Exact Editions Blog

The Association of American Publishers have produced a letter in support of the IDPF‘s EPUB standard. There are so many things wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to start. This quotation is representative of the substance of the letter:

….For books with text that can be reflowed, many publishers would like to create and deliver to retailers and/or wholesalers EPUB files. If a proprietary e-book format is then needed, it is expected that the

This looks pretty interesting (and it looks like the first installment of a multi-part manifesto). I particularly liked her way of putting things here:

The publishing model has evolved over history in a very slow, organic fashion. The sedate pace of change has suited publishers. Stated simply, the journey of a text from author to reader has been a linear one, with publishers traditionally fulfilling the intermediary roles of arbiter, filter, custodian, marketer and distributor. There has been some blurring

Web software has the massive advantage that you can make incremental improvements to a steadily improving service (and web services do seem to steadily improve — we trust that Exact Editions is). There was a small new release for our service today, and users will not notice anything.

The main change is that it makes it easier for us to set up ‘shortcuts’ for content that we are hosting for our clients. It logs the user into the right account … Keep Reading

Philippe Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped, asked 14 talented people how they cope with the digital onrush. There are some helpful suggestions (and don’t we all need it). But I was gobsmacked to see that he had sought and actually elicited advice on this matter from Noam Chomsky:

«I wish I could answer sensibly. I just can’t. You should see the room in which I’m working. Piles of books, clippings, manuscripts, notes,… All sorts of lost treasures buried in

John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have been sponsored by Thomson Reuters to write some pieces on the future of search. They are two of the shrewdest commentators on internet search so the essays will be worth reading. John Battelle has an exceptional feel for the overall commercial space in which search operates. Danny Sullivan has a terrier-like persistence which means that when he has really researched a topic, you are unlikely to find a better or a more judicious summary … Keep Reading