Dangerous Precedent

E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part Two Point Five of Three

This is part 2.5 of 3. Parts 1 and 2 set the scene.

An example, then. One of my basic points is that having lots of metadata means you can do lots of really nice stuff when you transition from print to online, or print to multimedia. But that metadata needs to be captured and stored as close to the original author as you can. The moment when you can write this stuff down and store it is fleeting, and once it has passed, it has passed forever, for profitable values of forever at least.

One solution is to have your writers mark-up their copy. As an example, here’s the first bit of something I wrote for WIRED last year:

It’s the hot design company hired by Apple to create its first mouse, (and by Microsoft to create its second), by the Post Office to rework the postbox, by Muji to create its wall-mounted CD player and by Procter & Gamble to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the Nokia N-gage, the Palm V and the Head Airflow tennis racquet. Now IDEO is being retained by Barack Obama’s White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of Iceland to help the country to innovate its way out of financial crisis; and by the Kellogg Foundation to reinvent education.

That sits, now, in a few versions. The webpage linked to above, the print copy (in various states of disarray, all over the world), in a few versions of Word docs on the shared drive at WIRED HQ, on my laptop, and inside Gmail. It lived first as a text file, then a word doc, then an InDesign file, then a PDF, then cut and pasted into a web CMS, then as HTML. Apart from the words, it contains nothing useful whatsoever. (obvious gag insert here)

Imagine, however, that instead of a Word doc I had submitted a marked-up document in a flavour of XML, like the following. Read through this, even if it looks weird to you. (And for the semantic web people in the audience, it’s pseudocode. Chill.):

<subject identifier=”Design”/>

<subject identifier=”Industrial Design”/>

<subject identifier=”Bill Moggridge”/>

<subject identifier=”IDEO”/>

It’s the hot design company hired by <company identifier=”APPL”>Apple</company> to create its first mouse, (and by <company identifier=”MSFT”>Microsoft</company> to create its second), by the <company identifier=”UKPO”>Post Office</company> to rework the postbox, by <company identifier=”MUJI”>Muji</company> to create its wall-mounted CD player and by <company identifier=”PANDG”>Procter & Gamble</company> to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the <company identifier=”NOKIA”>Nokia</company> N-gage, the <product identifier=”PALMV”>Palm V</product> and the <product identifier=”HEADAIRFLOW”>Head Airflow</product> tennis racquet. Now <company identifier=”IDEO”>IDEO</company> is being retained by <person identifier=”Barack Obama POTUS”>Barack Obama</person>’s White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of <country identifier=”ICELAND”>Iceland</country> to help the country to innovate its way out of <newsevent identifier=”2008-9FinancialCrisis”>financial crisis</newevent>; and by the <company identifier=”KLLGF”>Kellogg Foundation</company> to reinvent education.

Now think of all of the stuff in that we can index against. No use at all for the print magazine, but once you come to put it into digital form an archive full of typescripts like this would be so full of options it starts to get giddy. Give me a thoughtfully built mark-up standard and a year’s worth of, say, Vogue, and I’ll break your heart with beauty.

Now, is this silly? Is it naive to ask writers to submit copy in a marked-up format instead of just typed English? No. People write in marked-up text all the time. Indeed, with blogging, I’d bet that more people write marked-up than not, even without tools to help them. There’s a whole generation used to writing with angle-brackets that wouldn’t blink at the idea that to submit copy you have to submit it in a marked-up format. Tools to pre-validate it could easily be rolled into a publishing workflow too.

And it’s that workflow that I’ll get to in part three. Meanwhile, Part 2.5.1 awaits you…, and there’s also Introducing Budding.