Gordon Woolf's Blog

Open letter to a publisher thinking of switching to online

Yet another magazine sent me a notification that it was going online. This time it was to be just a trial, but here is a slightly edited version of my reply:

While I can understand the desire of publishers to change to online provision of magazines, I would suggest that this is not as much in a reader’s interest. It is largely a transfer of costs from publisher to reader rather than a true saving in costs (and therefore in resources).

For example, I have a 10GB monthly download limit and while I usually stay within that, it means that on the occasions when I might not, it is quite likely that a magazine file will have to wait until the new month or be ignored altogether. My minimum cost to add an extra couple of GB of download is a one-off $20 payment or, alternatively, to increase by $10 every month to go to a higher limit which may not be used.

If I wish to show something to my wife or look at it more closely it means printing it out which again increases costs at my end, and though I’d often choose to print on my relatively ancient laser printer at a few cents a page, it might have coloured content that makes it more likely that I’d print on my inkjet at perhaps a dollar or more a time for a 2- or 3-page article.

The print edition will also normally be passed on to someone at the local computer club or U3A or community house (or even the local branch of the Australian Shareholders Association  (though that I no longer attend with any frequency). At any of those it may well attract further interest and possibly subscribers before being recycled (at least I can hope it is recycled). The online edition, if downloaded, will consume electricity and broadband fees before being deleted, i.e. gone for ever. Online for you it will continue to cost storage fees.

I can see a lot of sense in making some content available only online, especially the tables which have to be printed in such small type that they cannot be read by most people with my aged eyes. News too may be better online but most articles tend to be scanned much more quickly on screen than in print...and therefore not read as thoroughly.

So, unless you plan to also reduce article lengths and their number and interest, I’d suggest that at the very least you investigate a thinner, more cheaply printed edition with web links, preferably in a short form or linking to an index page online for more information.

I note your comments that the online version is just a trial but it does take several seconds to go from low to high resolution on a page and I note that links within pages are not live.

Lastly, it is a Flash file and I presume you have noted that the iPad does not accept Flash files and does seem to be the only real eReader suitable for viewing online magazines, at least until we see HP’s contender.

Get ready for the ISTC - a new book identifier

ISTC (International Standard Text Code) is likely to come into use in the book industry worldwide late this year or early 2011. Basically it goes beyond ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) to identify content rather than edition.

Different editions of a work, even from different publishers, should have the same ISTC.

It will look something like:

ISTC 0A9-2010-12B4A105-7

and may appear on the back cover but is more likely to be referenced just on the copyright page and will be listed in database information about the book.

In this way, you'll be able to tell instantly whether a trade paperback, a hardback, an audio book or an ebook have the same content. It should also help end the confusion on whether different presentations of the same book should have the same ISBN. They should not. They should have the same ISTC.

The issuers of ISTCs will almost certainly be the same as the issuers of ISBNs, in other words the biggest players will be Bowker and Nielsen under the supervision of the ISTC Agency and using a single, global XML database system.

Items covered are described as "creative works" such as prose, peotry. lyrics, original screenplays, audio and stage scripts. Photographs, although they can be part of such works, are not in themselves covered and while graphic novels would be, the registration would cover only the text elements of these.

The registration agency will run a computer test to check whether the content has already been registered.

Works can be registered by an author, publisher, agent, library, rights management or collection agency or distributor. It is not yet clear what the fee structure is likely to be. The present ISBN structure is commonly a price per code which reduces with quantity, although there are provisions is some countries for free issue of ISBNs, especially single registrations.

The ISTC identifier is a 16-character code (using numbers 0-9 and letters A-F, i.e. the hexadecimal system) in four sections to identify the registration agency, the year of registration, the identifier and a check digit.

It has no section for registrant, so the same content can be published by diffreent publishers but would have only one ISTC. That's a major difference to the ISBN which identifies primarily a publisher.

A work that is translated, abridged, annotated, a compilation, criticism, excerpt, expurgated, revised or adapted, will get a new ISTC but the metadata for that must state the original ISTC and just what its relationship is.

This will also be a problem for authors and publishers of non-fiction works which have frequent editions. New ISBN are usually adopted if there is anything but superficial changes but often there are substantial changes between editions, and all degrees inbetween. It seems it will still be a matter of opinion with the publisher making the decision whether to use the same ISTC or gain a new one with a reference to the original.

There will be internet search engines to identify works from the ISTC and for prospective publishers etc to search on title, author etc to establish whether a work has been registered. They will not link to ISBN data and it would be normal for a work to be registered for an ISTC well before it gains an ISBN, such as that an author might register it before submitting to an agent or publisher, or an agent might register a work before submitting it to publishers.

No one will own any single ISTC once it has been created and an ISTC will not imply any rights to the material. (To my mind, however, it may discourage plagiarism).

It may help in book searches, since once a particular example of a work has been found, that will provide the ISTC which is what is needed to identify the work in other formats, even if they have a different title. It may also help avoid duplication of axquisitions by libraries.

The usefulness of ISTC will increase with time, more rapidly if the registration agencies and especially those who already maintain databases used extensively by the book industry decide to start entering past works. There seems to have been some indications that this will happen though that may depend on what they see as possible financial benefits.

For an author or small publisher I would suggest that ITSC is not something they need to act on instantly, but they do need to watch what is happening. Once the codes start to appear for new works by major publishers in your genre then that will be the time to act.

In the meantime you may like to delve further:

ISTC: http://www.istc-international.org/ (see resources page for a link to the user manual)

Book Industry Study Group discussion paper:
http://www.bisg.org/contentweb/papers/the-international-standard-text-code-istc-a-work-in-progress/

A 2009 overview by Andy Weissberg, VP of Identifier Services at Bowker: http://www.myidentifiers.com/multimedia/pdfs/ISTC_overview_ISQv21no3.pdf

'Large print' is not just type set larger

An interesting suggestion I saw on a publisher forum a while ago was to produce a large print edition and to just reduce the pages of this to make the standard edition. The logic was that some of the readers for which the book was intended were sufferers of diabetes, which often brings sight problems.

Unfortunately the internationally researched standards for large print books, are not just an enlarged form of normal typesetting. And there is a big difference in producing books for those who are substantially sight impaired, and books for those of us who may have a slight deterioration in sight within the normal ranges of variation with age.

A chapter in the current edition of Type & Layout (the book by Colin Wheildon republished by The Worsley Press) -- although this is a chapter in the additional material by Geoffrey Heard -- does describe how preparing a book for the non-fluent reader is different to preparing a book for a fluent reader who may have minor sight problems, or no problems at all.

Just one quick example: although Wheildon's research showed that for reasonably fluent readers, justified serif type is by far the most readable, that is not true for someone who is less fluent, either through education or sight.

The chapter also includes information on the alternative of "Clear Type", a standard developed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, with standards which, while being acceptable to a wide range of those with site problems, is more acceptable to others. While tending towards sans faces it does accept fonts with a good serif definition such as Bookman.

I would therefore warn against producing a smaller version of a large type, or even "Clear Type" book as a normal edition.

If the text of a book is correctly tagged in its preparation it would be a very simple matter to run it through with alternative layout specifications. I'd estimate an hour or two in a program such as InDesign, maybe even less in an entirely tag based layout program such as TeX.

There will need to be an entire new round of research into legibility on ebook readers.

Email: the world will know

One of this country's senior politicians has just found that emails may not be what they seem. In particular a forwarded email may be changed easily before it is forwarded. That should be a warning to everyone who uses email.

To start from the basics: There's a simple Law of Email, which states "Never send anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know".

They are easy to copy, easy to change, easy to get out of even secure offices since the introduction of USB sticks, which has led some companies to disable the USB ports on their computers, a method which causes more problems than it solves.

Encryption should be used if you are sending confidential information by email, but encryption does not assure security since it has to be decrypted at some stage ("Decryption" rather than the unencryption which I've seen many times). Emails may be decrypted on the main mail server which offers little security within an office.

There are better ways, one of the simplest being to create a PDF of a document, encrypt that and sign it digitally. Warning: simply requiring a password to open a PDF is not securing it; a Google search will reveal programs that will ger around that (which I've needed to do to get an ad into a magazine that was secured by a foolish designer).

If you have this kind of material then you'll need to study the Acrobat help files. There are also some examples of commercial software programs that will make it a simpler task.

On the other hand, there are authors and others who are so scared of someone stealing a single copy of their ebook that they make access difficult for the people who have paid for the file. I would quote from my own experience when running a milk bar/convenience store. If you put a box of lollies on the counter they will sell, but a proportion will be stolen -- move them to the back or anywhere where the customer cannot easily pick them up and they stop selling. There will be a point at which theft is too great but it will always be worth losing a few.

It can also reflect on the trust between a business owner and his customers. In my book Success in Store there are two examples of the relationship between my wife and some local high school students who came regularly for fish and chips. In the first, they left wrappers and cans by the seats on the footpath until one of them saw my wife go out to clean up their mess as they left. "Do you have to do that?" one asked. No one else will do it, she said, and from that day there was no more mess; everything went in the bins.

Similarly, a sheepish youngster returned to hold out a confectionary packet, saying he'd forgotten to pay. Next day one of the other students asked if he'd returned to pay. "He told us on the way back to school and we said 'you don't do that there'."

Fair dealing will do a lot to reduce problems of theft but that does not help with the general continued availability of email and its likelihood to spread far beyond its original intended use.

A recent search for my name in Google, and going far beyond the first two or three pages where most of us stop searching, came up with an email I wrote in 1996 which is 13 years ago, long before the Internet was anything like it is today, and in the earliest days of the web when many exagerated claims were being made about "hits" on web sites. If you are interested, that email is at http://open4success.net/Olnews/mbox2/282.html

That was not the start of email for me as I'd already been using it for the best part of a decade; at that time the problem was that there were not many people you could send emails to but I did use an email-to-telex service to submit articles to some publishers.

In all that time, there have been regular warnings that normal email is the least secure communications system of all. At least with phone recordings you can be fairly sure that what is heard is what you said, and there are legal safeguards on what can be used. With email, forgery is simple, and preservation and distribution is even more simple.
 

How to make great ads

First I must declare an interest. The new ebook How to make great ads for (sm)all business grew out of my book  Success in Store, with co-author Geoffrey Heard, but this is entirely Geoff’s work. It consists mainly of short tips with examples from real life of what to do (and a few of what not to do). Most of the examples are of ads for small businesses and it is intended to be digested in small bites – taken a spoonful at a time, which suits ebooks, rather than read in a continuous session. You can download a free extract – a 30-page selection – and that should give you enough ideas to pay for the book several times over, because the full book as a download costs you only US$5.95 See details at worsleypress.com