TECH TRENDS - NOTES ON E-BOOKS 2

Another good post on e-books yesterday from Richard Curtis's Publishing in the 21st Century blog.

There is an assumption, which in my experience of helping publishers take their content online through the Publishing Technology online platforms pub2web and IngentaConnect, is entirely unjustified, is that it is a really simple business getting content online. And that ipso facto, authors - and e-retailers - should get much more of the cake than they were for. Things may change, but as this post nicely demonstrates, there is an enormous amount for publishers to deal with, even if they have had the foresight to StartwithXML. There are multiple different formats, a huge range of TLA's to come to terms with (try this one), and an enormous amount to be done to extract the metadata that is so critical to success online.

Some of this may become easier in time, but with formats and identifiers inevitably lagging behind technology (the industry still cannot work out whether we should use a unique ISBN for each format(, I cannot see this changing anytime soon. As many commentators have noted, most e-books right now are not very attractive renditions of print books being read on not especially attractive readers of one sort or another. There will be much more to come on this issue but I leave for now with a great cartoon from the excellent Bookslut blog from yesterday