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Tag: shovelware

Published February 10, 2010

Workflow in the House

As I’ve mentioned in the past, many publishers have tended to treat e-books as shovelware, and (unsurprisingly) the hasty conversion of files intended for print into e-book editions — with little or no consideration for the medium — has meant the quality of e-books has suffered.

Needless to say, poor quality e-books are becoming something of an embarrassment for publishers trying to convince readers to pay a premium for downloads (as Kassia Kroszer recently pointed out in Publishing Perspectives: it is hard to justify higher e-book prices when the product simply isn’t up to scratch), and clearly it’s an issue publishers need to address sooner rather than later if they want win this argument.

The problem of substandard e-books partially stems from the fact that many publishers currently lack the means and expertise (and, to some extent, the will) to produce high quality e-book editions themselves. Their workflow and production process are set up for print, so the quickest way to create e-book files has been to outsource the job to third parties, inevitably with very little quality control.

This was the subject of an interesting (if somewhat snarky) post this week by Pablo Defendini, producer and blogger at Tor.com, at The New Sleekness:

[B]ig publishers outsource a large part of these services… They’ve found that cutting out expensive production departments and hiring out the services of middlepeople, who also handle distribution and sometimes even retail fulfillment, saves on people power (read: health insurance and pensions), hassle, and extra load on their IT departments. Well, guess what one of the cardinal rules of the digital revolution is: digital production eliminates the need for most middlepeople. Bring this all back in-house, make it a lean operation. Settle on nothing less than a standards-compliant workflow, but please, build it from the ground up, as opposed to tacking it onto your existing production setup as an afterthought.

Pablo is picking a crowd-pleasing soft target in the “big publishers” — many (most even?) small and medium size publishers (the notable exception being O’Reilly of course) are also outsourcing their e-book production — but he does make some really important points about the need to learn new skills, rethink workflow and (ideally) bring e-book production in-house.

The comments are also worth reading but, — if like me — you are just beginning to get your head around this stuff, definitely work your way through the Digital Book World presentation by Liza Daly, of Threepress Consulting, referenced in the article:

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Published September 30, 2008

Are E-Books Shovelware?

Introducing his five-part series BASIC Principles of Online Journalism (discussed last week), Paul Bradshaw notes:

It shouldn’t have to be said that the web is different, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio.

So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?

Organisations used to do this, and some still do. It was called ‘shovelware’, a process by which content created for another medium (generally print) was ‘shovelled’ onto the web with nary a care for whether that was appropriate or not.

It was not.

With Peter Kent of DNAML recently suggesting  on the O’Reilly TOC blog that publishers treat e-books like software, and many e-books just digitalized versions of their print edition, are e-books falling into the category of  ‘shovelware’?

Certainly trade publishers have tended to think of the e-book as a ‘format’ — a cheaper, more convenient way to read text than an ordinary book that requires little amendment — rather than an entirely different ‘medium’ with new rules and possibilities.

Andrew Gallix, editor-in-chief of 3:AM Magazine mulled some of this over in The Guardian last week:

Bar a few notable exceptions (Penguin’s wiki-novel or We Tell Stories project), traditional publishers have used the internet as a glorified marketing tool providing them with new ways of flogging the same old same old: e-books, Sony Readers, digi-novels, slush-pile outsourcing… So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic…

I don’t think you  don’t need to embrace Gallix’s avant-garde e-lit leanings — or see e-books as completely detached from print — to appreciate that if they simply reproduce what’s already available, e-books are not really reaching their potential.

At the very least, authors and publishers should consider how the digital reading experience differs from that of print, whether this is producing new texts specifically intended to be published as e-books, or providing additional digital content for existing texts.

Thinking about Bradshaw’s  principles — brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity, community, and conversation — seem like a good place to start.

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