Exact Editions Blog

There is a new burst of enthusiasm for XML amongst book publishers. Mike Shatzkin, who often has cogent things to say, has produced a little encomium for XML in Publisher’s Weekly.

Here’s what we call the Copernican Change. We have lived all our lives in a universe where the book is “the sun” and everything else we might create or sell was a “subsidiary right” to the book, revolving around that sun.

In our new universe, the content encased

I had a wry chuckle on noticing the form of the url’s that Google is using in its magazine service. They are something like this: (http) //books.google.com/books?id=Ok8XtrhowscC which is more or less gobbledeygook because it doesnt need to be anything else. But the chuckle was over the way that Google give magazines a ‘book’ id…. Our system is not too dissimilar and having worked from ‘magazines’ towards books, we were until a week ago putting a ‘magazine’ moniker in the … Keep Reading

And this is not about the recession. This is Amazon’s news that they are now putting some of their cloud in Europe. I have to say that I always thought that it always was in Europe. But I guess it is more in the EU now than it was (probably so that businesses that have to say that they host stuff in the EU can stay with that). Even so, it seems to be going against the grain a bit … Keep Reading

Google Blogs the news and Danny Sullivan has an excellent summary of what the service does and currently doesn’t do.

Here is a 2-page spread from New YorK Magazine on Tom Stoppard.

Google is mainly (entirely?) working from scans (yes I know that there were no PDFs in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s). I am not sure that there are any current issues in the archive I couldnt see anything yet from the noughties (correction Popular Science is there up … Keep Reading

Why does this Guardian article about the Government putting aside £1 Billion to fund technology startups give me a gloomy feeling?

Somehow one knows that if the government does this, the bureaucracy will kill or at least stifle too many of the innovative companies that go with it. When we started in 2005/6 we wasted too much time (not a great deal thank heavens) talking to and negotiating with VCs and getting a small firms loan guarantee. That was a … Keep Reading