as an opportunity to attract new costumers: “We are experimenting with ways to create new interactive content which will not only appeal to traditional book lovers, but will also reach out to a brand new readership.” Ana Maria Allessi, publisher of HarperMedia, stresses their attraction:  “When both digital editions are available, and consumers are given the choice, in half the cases they’ll pay more for extra content.” Also Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc. relates it to reader interest:  “We sold more than 4 million physical books with CDs, so we know that there is an interest in meshing text with audio and video.”

Publishers are often enthusiastic, but what do authors think? James Patterson and Lee Child take a positive view. Patterson sees it as new way to engage his readers: “Packaging ebooks with additional, interactive, digital content is a great way to engage readers. I’m always interested in exploring ways of attracting people to my novels.” Child believes enhancement will mark the future of publishing: “In the future both writers and readers will interact with books, stories and characters – and each other – in wholly new ways, and I congratulate Random House for asking the questions and supplying the first answers.”

The categorisation of ebooks

When it comes down to it, we first have to define what an enhanced ebook is. Schnittman for example uses both the terms ‘enhanced e-books’ and ‘apps’. Over the years different terms have been used for ebooks with enhancements, such as ‘expanded ebook’, ‘amplified ebook’, ‘enriched ebook’, ‘Vook’ and ‘ iBook’. I propose a distinction of three different kinds of ebooks: ‘ebook’, ‘enhanced ebook’ and ‘multimedia ebook’.  ‘Ebook’ is the simple ebook, a digital version of a book without extras. The ‘enhanced ebook’ is an electronic book with additional information, primarily of text, and relates to the core text but is not part of the core. The ‘multimedia ebook’ is embedded with different media such as pictures, music, video and games. (S.Schram, The Consequences of the Literary E-boook, 2010).

People are more and more accustomed to the multimedia properties the computer provides, so enhanced ebooks and especially multimedia ebooks will likely be successful. The publisher however should look carefully at any single book’s content and decide which enhancements should be added to increase the pleasure of reading it. Not every reader will equally value all the possible enhancements for the ebook. People who read for a hobby might not value the addition of different media but rather of essays about the context of the story or information about the author. Readers who read for entertainment might prefer entertaining additions such as recipes, trivia or quizzes, and others who have hobbies and who for example especially read during the holidays might value the media enhancements more. Readers who like watching films or gaming will value the adding of film clips and games to a book. In conclusion the enhanced ebook is not dead but alive and will be even more livelier in the future.

I met with Joost Kircz, the main organizer of the Unbound Book conference and director of research of Electronic Publishing at the Domain Media, Creation and Information of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. We spoke about the conference, the e-boekenstad project and about the still-elusive future of educational ebooks.  

SS: What are the primary goals of the e-boekenstad project? And how does the conference relate to this project?

JK: The goal of the e-boekenstad project is trying to understand the relationship between electronic versions of educational material and the changing book chain. It is a collaborative effort of publishers, distributors, libraries and companies working on electronic material in general as well as the HvA as an educational institute. The point is that creating electronic educational material is not just making a photograph of an oil painting and selling it as a postcard, it is trying to find out how changing substrates of messages are influencing the way material is written, read and understood.

The relationship with the conference is that for most people it is clear that for educational material e-learning will become important because people are struggling with a greater number of books (and in an electronic environment also with books formally known as ‘out of print’), working from various places or even travelling long distances. However for educational materials the reason for e-learning is clear but the implementation of new educational material has a very long way to go. At the conference we try to tackle problems such as what is the book as an object, and how should a book be edited and structured? The real thread in the conference is the educational material because there it becomes clear what can be changed. We don’t know yet what the effect will be of the changes. 

SS: How does the ideal educational ebook look?

JK: Honestly I don’t know, and even the educational publishers don’t know yet. The point is that for some parts of an electronic educational book you need text to make it understandable, explanatory text. Other parts can be much better explained in pictures, film or sound. This is the difference between an illustration and an explanation. You can illustrate reasoning in a picture; say the movement of tectonic plates. On the other end of the scale pictures are the primary information such as the picture of a wound or a tire imprint in mud as forensic evidence. Here it is the text that explicates what we see, and after that explication we will always immediately be able to recognize. In the case of a wound colour is essential.

There is always a balance between a picture as illustration to make the reasoning better understandable and primary information, which has other demands. The quality of colour is not important when it is to illustrate, like a graph of a company’s turnover. On the other hand it you want to describe a flower, something from nature, the quality of the colour is essential. The technical requirements depend on the type of information, the genres and on the type of understanding. The balance for educational books is: where do you need text, where do you need pictures, where do you need sound. Plus, this is very important, how do you build different stages, different levels in a modular approach, that is now part of research.

The handling of material becomes something new. We solved the problem of handling a pile of books. Now it is possible to do comparative research on another level, since we have material in digital form to compare, to refer back to, or to make annotations of in the text. So, now I can do different kinds of study, which means I have different demands on my electronic equipment. When I, for example, do a comparable research of paintings, I want to have a picture manipulator like Corel or Photoshop. We don’t yet have a clear understanding of the methodology. It is very new.

An electronic educational book should enable students from various backgrounds, cultural as well as intellectually, to achieve a similar end. Now educational books start on a certain level, but not all students have the same level when they start. My hope is that an educational book will be able to have different entries. The electronic book will then be able to have a variety of educational lines within the same channel from first year student to graduation. There is not one didactical way to end up at the finishing point. Electronic educational works will enable you to implement different ways of coming to the same goal that can be much more student- and cultural-dependent.

SS: When do you expect ebooks will be used in education?

JK: Ebooks will be used when the business model is set; it is not only an intellectual exercise. Economically it is extremely important because the way we write and produce books is new. The once in a lifetime event of buying a particular book is over. For example it might become possible that together with your diploma you will get a lifelong licence of educational material. It is a completely new economic model. New material needs a completely new way of manufacturing. At the graveyard, there are stones, we only know for sure that if you want to be remembered you use stone, that’s it, there is no floppy disk on the graveyard. There is something in the human culture that if you want to have something that has stability, we use materials that have proven stability. And electronic memory is not yet proven to be stable, because they change every couple of years. People don’t feel certain of new materials. So they will not transfer lock, stock and barrel to electronic environments and put all their chips on that before there is some security of eternity. 

SS: There are many forms of ebooks, such as ebooks for the mobile phone. What is your opinion of ebooks for the mobile phone?

JK: It failed because they didn’t make an investigation of what reading is. You have to find out what the mental activity of reading is and what you need. Technologists have not invented the size of the book but it is formed by usage. For reading you need a certain size and overview. Will you read from a phone if you have a paperback? Why was the paperback so successful? Because it reads very nicely and you can take it with you. A telephone doesn’t read very nice, but you can take it with you. Of course you can eat peas with chopsticks and you can read a book on your telephone that is about the same. But why would you?

SS: What will be the future of ebooks for education?

JK: In the future education won’t be entirely digital. Education is also not on paper completely. You have to make a distinction between a storage medium and a presentation medium. The output technology will change, which can be screen, paper, or wall. If we have a flexible screen with a resolution as good as paper, there will be a day that you roll it up, and away with the codex. But we have a long way to go. So everything will be stored electronically, but the output, the presentation device is not necessarily an electronic screen. Simply because you might read in an environment where there is no electricity.

The development of ebooks, and then I don’t mean the electronic reproduction of a paper book, will be dynamic but it will be reasonably slow. We have to develop new methodologies, new ways of writing, new ways of editing, and that will take one or two generations. Two barriers have already been solved: logistics and memory. We now face the next barrier, how to read and how to compose because it is not just making a copy of a paper book. I truly hope that one of the outcomes of the conference is that we create a research platform on all aspects of ebooks that goes beyond the gadget.

SS: What are your other expectations of the conference?

JK: My expectation is first that there is a better understanding of the fact that now the barriers of logistics, memory and bandwidth have been solved and that we only start now to define the research and routine for, say, hypertext environments. The barriers have been solved technically but now we don’t know how to handle it. So there is a lot of experimenting going on and that will be presented. I hope we get a better understanding of how to make educated guesses, to do control tests with publishers, with libraries, with authors to find out what really are the novel aspects of electronic publishing. Hence, you have to define what is the message between the author and the reader and what technology fits best to cater for the conveying of that message. I like the word ‘message’ more than ‘content’ because content is one of these undefined notions in this world, which are most often used as a measure for charging users of electronic networks. A message can be a full book but also a telephone number that you are looking for.

Openmargin is a new platform that unites your book and your community. http://openmargin.com/

The 40th edition of the London Book Fair focuses this year on digital media’s effects on publishing. The London Book Fair Digital Conference, The Digital Now: Creating Lasting Change, took place a day before the fair opened and hashed out various disruptions and possibilities of the digital turn. Meanwhile the book fair itself takes on digital topics through the Digital Zone and Theatre, featuring over 40 exhibitors from across the digital supply chain. At the Theatre visitors can see presentations of the latest products and suppliers from companies involved in digital publishing. Visitors can also attend several seminars covering the latest trends in digital publishing at The Digital Seminar stream.

The key themes of the Digital conference
What’s going on in the digital publishing market? Key themes at the conference were the future of enhanced ebooks, the importance of ebook discoverability, pricing strategies and business models. Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber and Faber, opened the conference by affirming that the publisher won’t grow obsolete because she’s already squarely in the thick of the digital turn. “We are not learning to be digital publishers, we are in the digital market.”

Discoverability and pricing of the ebook
Ebook discoverability, one critical theme, emerged as a key challenge for vendors. According to Evan Schnittman, buying books is a leisure activity, so the competition for an ebook should be viewed differently from its physical counterpart. Gordon Willoughby adds that pricing for ebooks is influenced by where the costumer is when he buys it and must take into account that e-books compete with film and music downloading. “It is digital vs all the other options you have sitting on the sofa.”

The Kindle and the Kobo
The speakers overall saw potential in ebook readers. Willoughby claimed that putting books on the Kindle generates sale: if a customer bought 10 physical books before they own a Kindle, after they own a Kindle they bought 33 physical and Kindle titles. Michael Tamblyn from Kobo discussed the growth of the sales of their ebook readers: “It took 10 months to get 1m users, 90 days to get the 2nd million, 14 days to get next million.”

Threads for e-books
The conference also had its skeptics, with repeated warnings that Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook could monopolise routes to the customer. Michael Comish from BlinkBox calls them “frenemies”. Evan claimed that the enhanced ebook and the app, especially for narrative works, are already dead and entirely unnecessary, since what sells e-books also sells p-books. Enhanced content is unnecessary because ”If a book is a hit in p, it’ll be a hit in e.” Only educational ebooks might find a viable market. However Faber and Faber’s head of digital, Henry Volans contested that statement: “Apps are a phenomenon of our age and are here to stay.”

The London Book is 11^th – 13^th  April.
http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/