Comments on: On Production.

By: On being “device agnostic” « William S. Vincent

On being “device agnostic” « William S. Vincent — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:46:44 +0000

[...] at The New Sleakness there is a good overview of the changes in production at major houses. This holds true at every [...]

By: Staying Ahead of the Curve in Publishing | Digital Book World

Staying Ahead of the Curve in Publishing | Digital Book World — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:25:47 +0000

[...] Andrew Malkin at Publishing Perspectives, the other from Tor.com’s Pablo Defendini at The New Sleekness. Despite a good 15 years, give or take, separating the three of us (I’m declaring Andrew the [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:05:05 +0000

I spent most of the ’90s trying to convince authors to use SGML, then XML…finally gave up. I was thinking too much like a programmer/systems analyst at the time. Most authors are not going to use XML (unless they write for a niche publisher in a technical field). Forget about it. Choose the right battle to fight. Better to focus on the in-house workflow, which is manageable. I like the concept of a Word template that translates well to XML for in-house use.

By: From good-enough to fit-like-a-glove e-books | Inchiostro elettrico

From good-enough to fit-like-a-glove e-books | Inchiostro elettrico — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:08:49 +0000

[...] great post by Pablo Defendini spaked some thoughts on the production in publishing and the changes it will (well, should) [...]

By: Dick Margulis

Dick Margulis — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:54:48 +0000

There’s a middle ground between manual typewriter in a cabin in the woods and authors originating mss. in standards-compliant XML. I’m with Rebecca on the inability of authors to write a parseable English sentence without outside assistance, let alone conceptualizing their pearls in terms of how they fit into a markup language’s conceits. But what they do seem to be able to do a half-assed job of is using a Word template furnished by the publisher. Once the copyeditor is done, the now rules-compliant ms. can be the input to an XML-based processing chain, and all is well with the world.

I edit for one major publisher who has standardized on this process, and I have to say it works pretty well. Authors are shielded from markup languages; editors are shielded from the chaos of unformatted mss.

By: Workflow in the House | The Casual Optimist

Workflow in the House | The Casual Optimist — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:35:41 +0000

[...] (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 [...]

By: India

India — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:08:31 +0000

Most authors don't seem to know how to use MS Word properly, either, yet they do keep trying . . . It seems like there's an opportunity here for someone to make an idiot-proof word processor that makes semantic markup easy to understand and apply, discourages unhelpful wysiwyg styling, has built-in version control with a change-tracking and commenting interface for editors, robust citation management (with Zotero integration) so that editing notes and bibliographies becomes less of a nightmare, and outputs clean XML. Lightweight, suitable to run on a netbook or iPad. Designed for long-document production, not for creating miscellaneous office documents. So, uh, could you get on that, you programmer people?

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:33:31 +0000

Having copyedited hundreds of now-published manuscripts in virtually every trade genre, there is no way I would trust authors to produce a standards-compliant XML file. These people generally don’t know how to use a semicolon correctly There’s no reason XML markup can’t be combined with copyediting. Let the authors create. Leave the technical details to the technical people = better results all around.

By: Stefano

Stefano — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:59:48 +0000

Great, great post.

@Ryan Chapman: if I may build a bit on Pablo’s comment, people will pay money for your production skills if that means that your production skills let them have the best possible reading experience for their favourite reading device (be it a paperback, a kindle, an iPhone, a next-big-thing, …), and XML simplifies this a lot.

…although I must agree that it will not be easy to have authors shift to XML.

By: Pablo Defendini

Pablo Defendini — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:22:01 +0000

DocBook, or even better, DTBook, I should think (certainly not whatever crap markup Office or Pages spews forth). But that's way beyond the scope of this post, really. It's up to production departments to do their homework and figure this stuff out.