by Maxwell Hoffmann, Desktop Publishing, Localization, Globalization and Sales Training Veteran

Really, how long can anyone really read long chapters on that tiny screen? The answer is “for hours, and hours and hours”

A few weeks ago I got a Tweet that sent me straight to downloads-ville. A “free” Kindle Reader app for my Blackberry! As a used-book store addicted Baby Boomer who color codes all of his hard copy books with highlighter pens, might I be the perfect guinea pig for this latest content delivery platform? Could an old school guy like me get used to reading literature or technical manuals in chunks smaller than 3×5 cards?

The answer surprised even me.

So I downloaded Kindle reader for both Windows laptop and Blackberry. I was skeptical at first. Really, how long can anyone really read long chapters on that tiny screen? The answer is “for hours, and hours and hours”. Why? Kindle on Blackberry has crisp, readable screen display (with adjustable fonts), bookmarks are created with ease, navigation is fast, and everything from eBook downloads to synching with other platforms is quick and pain-free. As spell out below, I could consume a lot of virtual pages, swiftly. By the end of my first day of I thought the only limitation to this form of digital content consumption was battery power on my Blackberry. Thank heavens for those laptop draining USB cables.

And guess what kids, Amazon’s Kindle Store starts you out in thriftsville with tons of books for FREE, ranging from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf to Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson (later serialized on PBS as “Mapp and Lucia”).

On Blackberry’s tiny screen I read the first 5 chapters in less than 90 minutes. I found myself hitting “P” a lot to reread the previous page again.

On my second day I bit the bullet and actually shelled out more than $9 for a “real” book, The Museum of Innocence by my favorite living author, Orhan Pamuk. If you’ve never been lucky enough to visit Istanbul, reading Pamuk’s sensual text is as close as you’ll ever get. On Blackberry’s tiny screen I read the first 5 chapters in less than 90 minutes. It could have been faster if it were a guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. (Hey, where’s Ann Rockley’s DITA 101 on my Kindle list? Stay tuned.) Some or Pamuk’s passages were so beautiful that I found myself hitting “P” a lot to reread the previous page again.

[FYI – Istanbul by Pamuk will give you great insights into Turkish national character, a good thing to have as Turkey emerges as a global and economic power throughout the rest of this century. Read The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman, which I read in the paperback version purchased at my favorite brick and mortar bookstore. I work in the translation industry, and Turkish is quickly becoming the most popular “new” language for many of our clients, especially in Life Sciences.]

But, I digress. Soon, I hungered for more, and found myself frustrated with the current limitations of most eBooks. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and YouTube have put most of us in the habit of sharing “samples” of content with others. And PDF files reviewed in Acrobat have put us in the habit of making marginal comments in digital ways. Kindle (and most other eBooks) don’t have copy/paste functionality, there is no highlighter pen, and no way to make a simple annotation. And, if there is, it’s not easy to find and use this functionality, which is a problem. All I wanted to do was extract legally correct, small samples to upload somewhere (isn’t there a “YouRead” community yet?) … and I wanted to mark content in multiple ways. Shucks, I just wanted to “color code” text to find favorite passages based on different needs.

To gain wide acceptance, eBooks and eBook Readers will need to allow us to do things we're accustomed to doing with traditional books, but in more meaningful, interactive and community-based ways.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting eBook Readers to double as a word processor, (or to become the next copy/paste Wikipedia to let college students whip out quickee term papers). I suspect that most users will also miss the ability to put their fingerprints on content like we do nearly everywhere else.

Ironically, the ability to “personalize” content is one of the things that I love the most about real, physical books. We can dog ear (upper or lower corner to code importance); we can underline, circle, or highlight sections of text we want to reference later. (In college I was nicknamed “nerdanada” for the 4 colors of highlighter pens constantly sprouting from my polyester shirt pockets). And of course, real books allow us to make marginal notes. I consider these physical highlights and doodles our “finger prints” on physical content.

My Kindle Read / eBooks Wish List

Digital versions of these old paper-based mark up methods (based on XML, or more specifically, DITA attributes, or course) should create persistent and personal “finger prints” on our personal Kindle or eBook copies that could make the world a better place in several ways:

• We could quickly locate content that mattered to us personally, based on different criteria.
• Amazon (or other providers: think Apple) could track our individual buying habits on an even more granular level. Instead of recommending books based on previously purchased titles, the vendor can use community driven social networks to recommend further eBooks for purchased based on the sections of the book that we related to the most.
• For the first time in history, publishers and authors would know exactly what portions of content turned readers on (or off) the most. (Today the most we can do is post a comment on Amazon, or elsewhere, and rarely do we cite individual pages, paragraphs or passages).
• Imagine the power of having a constant consumer survey occurring, page by digital page, all driven with uploadable “highlighter pen” passages! And imagine the apps that could interpret smart content and metadata embedded by our highlight selections, to graphically display consumer response to specific portions of content! I visualize a sort of daily Dow Jones line chart mapped to the book which has longer lines for chapters or DITA topics that got the most “hits” or reader embedded fingerprints.
  • FYI – although Kindle reader offers a “book mark” feature, it is really only useful for general navigation.
• The ability to track the changing hot spots of readers via “fingerprints” over time would also give sociologists and historians the ability to impact a book’s changing impact over several generations. Would it be great to see how graphical representation of reader response to The Next Hundred Years by Friedman had changed 20, 40 or 60 years from now, as we approach the end of the time that he documents?
• And if there is ever a way to “will” your Amazon/whomever library to someone else, your heirs could not only thumb through static pages, they would see your fingerprints, sense your personality, and know what mattered to you at the time of your reading.
• Consumers commenting and sharing digital eBooks would leave an incredible legacy.

the locked, protected content of eBooks precludes us from sharing with others.

This last point has been one my biggest misgivings about the “one-way” aspect of current digital media: the locked, protected content of eBooks precludes any way for us to share our content-specific comments, annotations, whatever, with others. If I “will” my Kindle library to some designated heir, he/she has no way of knowing what turned me on. On the other hand, I have a shelf full of carefully selected books from my grandmother’s estate that achieve that goal beautifully.

Grammie was a red pencil/underline addict (highlighter pens didn’t exist yet) and her personality is evident on every page of what mattered to her. From marginal “stars”, single/double/triple underlines, little balloons around key words, and, best of all, marginal notes like “you’ve got to be kidding!”, I can literally hear her voice as I read what mattered to her.

After death, eBooks could allow your heirs to not only thumb through static pages, but they could also learn more about you by reading your digital fingerprints, helping them to sense your personality, and know what mattered to you at the time of your reading. Artwork: Secret Diary 18: "Up to speed" (2005) by Angela Moll

She was the woman who more responsible than anyone on the planet for who I am today. (OK! So now you know who to blame!) Incidentally, you can get a glimpse into this remarkable woman through a blog I wrote about the discovery of her 100 year old journals, written last year. I have Linked In contacts from Germany who connected with me after reading about what Grammie wrote in 1912. Now that’s what I call persistent fingerprinted content! These remote Linked In contacts are really connecting with her, through me.

Will my Kindle-driven wish list ever come true?

So, is there any hope that the publishing industry (and copyright lawyers) will smell the coffee and make my wish list of interactive features come true? I attended the Intelligent Content 2010 Conference in Palm Springs, CA where a roster of the “smartest guys/gals” on the subject gave us all a realistic whiff of the future of content. (Hint: DITA DITA DITA).

Dev Ganesan of Aptara (a digital publishing and XML content conversion services firm) gave a highly dynamic presentation on “Reimagining the Book: How Intelligent Technology is Changing the Publishing World”. His depiction of the future of the book far exceeded my Kindle-driven hunger for new features. Dev is actively involved in shaping the evolving EPUB standard, a free and open eBook standard designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be optimized for the particular display device. Dev demonstrated “beyond engaging” DITA-driven intelligent and interactive content that runs on anything from a laptop to a Blackberry, iPhone, or most effectively, on the iPad.

The Q&A session was lively, with much discussion about Kindle being the lone wolf on sticking to its proprietary format, which Tim O’Reilly thinks this is a bad idea. The recently launched iPad is “intelligence” ready for what’s coming down the pike. Many of the questions opened up the whole can of worms regarding how do authors, artists and publishers flexibly copyright their assets without creating an impenetrable “glass box” that drives consumers away. (Follow Scott Abel’s tweets on this issue, he is more on top of this than anyone I know and will soon be presenting to a select group of Alpha Dog investors to clue them in).

What will it take to get the ePubs world to “wake up” and create the fingerprint and sharing tools we all crave?

If a dead chocolate icon can make individual “topic level” content available for a modest purchase price, why can’t newspapers, eBooks and other media creators who are quaking over broken copyright laws?

Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) had the answer during the Q&A session for his closing presentation Intelligent Content 2010. “When the lawyers finally realize that publishers can parse book content down to the chapter, or DITA topic level, and sell that content for pennies, and as with iTunes, do this millions and millions of times, then it will happen.” In other words, Amazon and other eBook publishers are sitting on a content gold mine. But they are trying to sell you the entire glass display of See’s Candies when you only want to buy a Marzipan Honey almond paste, a Light Chocolate Truffle and a Dark Bordeaux. (If your itchy fingers clicked on the link in the previous sentence, you will see that even old lady See has wised up and lets you do exactly that!) If a dead chocolate icon can make individual “topic level” content available for a modest purchase price, why can’t newspapers, eBooks and other media creators who are quaking over broken copyright laws?

In the closing conference session, Scott also revealed a future Trival Pursuit question. Name the most popular app on the iPhone right now? Kindle reader and other eBook readers. The future is here. All we need is the intelligently structured content to go with it. And I will think of my grandmother’s red underlines every time I highlight eBook sections and upload it to some future eBook community site. Grammie would have loved this stuff.

‘And this affects me how?’, you ask

So how does any of this affect you? If you are creating content that must be published in multiple formats (including formats that don’t exist yet), get on the DITA wagon and start structuring your content now. Find out what intelligent content is and how to embed it usefully in what you produce. Closely follow webinars, tweets and especially blogs from Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, Joe Gollner and the crew of visionaries that presented at the Intelligent Content conference.

Why? Because the projected pixels displayed at the posh Parker Meridian resort in Palm Springs this week portend the world that we will all soon be living in. The old adage for college professors used to be “publish or perish”. Perhaps the new adage should be “embed intelligence in your structured content, or watch it evaporate.”

*** About the Author

By Alex de Campi

Valentine: An original supernatural thriller set during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia

Imagine a graphic novel series, released every month simultaneously in 14 languages and across all major wireless platforms (Kindle, EPUB, Android, iPhone), hopefully soon via the web and, eventually, in collected print editions. Every month, you pay 99 cents and get 70-75 screens of action, adventure and suspense. In its first fortnight after launch, in the difficult final weeks of December and with no marketing and without all our distributors yet on stream, the first episode had 5,000 downloads — of which English was in the minority. (There were over 100 downloads in Irish, which some call a “dead” language! And Latin is next…seriously.)

So, what is this publication and what innovative publishing house is behind it, you might ask? It’s Valentine­ — an original supernatural thriller set during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia that I am co-writing with artist Christine Larsen — and, at the moment, none. It’s just two American girls who got in over their heads.

Valentine became what it is today as a result of philosophizing about future models of publishing, and our real-life needs to have the book start paying for itself quickly. This was one of the reasons for choosing wireless distribution: it’s easier to sell downloads on phones and eReaders than charge for content on a website.

We are a Creative Commons work, which means that we acknowledge that there will be what some people may refer to as “stealing” but honestly, we’d prefer folks just enjoy the story rather than be demonized for how they obtained it. Hey, their sins may be scarlet, but at least our book is read. We’re also deliberately setting our price point very low (99 cents, versus $3.99 for a US comic book of similar length/content) to entice purchasers.

The creators of Valentine deliberately set the price point at 99 cents — versus $3.99 for a US comic book of similar length/content — to entice purchasers.

To my mind, the three most interesting aspects of how we are publishing Valentine are: the translations, the multiplicity of distributors per format, and the flexibility/scalability of the model, which allows us to dovetail nicely with the traditional publishing model.

The translations came about because in my other life as a filmmaker, I am always complaining about how not releasing films simultaneously in all geographies and all formats is basically what causes “piracy,” — a corporate term for “people wanting to see a film but having no other affordable way of doing so other than torrenting it.”

So if you’re going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk, right? I also have a lot of friends around the world with whom I like to talk comics, and having written for French comics publishers and being a devotee of Japanese comics (to name but two markets) I am very aware of how comparatively tiny the English-language comics market is. Hell, there are individual French bandes dessinée and individual tankubon that regularly outsell per volume the entire annual output of the US comic book industry.

To find our translators, I put messages up on Twitter and Facebook. It really was that simple. Our first six or so translators were friends of mine; the next seven ranged from friends of friends to complete strangers. Most have professional translating experience. The translators receive 50% of the net sales of the book in their language, which gives them an incentive to blog, tweet and otherwise market the hell out of Valentine. Everyone has been warned though that 50% of our net sales for the first nine months or thereabouts is unlikely to earn them more than enough to buy a cup of coffee.

Translators of Valentine receive 50% of the net sales of the book (in the languages into which they translate) which gives translators an incentive to market the book.

I can’t say enough good things about the translation team; they are amazing individuals (they range from an Anglo-Italian pop starlet and a Serbian artist to one of Rolling Stone’s Brazilian correspondents) and, for something organized via Twitter, there has been absolutely zero drama or flake factor. (Actually, that’s a lie. My first Spanish translator went AWOL, but a good friend, the artist Felipe Sobreiro in Colombia, stepped in at short notice.) The translations come in on time, perfectly done; clarification is often asked for and given — a loose network of individuals acting to an extremely high, professional standard.

Another exciting thing about Valentine is the relative frictionlessness of wireless distribution. We have two “publishers” for iPhone: Comixology and Robot Comics. We could add more if desired; there is no exclusivity. I always say this is like having your comic book published by DC and Marvel at the same time — or Glenat and Casterman, or Kodansha and Shogakukan. As we really start hitting the eReader stores we will have the same distribution reach (though not the same marketing muscle) as any major publisher. In today’s publishing world, you have to be everywhere people look.

Valentine is available from the iTunes Store

And that also means, eventually, landing our product on store bookshelves. I love printed books. Part of the thinking behind Valentine was how to achieve three things: an immersive, high-quality reader experience specific to small-screen devices such as the iPhone; a true right-to-left reading experience for our Japanese, Hebrew, and (eventually) Arabic readers as well as our native left-to-right; and an equally good reader experience in our eventual printed collections. The idea of publishing Valentine as a paper book was embedded in our plans from the very start.

Each “screen” is a stand-alone comics panel. There are no “pages” of multiple panels, just infinitely flexible single panels which act as building blocks, shown singly on iPhone screens or rearranged to a traditional comics page for a book. Episode 01 opens with a five-panel panorama of a battlefield that not only creates a wonderful feeling of movement and space when reading on the iPhone, it raises the quality of the print version, where that five-panel spread will become nearly ten digest-sized splash pages.

Though there is no animation or “motion comics” in Valentine, because we are basically dealing with panels of all the same size and orientation — panels shaped like a cinema screen — we have created a very cinematic experience for the reader, in our expression of space and time.

I am beyond excited for when we reach the first major “break” in the Valentine story, at the end of Episode 08, when we will have the first volume of the story complete and ready to look for a publisher — or indeed publishers, as I doubt one will be able to handle all our language editions. (We already have interest in the US edition, but are actively looking for overseas publishers…write me.) The story is set to run to 24 episodes, which in book terms will equate to three volumes of 250-300 page full-color digest size graphic novels.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s difficult. I work four days a week at a bottom-level job to pay my rent, and I could really use those days to improve the Valentine website, work on our marketing, and write my next series. We make mistakes. We are very much learning as we go along. But sometimes I pause and look back over what we’ve accomplished so far, and it strikes me just what a giant thing a small, informal group of people has achieved. And we have so many exciting places still to go! Episode 04 of Valentine is out on February 17th for iPhone, Kindle, Android, and eReader.

[Note] This article reprinted with permission of the author. It originally appeared in Publishing Perspectives magazine.

By Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of Aptara

Dev Ganesan, President and CEO, Aptara

Today’s content consumers are voracious digital omnivores, desiring to feed on all types of electronic content — from Twitter tweets to YouTube videos, from iPhone apps to Facebook updates, from mp3s to eBooks. Yet traditional publishers, particularly trade book publishers, are not prepared to serve digitally savvy audiences the variety of electronic products they demand. That’s because their production processes are traditionally rooted in outdated print publishing practices that are severely inadequate for tackling today’s publishing challenges.


In order to profit – literally – from the new digital markets, publishers must rethink the way they create, manage, publish, and deliver content. They must re-engineer their processes to create more flexibility and guarantee a sustainable and certain future. They must re-imagine a production process that frees their content to be transformed — on-demand — into whatever new formats, devices, and uses consumers require, now and for the future.


Continuing to retrofit existing print-based content workflows is not only impractical, overly expensive, error-prone, and unnecessarily complicated, it’s also not an efficient, flexible, or sustainable business practice. Fred Ciporen, former publisher of Publishers Weekly, recently echoed similar sentiments to an industry group preparing for the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference.


To become lean and robust, publishers have to recognize the shortcomings of undertaking each new publishing challenge from scratch. For example, considering eBook creation as a project at the end of the print publishing lifecycle artificially and exponentially increases production costs. Continuing such practices misses the essential benefits of digitization. It condemns the company to the past, forgoing the future while ignoring consumer demand.


Freeing content from formatting and making it possible to easily deliver content to any device on any platform in any format—print, web, or mobile—is not a new idea. Organizations have been doing it for years through leveraging the power of XML.

“It’s both surprising and ironic that trade publishers, in particular, have yet to adopt XML-first or XML-centric workflows,” said Fred Ciporen.

It’s time for traditional publishers to follow suit − with a content-centered XML-first publishing approach. Getting there is not the difficult or disruptive process that many publishing executives have assumed. For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word. (XML is an open content standard that drastically reduces the effort required of publishing houses to create eBooks — and every other type of content. XML is designed to help publishers break the dependency of content on proprietary formats and specific devices. XML content can be easily repurposed, reused, shared, sorted, aggregated with other content, and automatically processed, published, and delivered, often on-demand.)


“Fortune 1000 companies have been adopting XML publishing not because it’s cool and trendy, but because doing so saves them millions of dollars and provides measurable benefits,” says content management guru Ann Rockley. “It’s seen as a competitive advantage; an approach designed to help publishers respond quickly to both new business opportunities and threats from competitors.”


Note: See Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning (New Riders Publishing) for details on how to plan for and implement a content-first strategy.


Technical communications departments in the aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, life sciences, financial, and publishing industries use a content-first XML publishing approach to create, publish, and deliver their own version of books: product-specific user guides, product manuals, support Web sites, and online help systems from a single repository of content, thanks to XML. Corporate training departments and universities use the same methods to create role-specific XML-based training and eLearning content. Some publishers may be surprised to learn that their own organizations are already using this approach to create in-house documentation and training materials.


Though there are few examples of Trade publishers adopting XML-first workflows, below are two examples of Educational publishing houses that are thinking creatively and benefiting:


John Wiley & Sons has re-engineered their approach to publishing with the advent of Wiley Custom Select, an online portal that provides educators with the ability to create their own custom text books. Teachers select content they desire from any of the products in the Wiley library, arrange it in the order they desire, upload their own content (should they desire to do so), and, with a few clicks, automatically format, publish, and deliver the content into a custom eBook. All of this is made possible using XML.





O’Reilly Media and the Pearson Technology Group joined forces to create Safari Books Online. The premise was simple: compile the best technology books from the leading authors and publishers into an on-demand digital library that technology, digital media, and creative professionals could quickly and easily search for reliable, definitive answers to mission-critical questions. Content downloaded from Safari Books Online is optimized for mobile devices, computers, or other reading devices, and many titles are available as eBooks. All of this is also made possible through XML.





“It’s both surprising and ironic that trade publishers, in particular, have yet to adopt XML-first or XML-centric workflows,” said Fred Ciporen. “Surprising, because they have the most to gain from re-engineering their publishing approaches, and ironic because their titles and products are more ideally suited for such workflows than most other types of publications.” The benefits to the publisher — and the reader — are many, including:

• Faster time-to-market
• Indefinite extension of products’ shelf-life
• Greater and more nimble responsiveness to competitive threats and new business opportunities
• Cost savings through more efficient utilization of human and financial resources
• Ability to automatically combine and deliver various types of content on-demand
• Flexibility in preparing content in new formats (Web, mobile, social media, eBook) for inclusion in fast-growing third party eBook distribution networks like Amazon.com, iTunes, app stores
• Ability to quickly develop enhanced and engaging interactive reading experiences that are not possible with print-based products

Regardless of publisher type, there’s no avoiding today’s bottom line: in order to compete in the digital age, publishers must design a process that allows them to sustainably profit from digital content distribution.


Although eBook challenges may be new, thankfully their solution already exists. The Trade industry is well armed with proven multi-channel, content-centered publishing approaches that deliver sizable, real cost savings and increased margins.


It’s time for Trade publishers to take a fresh look at XML-first workflows. It is the best and only content strategy designed for the present and the future – while establishing a solid foundation on which to profitably operate a publishing business in the digital economy.


[This article was originally published by TeleRead, and is reprinted with permission of the author.]


About the Author
Dev Ganesan is the President and CEO of Aptara, a digital e-book conversion and digital publishing company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.