@John Maxwell re authors writing in XML/HTML. It was not very long ago that publishers began requiring authors to deliver a Word file when turning in manuscripts. There was a lot of bitching from the Luddites and for a while there was even a movement to charge publishers for formatting their books for them. After all (they argued), think of all the time and money publishers are saving on typesetting costs. Publishers quashed that idea and in time, submitting a book in Word or a similarly suitable document format became part of the author’s contractual obligation.

The point is that authors learned a new skill and after a while no one thought twice about submitting Word documents.

I have no doubt that authors will adapt to markup language the same way and will feel as liberated as they did when they gave up their manual typewriters for word processors.

Richard

Truly, though, I am an introvert. I just happen to be an extremely social introvert. I promise I crawled back into my the shell the very next day.

Just saying.

Other responses (short as I’m traveling and jetlagged)…@Rich, I suspect we will have this conversation many times. I don’t know who will pay whom for what, but I am convinced that the responsibility for much of this work will fall on the shoulders of editors. They are closest to the manuscript and best positioned to handle this job. How it will shake out is still being determined (what will we call this role, what skill sets are required, how this falls into the workflow). But the current process is unsustainable. It costs more to do it the hard way, and maybe the savings realized will be passed to editorial (one can hope).

Now, then. Of course it will be difficult bordering on impossible to get authors to write in HTML first. Inevitably there will be post-facto conversion, but if you think that’s simple, you’ve already proven your markup sucks.

Anyone who thinks markup is simple is bad at markup. I assure you this applies quite handily to “simple” books like novels.

Can anyone who has left a comment on this post convert a book chapter to valid, semantic XHTML 1.1 (as required by ePub), with correct character encoding and readable CSS?

In any length of time, with any tools?

Somehow I doubt it.

In the Pragmatic Programmers’ presentation, they made two points here: first, that the markup language they use was designed specifically for their (tech/programming) books, and that it was made to be as simple as possible; second, that if the content was simpler (like the kind of prose most of us read most of the time), you could get away with even simpler markup. That’s where good old HTML becomes relevant as XML that even authors can write in.

All that’s required is a toolchain that connects web-based content with the other kinds of things you need (like ePub and print and whatnot). We’re working on that at SFU, and we’re not the only ones…