A List Apart on ebooks and HTML
by Pablo Defendini
Remember when I went on my screed for production reform in publishing? Well, the heavyweights over in the web development community are starting to take notice of publishing’s little corner of the media space. Joe Clark has a fascinating article up titled Web Standards for E-books on A List Apart (which should totally be in your bookmarks or RSS feed anyway). It was a bit of an egoboo to read this bit:
What’s the solution? The canonical format of a book should be HTML. Authors should write in HTML, making a manuscript immediately transformable to an E-book. A manuscript could then be imported into that fossil the publishing industry refuses to leave behind, Microsoft Word. (MS Word’s Track Changes feature has become a kind of methadone for an addicted publishing industry.)
To typeset a print book from this source, translating twice (HTML → Word → InDesign) is a proven workflow with the added advantage of outputting tagged PDFs with good semantics.
Go read the entire article, it’s chunky and chock-full of compelling thoughts on ebook production from the point of view of people who have been working with HTML from the early days of the web, and, more importantly, are strident supporters of standards-based web development and the semantic web.
Comments
Also of interest is this article, from Karl Stoley:
http://www.technorhetoric.net/12.3/topoi/stolley/index.htm
Ah, the Lo-Fi manifesto. Like most manifestos, excellent intentions behind it, but too general in its blanket assumptions about production (although it’s probably quite appropriate within the context of this post). Still, worth reading; thanks for the link.