I think I also need to expand my horizons from purely digital publishing, because if I don’t, I fear that my content will stagnate. So it’ll still be digital, just a broader approach.

It seems to me that whatever else, we need an open format for trading ebooks. I don’t own a reader, but if I did, I don’t think I’d buy a Kindle, i) because I want to be able to read epubs since that’s the current industry standard and instead the Kindle uses mobipocket (ii) because I don’t want to be limited to not just buying, but also downloading, my books through Amazon, & (iii) and this is purely a personal opinion, having seen our office one, I don’t like the design of it, particularly the fading in/out of the pages when you ‘turn’. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with the distribution of ePubs freely and without DRM security attached except where the titles are out of copyright, but I do agree with everyone using the same file format.

Leaving out the issue of DRM, it’s like .wma vs .mp3 for music. I can open my mp3s in iTunes and in Windows Media Player, but I can’t open the .wma files in iTunes and it’s really, really frustrating. Because I don’t want to spend extra money on a conversion and yet I use iTunes to catalogue and listen to my music files. I do this because I use my iPhone to listen to music, and so being able to access all my music, even that which hasn’t been purchased through the iTunes store, is convenient.

In the same way, say I buy a Sony eReader. Now, I’ll probably buy my books through Sony’s store. But it might just happen that I want to be able to download a copy of On The Origin Of Species (being the ex-History of Science post-grad that I am, this is the first thing I downloaded as a test on my iPhone in Apple’s Bookstore), which I can get for free in a variety of places. I want to be able to import that file onto my eReader and take it on the tube with me. But if I have a Kindle, I can’t do it. I can only do this if I download it through Amazon. And this is bad. Many people who buy a Kindle now, with the launch of the UK store, may well end up with a library of ebooks that they find can’t be exported elsewhere. They will have been tied into Amazon without their knowledge. Obviously, this is what Amazon want, but I can’t imagine it’s what the consumers want.

Imagine if you bought an entire bookshelf, only to be told that they have to stay in the house you were living in when you bought them. What’s that, you want to move house? Fine! But you can’t take your books with you.

We need an industry standard format, and we need to fight to keep things open.

So while I find the story about Amazon pricing more interesting than the Kindle being launched in the UK, I don’t feel I have the authority to comment on the story.  Apologies if you were looking for insight, that I cannot provide! Anything I say will likely be either a) mundane, or b) wrong. And I wouldn’t want to be either.  Believe me, I’d love to have the experience to be able to give an authoritative opinion on this, and on the fact that Andrew Wylie is bypassing publishers altogether. I *know* these things are of import, and I can see the consequences, but I can’t write about them.

The other fact of note here is that I’ve never bought an ebook in my life so I have no personal investment in what the cost of them is. I don’t own an ebook reader (other than my iphone) and I have no desire to buy one.  I cannot fathom the appeal of reading something electronically rather than having a physical book.  Personally, it’s not for me.  I spend all day staring at a screen at work, and do plenty of that in my free time. I don’t want to eliminate the major activity in my life that doesn’t involve pixels.  I realise that, given my job, this is a bit ridiculous, but not owning a reader doesn’t mean that I can’t be enthusiastic about producing quality ebooks. It just means that I’m not a consumer of my product. Which is fine. When I produced exam papers I wasn’t a consumer of those either.  In a way, perhaps being ‘platform neutral’ is a good thing.  I have no preference for the Kindle, or the Sony eReader, or Kobo’s reader, or even the iPad and any other reader you care to name. For me they’re all the same – devices that you can read books on. I don’t have much of an opinion on the benefits of one over another.

And so, to what conclusion do these ramblings bring me?

Well, firstly, that I have the good sense not to comment on something before I’ve learned my trade, because there are far more knowledgeable people than me out there.  Secondly, that one device is much the same as another, but this will change if not all books are available equally. Thirdly, that I really should get on with checking that epub…

You might not being doing it right, but chances are you’re not doing it wrong.

The thing is, in my short career in the (e)book industry, the one thing I’ve discovered is that there is no right way of doing anything. There are frustrations, and problems, but also discoveries and solutions. I moved from an environment in which the work I did was very strictly governed. The process we followed was laid out to ensure the elimination of errors. Everything was checked, checked again, and then checked a third, fourth, and fifth time. By the end of it, you’d seen the same words on a page so many times that you might not even notice errors if they were there.

So I face my current role coming from a place which dangerously encourage my perfectionist tendencies. I find it very difficult to let go of anything that isn’t absolutely right. But with the way the current ebook market is, I’m beginning to realise that there’s no such thing as ‘absolutely right’. So I’m torn between my wish to produce the best books I can, and the need to get our books out there and available to the reader. There are some problems I’ve hit that it’s not yet even possible to solve for ebooks and this in itself is hugely frustrating. However, I do think the strictures of my previous role have been a help for what I was brought in to do at ACB. I’ve had a lot of files to go through and sort out. They’ve needed identifying, and categorising, and tracking – this is all stuff that I find easy, if not always enjoyable, and always time-consuming. I’m a great believer however, in the need to put in the background work before you can achieve anything. You wouldn’t write a dissertation on a specific topic without doing the necessary reading, so apply this to everything else. It always turns out to be worth it in the end.

Having the freedom to define my own process has been a fantastic opportunity, and I’m refining a system for our ebook production that I hope will stand us in good stead for the future, not just for the immediate period of ebooks being a new and exciting thing. Although, when I say ‘a’ system, that’s not quite accurate. Every different list within ACB seems to need a different approach.

Never let it be said that ebooks are simple.  And never let anyone tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Nigel Newton, Chief Executive of Bloomsbury, said “I am delighted to welcome Evan to Bloomsbury. The creation of the role of a worldwide head of sales and marketing and the appointment of a highly experienced American with considerable digital experience reflect our view of the future of the publishing market place.”

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Exciting news! I’m looking forward to meeting Evan, and to the development of our digital marketing strategy in tandem with print books. I’m still so new to all this that I don’t want to start commenting on the impact this will have on me, because I don’t know. My ebooks have little to no marketing at the moment (excluding, perhaps, Me & My Web Shadow) but it’s exciting to see Bloomsbury taking the step forwards to bring digital more into the fold. And my apps will need marketing too!

I came across this blog post yesterday in the Telegraph which rather makes my blood boil. It’s not my fault that I’m a one man band. There’s this huge demand for ebooks, without the resources. The editorial teams here have been pretty great, but they can’t be expected to drop their day jobs in order to do ebooks full-time. I wouldn’t ask that of them. However, I can’t go through and check hundreds of epub files myself and get them all perfect. Especially when to get any amended I have to make a list of the errors, send this list and the epub via ftp to another company, and then wait for that company to make the amends. And with the complex titles I deal with here, the chances are that there’s a week or two delay just getting any amendments made. I’d much rather do it myself, but I don’t have the tools yet.

The tools will come, but until then, and I’m sorry to say this, but I expect the readers may have to live with errors for a little while longer.* I dislike like this as much as anyone, but please don’t demand that we do more than we’re doing, because we’re already doing an awful lot just to get the books out there in the first place.

*Yes, I know about Sigil. But it’s far from perfect and, as yet, isn’t responsive enough for the speed I want to work at, and the size and complexity of the books I’m dealing with.

Of course, there was a practical reason for my purchase, as well as simple indulgence. I’m co-ordinating a few app development projects at work and am very excited. Having an iPhone just means I get to play with what we produce, and allows market research.

There are a couple of events that I attended in the past week that I want to comment on. In reverse order these are the lunchtime seminar at work today, with guest speaker Bill Thompson (@billt), and the other was the ePub user group held at the Publishers’ Association last week. I will write up today first, since the User Group was minuted and so I’ll be able to recap that more succinctly once the minutes are circulated.

I was really interested to hear Bill speak having read his BBC column for a while now. I don’t want to type up everything talked about, but the most interesting part was the discussion on the changing role of publishing. The digitization of the world is such that most of the information we consume has, in some way, been represented or manipulated digitally. The context of publishing has changed. Consumers don’t rely on a single source for their information any more, no longer do the newspapers bring us the news, instead they comment on it. And we rely on the social networks in which we are embedded to let us know what stories to read and people to listen to.

And so we come to the iPad. Bill told us what he has learned in the six weeks since getting one. The ipad reveals the failings of the Kindle and the Sony Reader: they have buttons. Unlike reading a book, you have the sensation of a machine between you and the words. On an iPad you don’t have anything in the way. The sensation of reading returns to a simple relationship between the reader and the book. This isn’t to say the device is perfect, one criticism is that tracking where you are in a file is not the same as tracking where you are in a book. The iPad can show you the former but not the latter.

We were told about three challenges to publishing – economic, technological and intellectual. Far and away, the most interesting for me is the intellectual. We have a cultural relationship with the book. Reading is not instinctual, it is a learned skill. In particular the skill of deep reading a linear text creates associated memory, and reading texts full of hyperlinks and other distractions from a young age will mean that the audience will lose that skill. Now, I do agree that the skill, and pleasure, of connecting with a book shouldn’t be lost, but having spent time in post-graduate academia I would suggest there’s room for a more disconnected form of reading too. I know that while studying for my MA I would often jump from article to article making connections.* The only problem with hyperlinks being in text is that it is the writer creating those links, rather than the reader. The reader is told what connections to make, which does hamper discovery of ideas in some way. I would suggest that much richer connections will be made if you aren’t provided with them by the author, if you have to think for yourself (probably having done some deep reading and remembering what you read) and that it’s a shame this skill could be threatened. I could have spent an hour discussing this, and would happily spend more time on the subject. Somebody remind me to get a copy of Nicholas Carr’s book.

Of course, you don’t have to allow yourself to be distracted. Useful tools such as Instapaper (which I was introduced to by @adrianhon recently) let you save things easily to read later. Adrian’s recent post about reading on the ipad, mentioning Instapaper can be found here. Of course, even as I type this post, adding in useful links where necessary, I’m adding to the distractions.

Sadly, with only an hour to cover such a rich topic, I can’t report that any conclusions were reached. However, this is definitely a topic that I will be thinking about in the future. I’m coming across different ideas for digital publication every day, with books being enriched and enhanced in a huge variety of ways, but I do think there’s an argument for keeping the plain, simple, printed page. It’s taken a few centuries to develop the skill of deep reading and it would be a shame to lose it within a few generations.

*I will say for the record that I may be old fashioned in this regard, but even for online access journals I would print out the article I wanted purely for the ability to highlight and scribble on the page. And there’s nothing quite so satisfying as that moment of inspiration when an argument forms and you know what you are going to say in your essay, after hours of reading and cross-referencing articles on a single topic.

Our policy at ACB is that we assign an ISBN per tradeable format.  Tradeable formats, thus far, include ePub, PDF and XML, in the same way that a print book has a different ISBN for the hardback and paperback editions.  The drawback is that you end up with one book having three different electronic ISBNs, however I think it’s madness to allocate an ISBN per device because you will end up with far more than three!  So we supply Sony and Amazon and Kobo and Ebooks.com (and all the others) with one ePub labelled with one eISBN, which can be linked in the metadata to the print ISBN. They are then free to assign their own reference number (such as Amazon’s ASIN), however their report back to us includes our eISBN so we can track our sales.

Of course, Google are going to throw a spanner in the works later this year (? – possibly, who knows exactly when…).  They have told us that we have to assign books supplied to them an ISBN just for them (a ‘Google ISBN’ as we refer to it). If we don’t, they will. So our epubs will end up having two ISBNs. One for everyone else, and one for Google. Thanks Google.

Library aggregators who take PDFs get the same book with a different ISBN. I can’t see it making sense any other way. The two formats are not the same, so they deserve to be distinguished.  Again, some aggregators then choose to assign their own reference number, but this is of little consequence to my tracking. As long as I know what has been distributed. To be honest, I can match on title just as easily as I can match on ISBN (in the tracking spreadsheet that I have created for my own purposes, not for any official reporting).  The only issue I have with libraries is where titles have been licensed without having any electronic ISBN, instead they’re out their, online, under their print ISBN. There are few, but there are some.

I have it easy, I can commission an ISBN where there is one missing. I have the backing of an established publishers. Out there in the world for those publishing on their own, its not so easy.

I focused on outlining the basic formats in which ebooks are released, and talking about the process I want to establish.  My manager had suggested to work from the assumption that my audience know nothing at all, and afterwards commented that I had perhaps even presumed too much knowledge. Part of the problem, I think, is that I don’t want to appear to be patronizing, but at the same time I want to be clear.

Incorporating the production of an ebook along with the hard copy publication of a frontlist title shouldn’t be too complicated, in principal.  Once we have a final pdf, the ebook process kicks off.  This pdf is supplied to a conversion house, who turns it into a reflowable epub file, and we then do a Quality Assurance (QA) check. If there are any amendments needed, we send a list of these, and the back and forth continues until we are happy.  In practice, I’ve not really had a chance to complete this process yet.  Of course, the process is complicated due to the nature of many of the books we publish here, which are more complex than a typical novel.  There’s a much greater level of formatting needed e.g. for dictionaries, or plays.  Questions come up such as the placement of footnotes – do you turn them into endnotes so as not to interrupt the flow of the text? – and appearance of tables.  These aren’t questions I can answer, which is why we want to involve the editorial teams to a greater extent.  In order to produce the best ebooks we can, we need to make the right choices with regard to format and layout.

I’m also finding a lot of my time taken up by kick-starting the production of smartphone apps (naming no particular brands). We seem to be juggling lots of different ideas and possible developers, with no central person co-ordinating.  I’ve started out by outlining the fact that we need to write a ‘comprehensive’ design brief for each app we want to produce, which can be supplied to developers in order to request a quote.  It’ll be interesting to see where this goes in the coming months, and I’m looking forward to buying my iphone when I get the chance!