best of toc 3e analysis and ideas about the future of publishing full

Best of TOC, 3rd Edition TABLE OF CONTENTS Special Upgrade Offer Introduction Innovation How Agile Methodologies Can Help Publishers What is an agile methodology? How agile methodologies apply to publishing? Taking a Page Out of ESPN’s Playbook Pay for one, access all Building talent franchises Memorable quotes Perceptive Media: Undoing the Limitations of Traditional Media How does Perceptive Media work, and are there privacy concerns? What driving factors are pointing to the success of this kind of storytelling platform? In the early days, Perceptive Media is being applied to broadcast technology What potential applications for Perceptive Media you envision in the publishing industry? Kindle Fire vs iPad: “Good Enough” Will Not Disrupt How disruptive is the Kindle Fire to the low-end tablet market? Is Amazon a threat to Apple? What role you see Apple playing in the future of publishing — and what current trends you identify as driving factors? Don’t Build Social — Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel Services, APIs, and the Complex Web Publishing focus and third-party opportunity Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy If you sell a product publishers don’t want, who is to “blame”? Solutions to solve future problems Where to next? The risk of ceding the future to other players In the end, readers will drive the change It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator Roadblocks People have been thinking about this for awhile The publishing incubator The Slow Pace of eBook Innovation Putting a Value on Classic Content Reading Experience and Mobile Design Mobile design? Five convergence points for mobile design & reading system design Serial Fiction: Everything Old Is New Again Why should you be interested in serial fiction? Frequency, engagement, and experimentation It still comes down to great writing Revenue Models Getting the Content Out There Isn’t Enough Anymore In what contexts does content aggregation create the most value? How about paywalls — is anyone doing this properly? What is the best way to make this model work? 24Symbols is based on a subscription model Since your launch, have you had to change the model to make it work? Amazon, eBooks, and Advertising New Life for Used eBooks In-Book Purchases Why a Used eBook Ecosystem Makes Sense Rich Content In the Case of Interactivity, We’re Still at the Phase of Irrational Enthusiasm Where you draw the line between meaningful and gimmicky interactivity? Are there times when interactivity is detrimental and should be avoided? How have mobile platforms changed the publishing landscape? What kinds of tools authors need to create interactive content, and what new skills might they need to develop? What are some guidelines authors should follow when considering interactive features for content? How should one decide between building an ebook and building an app? Is there a tipping point? Are eBooks Good Enough Already? Data Transforming Data into Narrative Content What does Narrative Science and how are you applying the technology to journalism? How does data affect the structure of a story? What kinds of stories lend themselves well to this type of system and why? What kinds of stories just won’t work — what are the boundaries or limitations? In what ways can publishers benefit from Narrative Science? In what other industries are you finding applications for Narrative Science? Book Marketing Is Broken Big Data Can Fix It What are some key findings from the Bookseer beta? What kinds of data are most important for publishers to track? What does real-time data let publishers do? How would you describe the relationship between sales and social media? Will Retailers Start Playing Big Brother with Our Content? It is also possible to consider creating CSS snippets and apply them dynamically using the editor This in effect turns the editor into a design interface which will open the path for in-browser design of various media including, importantly, ebooks and paper books There are various attempts at the HTML5 editor, which might also be called a WYSI (What you see is) editor The most successful are Mercury, Aloha and the recent fork of Aloha called WYSIWHAT Each of these are treading their own path but things are really opening up As an example and with reference to the last post I made about Math in browsers, the WYSIWHAT group is making some giant strides in equation editing Their equation plugin which was first built by Mihai Billy Balaceanu at the September WYSIWHAT hack meet in Berlin has since been improved and extended by the Connexions team and the good people at OERPUB (including the talented trio of Phil Schatz, Kathi Fletcher and Marvin Reimer) The plugin was made by including MathJax in the page and allowing the editor to interact with that This was not easily possible with previous WYSIWYG editors The progress on the equation front is looking very good but what this shows more than anything is that by using WYSI editors the entire page is available for interaction by the user or Javascript Anything you can think of that Javascript can you can bring to the editing environment, and that is quite a lot … [Coda: if you are brave and have Chrome 23 installed try visiting BookJS.net, follow the instructions and then visit this demo (it enables content editing of a book and dynamic CSS editing via contenteditable) All posts by Adam Hyde are CC-BY-SA.] A Kindle Developer’s 2013 Wishlist By Sanders Kleinfeld 2012 was a good year for Kindle developers With the unveiling of the firstgeneration Fire tablet in late 2011 and the release of the KF8 Mobi format in early 2012, designing beautiful ebooks for the Kindle platform became a reality KF8 introduced a fixed-layout specification for Kindle Fire, which opened the door to graphically rich titles — children’s books, graphic novels — in Mobi format KF8 also greatly increased CSS2 compliance for standard reflowable ebooks, implemented a handful of CSS3 features (text shadow, rounded borders), and added support for embedded fonts The subsequent rollout of KF8 to Kindle eInk readers running firmware 3.4 (including the new Kindle Paperwhite) and KF8’s support for @media queries to enable fallback styling for non-KF8 devices helped to increase rendering parity within the diverse Kindle ecosystem But while 2012 marks a huge leap forward toward the incorporation of modern Web standards into the Kindle platform, there is still much room for improvement in terms of multimedia/interactivity, content rendering, and ease of ebook development Here is my humble wish list of improvements for the Kindle platform for 2013: Add support for embedded audio/video to Kindle Fire When KF8 was introduced in early 2012, support for audio/video was not included in the format — even though MP3 audio and MP4 video were already supported in Kindle for iOS Nearly 12 months later, the Kindle Publisher Guidelines still read, “Currently, only Kindle for IOS [sic] supports audio and/or video content Kindle e Ink devices and Kindle Fire not support Kindle Editions with Audio/Video.” Given that support for streaming multimedia content via Amazon Instant Video is such a highly touted feature of Kindle Fire, it’s rather surprising that Amazon has not been more assiduously pursuing support for embedded multimedia for Kindle Fire ebooks As a result of this discrepancy — Kindle Fire supports KF8 but not audio/video, and Kindle for iOS supports audio/video but not KF8 — there is no single Kindle platform that supports all the ebook features that Amazon offers Those Kindle readers who opt to buy a Fire over an iPad are penalized by not being able to view embedded video in ebooks, and those who opt to instead read their ebooks on Kindle for iOS are penalized with a lower-quality reading experience, as embedded fonts and many key CSS features will not be supported This should be rectified ASAP Here’s hoping that by this time next year, embedded audio/video is supported on every Kindle tablet device, and that KF8 is supported on Kindle for iOS Add KF8 support for MathML High-quality typesetting of mathematical equations is a challenge in most digital formats, and Kindle is no exception Because Kindle’s KF8 format does not support MathML (a XML vocabulary for markup of math content that is part of the HTML5 specification and supported to varying degrees in different desktop and mobile Web browsers), the only viable typesetting option for including complex equations, matrices, etc., in ebooks is to embed the math content as images However this approach is far from ideal, because when implemented as images, mathematical equations are not searchable or resizable by readers Optimizing image size can also be challenging See the Kindle Paperwhite screenshot below featuring two equation images scaled to the same size, which results in the longer equation (bottom) being more heavily “shrunk” than the shorter equation (top) Figure 13-6 Two probability equation images rendered on Kindle Paperwhite, the bottom equation shrunk more than the top equation Adding MathML support to KF8 would remove the burden for equation sizing and resolution from publishers and developers, and place it on the ereader’s rendering engine, where it belongs As Adam Hyde notes in his TOC post on math typesetting, the current state of MathML support in browsers and on the Web is rather woeful, forcing reliance on third-party libraries like MathJAX to correct and normalize rendering But this presents a huge opportunity for ereader vendors like Amazon Adding robust MathML support may provide a competitive advantage in the likely-to-grow ebook marketplace for math and science textbooks iBooks already provides limited MathML support via its WebKit engine; your move Amazon! Add a Monospace Default Font to Kindle Paperwhite The Kindle Paperwhite ereader contains six system fonts: Baskerville, Caecilia, Caecilia Condensed, Futura, Helvetica, and Palatino None of these is a ... new piece of software when the core concept needs proof from the user to evolve — or where there needs to be a very direct and engaged relationship between the producers and users of a particular... adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project At the end of the day, it’s about getting something out there that we can test and learn from How agile methodologies apply to publishing? Kristen... Open Publishing s “Open” Future Content access via APIs Evolution of DRM Apps, platforms, formats, and HTML5 Let’s open this up together Free and the Medium vs the Message Free as in freedom (and