The Content Wrangler
Marking Up The Fab Four: Just Imagine What XML Could Do For Your Books
Alan J Porter
[This post is the first in a planned series of articles that examine how the traditional book industry could benefit from adopting XML.]
Yesterday I posted on Twitter a couple of figures from the Association of American Publishers report of November 2009 book sales. The good news was that sales overall had in fact increased by 10.9%, but what really stood out was that in November of last year the sales of eBooks exploded showing a 199.9% increase and that they now account for about 2.5% of the revenue generated by book publishing. When you consider that most eBooks are cheaper than their paper equivalents, then the market share based on actual sales numbers is going to be even higher.
Sales of the electronic version have out paced hard copy sales 4:1
All this sounds great doesn’t it? – On the surface it is, BUT it could be so much more.
When I look at my book on the Kindle, or on my iPhone, I am frankly disappointed in it. The reason? eBooks and eBook readers today are little more than simple electronic page turners.
eBooks and eBook readers today are little more than simple electronic page turners.
And it’s not only non-fiction where I see these sort of enhancements, imagine reading your favorite novelist, and when a character mentions a location being able to click through to the Google street view, or when they eat at a nice restaurant being able to access the recipe. Ever wanted to know exactly how to make the type of vodka martini that is best served shaken, not stirred? It could be just a click away.
There is no technical reason why this sort of interactive book couldn’t be done today.
As well as being an author of books on various aspects of pop-culture that are published in the traditional model, I’ve also been active in the technical publishing industry for more years than I care to count.
Where eBooks and platforms like the Kindle, the Nook, etc. are now is where the technical documentation industry was 15 years ago – simple electronic page turners.
But take a look at what large engineering companies, the military, and others are doing with their technical documentation today – they are delivering IETMS (Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals), books with links in the text that can jump you to the related part on an illustration, call up part numbers (even do the automatic ordering of that part for you), or call up animations, video and a whole plethora of supporting information.
Technical publications, training, and service departments have been using XML technologies for years to streamline content production processes and to create multiple information products from a single source of content.
With XML you can not only format the text to look how you want, without having to rewrite or reformat the source each time, but you can use it to automatically generate navigation aids like table of contents, lists of items in the content, indexes, plus all the hyperlinking that adds real value.
Over the last few years I’ve offered to write a few books using XML markup, but the publishers have always politely declined, preferring to stick to a system they know. A process that has changed little since the days of the typewriter – yes the tools have changed, but the process is still fundamentally the same; largely because traditional publishers still see the physical book as the product, and not the content.
But today content is king, and we need to make that content available across all platforms, and to be able to add value to it, and that means mark-up.
[In the next post I’ll compare the differences in the workflow between traditional publishing and technical publishing and look at how the cost of moving to XML is a lot less than most publishers believe.]
About the Author
Alan J. Porter a 20 year veteran of the corporate communications industry is founder of 4Js Group LLC a consulting and services company that specializes in combining creative talent with business expertise to help companies tell their story. He is also the regular writer of the monthly Disney*Pixar “World of CARS” comic book series.
His latest book, “WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit” will be published by XML Press in May 2010.
Blog: THE CONTENT POOL http://4jsgroup.blogspot.com
Email: ajp@4jsgroup.com
Phone: 512-968-7362
Twitter: @4jsgroup
Hi Alan, Interesting article, I liked your comparison with the IETM. Perhaps the ebook will catapult the use of XML into the commercial production arena at long last, although all of the projects that I have worked on for the last three/four years have included XML in some way.
Regards
Mike McNamara
Great overview. I firmly believe that including mark-up in production workflows early gives everyone a better understanding of the content they’re working on. Not only does it make production of multiple outputs more efficient it yields greater consistency and better organised content. If we can get authors to embrace the structure of their work (not necessarily through complex XML mark-up – using Word styles would be fine) these efficiencies and improvements to content would benefit us all.
Jo:
Thanks for your comment, but I hate when people say “Word styles would be fine”. Actually, that’s not going to provide much benefit to the company as a whole, nor help them remain competitive. Look to these pages in future days as we clearly spell out the challenges publishers are facing, how they are actually already using XML inside their own companies, and how doing this would provide them with myriad benefits. Also watch as I attempt to make the case to shareholders and investors that putting money into companies that aren’t using efficient processes wastes money, time, and human resources — and fails to provide them with maximum ROI.
Thanks for your comment. I do know where you are heading with your comment, but, in today’s world, it’s just not good enough — and good enough, ain’t all that good.
Fair comment. I’ll be interested to see how the conversation develops. To date we’ve been successfully working with our suppliers and editors in using Word templates tied to client DTDs to deliver XML. Admittedly it’s not directly XML up front in Word but, providing we stick to the DTD via the template, the conversion works well.
Sadly despite the good intentions and much explanation of the benefits, I’ve always found that getting any group of people to accurately follow a Word Style/Template will always throw up issues, even if there just Typo’s. I worked on a project last year for a major Educational publisher and they had reported back three failed attempts at rolling out Templates that people needed to use. The plan was not flawed, it was just that the average person could not be bothered or did not pay enough attention to what they were doing. Sadly despite fixing this issue with the ‘right’ tools, editorial decided to abandon XML completely!!! Sadly they will regret this.
I think as editorial staff become more understanding of what it means to get the ‘coding’ right at the beginning, the better and easier it will become; but there is still a long way to go to marry the ‘open’ editorial world of Microsoft Word with what publishers need, XML.
Two projects I am currently working on are addressing this through plug-ins for Word that from a simple template driven Word file, full blown XML against a rich DTD can be extracted (no RTF involved) and the XML reused for multiple publications. However, there will still be a need for some in-house editorial clean-up, sometimes using Word and sometimes using XML editors for complex ’stuff’ as at the end of the day a publisher will sacrifice any kind of format control on its contributors if the content is so valuable, and they will ‘tag’ it up themselves. But XML really is the only way to go.
I think from my discussions, XML could get a lot of focus this year. I’ll follow this conversation with interest and post some more at another time, but an interesting topic for discussion.
Hi article Scott and Alan, of course.
My take on this is that Microsoft will start to make Word more powerful – in the real sense – or offer an entry-level version of Sharepoint to capitalize on what it offers.
The business benefits are obvious, i.e. with content distribution.
It when you mention the tools, such as XML, that people switch off.
They assume it’s too technical and not for them.
Ivan
Ivan,
You put your finger on a major issue. Without a doubt, the biggest hurdle to moving to XML is getting past the idea that it’s “too technical.” That goes hand-in-hand with the idea that XML will make you write differently, which implies that it will restrict your style.
Neither is true:
- For a writer, XML is just a way to mark up text, and the best XML editors make XML easy to author and edit. Any competent writer who can use Word or Frame can learn to use XML.
- Some XML schemas (I’m thinking of DITA here) were designed with a particular methodology in mind. But other schemas (e.g., DocBook) are agnostic about methodology. Some organizations choose to adopt a new methodology at the same time that they adopt XML, and that is often a good idea, but XML, even DITA, does not enforce any particular methodology; you can be as disciplined or as sloppy as you choose.
The XML community in general has not been very good at making these points; we tend to be techies who have a hard time understanding writers’ concerns, and are often dismissive of them. Even if these concerns are not “technically” valid, in practice they remain a true obstacle to XML adoption that managers must address.
Totally agree with Richard, ensuring that XML is not seen as ‘too technical’ is the key to its wider acceptance not only in editorial groups, but also across the whole publishing production environment. I think it is getting better, but there is till a fair way to go.
Better tools ‘distancing’ editorial staff from the need to ‘know’ XML are becoming available and will help, as will greater adoption of ’standard’ schema’s. However, it is inevitable that there will always some degree of a ‘technical’ slant when dealing with some XML’s.