In-Browser Design

The page is changing in so many ways – time-based media is making its way into book pages, reactive content, scrollable space, and a multitude of differing display devices make designing pages pretty hard work these days. How to design for so many possibilities? How to understand so many possibilities?

Craig Mod of flipboard makes a very compelling argument for two forms of page : formless and definite content in an article he wrote for Book: A Futurists Manifesto – the first book to be produced by PressBooks. Craig’s argument, in a nutshell and in his own words is:

the key difference between Formless and Definite Content is the interaction between the content and the page. Formless Content doesn’t see the page or its boundaries; Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it. It edits, shifts, and resizes itself to fit the page [...] Put very simply, Formless Content is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas.

Craig argues that most book content we know is formless – the text can reflow into other containers without affecting the meaning. This position is in tension to the thinking of most book designers today. Designers of paper books design contained space and desktop publishing applications are built to manage pixel-perfect manipulation within a strictly defined and known container. If the finished digital article does not exactly co-relate to the printed artefact then something went wrong; it is assumed that either the designer, or the tool, has done a bad job.

Those familiar with this kind of process are uneasy with designing formless content – how can you design a page when you do not know its container? It is literally like asking a book designer to design a book without telling them the page dimensions. Web designers, on the other hand, have been thinking about page design too, and they have for a long time, at least in part, been designing for formless content.

The design of formless content is really a partially-formless, partially-constrained design process since elements within the page have some kind of relationship to each other, and they can have relationships to characteristics of a page, such as top or top left, for example. These relationships are defined by rules, the same rules I have discussed previously – CSS aka Cascading Style Sheets. Relationships can be articulated with CSS which will be preserved when displayed in different contexts. The meaning is preserved by the relationship between the elements and page features more than by their relationship to the the exact x,y position of a page with a specific dimension, although strict placement is possible. This is the job of Cascading Style Sheets – the design language of the web. It is rule-based design with some conditional arguments and it is the method for designing electronic books; it will become, increasingly, the technology for describing the layout and design of paper-based print.

All of this can be manipulated in the browser. In fact, the browser is the best place to design flowable text since it is the flowable type environment of our time and, as mentioned before, the browser (Webkit) is the background technology for many e-readers. We have not yet seen the development of very good flowable design environments in the browser, but that is changing. The closest we have seen so far are the ‘in-browser’ design environments that some internet service providers make available for their customers to ‘design their own website online!’ While actually quite powerful, these environments are generally horrible to use, but this practice is applicable to the design of ebooks.

The desktop publishing world is not taking this lying down, and Adobe, in particular, has been pursuing what they call “Adaptive Design Tools” for the production of ‘liquid content’. Liquid content is flowable content, content that can rescale and position itself to fit the container. Adobe’s tools are intended for content targeted for mobile devices and tablets, although they also identify a role for it in print production. Adobe’s yet-to-be-released Adobe Edge is the product targeted at this flowable design process and their background technology for this design environment is – Webkit, the same browser mentioned earlier. Webkit is the ‘design surface’ for the new generation of desktop design tools coming from established publishing technology providers.

Coming back to the paper book. Until recently it has been extremely difficult to generate a PDF that exactly co-relates to what you see in a browser. Until now the browser accessed the PDF-creation features of the operating system. Hence a PDF from the same browser would look different if that browser were running in Windows, Mac or Linux. Just recently this has changed and the browser itself is now making the PDF. Chrome has been pioneering this ‘Native PDF’ output from the browser and the output looks exactly as you see it in the browser. One to one co-relation of content in the browser to the content in the PDF is a breaking point which points the way to designing your paper book in a browser. We are getting to the point where you can use a browser just as you would a desktop publishing application to design paper books.

The browser can now play every part of the book production process except the actual printing (although from the browser you can upload PDF to print-on-demand services such as Lulu.com).

What this means is that you can write a book in the browser, while at the same time it is being proofed and edited, and designed. Each part of this formerly-linear production cycle can now become synchronous. You can now write, edit, proof, design the book ‘in the book’.

Ease of Production

Around 1460, the entrepreneur Johann Fust (commonly confused with Johann Faust) took some of the Gutenberg bibles to Paris to sell. Paris did not know of the printing press and rumours started. How could someone produce so many books so cheaply? How could they possibly be made so quickly and with the exact same rendering of all characters on all pages? The apparent ease and speed by which these books were produced had the feeling of witchcraft.

It’s a good story and a popular one, although it might actually be apocryphal. It seems, according to Elizabeth Eisenstein [see The Printing Press as Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press 1979, p50] that at that time, the “increase in output did strike contemporary observers as sufficiently remarkable to suggest supernatural intervention.” This story helps us imagine how Gutenberg’s Press changed the world forever, simply by making the production of books easier and faster. Before this, books were created by scribes copying the content by hand – a process which took tremendous time was prone to error and was very expensive. The newly invented printing press meant books could be made quick and cheaply. As a result intellectuals and artists were starting to work closely with printers, print shops became places where these people would meet and where knowledge started to cross disciplines, publishers eventually evolved, the economics surrounding knowledge changed, book production was made accessible to a vastly larger section of society, literacy increased, and knowledge was transmitted across societies and boundaries in ways previously unimaginable. Making books easier and faster to produce changed everything.

Because books are now web pages, book production again becomes easier. All the tools required to produce beautiful books can be accessed through a browser. ‘Web-based workflows’ for book production begin with an empty book and take you through the entire book production process without needing to leave the browser. Easy-to-use tools take you through this workflow and in so doing they change every part of book production. The book becomes something you can make, not something that publishers make for you.

This ease of production is assisted greatly by the development of online print-on-demand services and ebook distribution channels which integrate APIs. An API is an ‘Application Programming Interface’ – jargon for a technical process that enables websites and online services to integrate and work together. Using APIs, you can utilise the services from another website in your own webpage. For example Lulu.com – one of the world’s largest online print-on-demand services – allows you to upload books directly to their service from your own website. That makes web-to-new book production models and print workflows a whole lot easier and faster. Ebook distribution services are also offering APIs so platforms can push ebooks directly into their channel.

Book production coming online means new book production models can evolve and new kinds of publishing can emerge. Book production can become faster, publishing becomes something anyone can do, people from all over the world can share distributed workflows and work on the same content simultaneously. Book production is open to more people, and anyone can produce an array of books from best sellers to niche texts. Peer production markets of skills and knowledge can ben generated to enable the production of the books we want – faster, cheaper, and better than the current state of publishing.

Book production platforms to enable these advantages are just starting to appear. Wikis were, and still are for many, the default knowledge production platform and have been used many times to make books. But Wikis are not designed for making books. Not only do they do this badly but they do not foster a ‘book writing’ mindset. Wikis tend to be used for short form texts and often as a kind of textual mind map. Wikis do not deliver the ease of production we are looking for.

The same is true of blogging software. Blogs do seem to build a culture of slightly longer and more structured narrative forms which does help but blog software is not intended for producing books either. It is intended for producing another kind of text. It’s true that blogs like WordPress can be bent into many shapes and WordPress is often considered by many to be a Content Management Tool rather than a blog, but at the end of the day, building a non-blog becomes more work using WordPress than if you had chosen a tool built for that purpose.

Essentially Wikis, Blogs, and CMS all have very specific roles.  Bending them to fit book production may work for a while, but they lack the possibility to richly explore online book production because they were not built to do this. They might be a useful shortcut for rapid prototyping but their inherent paradigm will soon get in the way. If you want to do something, then it’s usually more effective to use a tool built for that purpose. Additionally, it’s not just the tool’s purpose that counts: the culture surrounding how the tool is used is also important.

Having used a wiki to build a publishing system, I can say from experience that we soon ran up against core design principles of the tool that made it hard to make it do what we wanted. We could do all the basics but when we really started working in an immersive way with online book production, we found that there were many issues that a wiki could not handle without significant re-development of its architecture.

When building a software for book production there are some features and issues that need to be considered as part of the core paradigm. First – any platform operating in the world of open or federated publishing MUST be open source. Open content on a closed platform is a hypocritical position. You deserve to be skeptical of any platform like this and its relationship to you, your privacy, the ownership and control of content, the distribution paths open to you etc. Beyond the primary necessity that the platform must be open source there are 4 key features that should be easy to manage :

  1. it’s easy to create a new book
  2. it’s easy to add and edit content
  3. it’s easy to manage the table of contents
  4. it’s easy to export to a book format

These are the basic 4 necessary ingredients.

Beyond this, there are some very important issues that need to be managed, either in a second tier of interface or done ‘automagically’ using default settings or presets:

  1. copyright license management
  2. attribution
  3. well designed output

That gets you to a basic ‘plain vanilla’ online book production environment. Of course it looks easy but it’s not. Realizing this simple vision is pretty easy if you wish to produce EPUBs. However, if you wish to support multiple output formats, it gets trickier. Paper books are especially tricky because you have to deal with the page – a real paper page. Paper pages need left and right margin control, page numbering, accurate linking of the page numbers to the table of contents, and not to forget bi-directional text rendering and widow and orphans control. Not only are these not very simple issues to resolve technically they are also offer very many questions about usability. How many of these options/parameters do you manage ‘by magic’ and how many (and how) do you expose to the user to control? This is when the going gets tough.

We are seeing a few online platforms evolve that are embracing some or all of these notions. The variety of feature sets and strategies is large but the following three online book production platforms are the ones I believe have the highest claim to having a stake in the game to date :

  1. PressBooks – a service started by Canadian Hugh McGuire who had previously experimented with a book platform called the Book Oven  (which is now closed). PressBooks is based on WordPress and has a good workflow if you are familiar with the popular blogging tool. Unfortunately the platform, while built on top of an open source software, is not open source software. It is a free (gratis) service but closed source. PressBooks does not currently hold high collaborative potential but it is very useful for writers who wish to work with an editor or editorial teams to compile anthologies. PressBooks is focused on extending the traditional publishing cycle online. The development team is spending a lot of time working on good formatting for book-formatted PDF. PressBooks also targets the web as a book output.
  2. Inkling – a service which is free to use but all content must be sold through the Inkling sales channel. Inkling derives a royalty for each sale through this channel. It is closed source and targets the iPad and the web as output formats. Inkling is targeted at textbook publishers and sells content in the form of books and chapters. Inkling is not open source and is targeted at traditional (but distributed) online publishing workflows for traditional publishers.
  3. Booktype –  of the three listed here, Booktype has been around the longest – formerly known as Booki and originally developed by FLOSS Manuals, it has been around for almost 6 years in various functional prototypes. Booktype is now developed by Sourcefabric and is open source. Booktype has a very flexible workflow which is ‘native to the web’ and is designed for non-publishers and publishers alike. Booktype can be a highly collaborative environment and is the platform of choice for rapid development processes such as Book Sprints. Booktype outputs to web, iPad, Kindle, print-on-demand, text document formats, PDF and many other formats. (Disclaimer : I am the project lead for Booktype).

These three are the 3 best platforms on the radar for easy online book production right now. The web being what it is, means there will be more to enter the market and this will probably happen quickly. The iPad iBook Author is not mentioned here because although easy to use it is not an online tool and I believe this is a critical missing feature for reasons that will become clearer later.

I believe these three outlined above change the game and interestingly have their own distinct primary use cases and strategies. There will be more to come. If you believe Gutenberg’s efficiencies changed society forever then what effect will tools like these have? It’s a giddy question and from working with book production like this for 5 years now, I firmly believe making books in the browser is not just a matter of having an easy way of making books – it will have an enormous impact on society as a whole.

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