Web standards and workflows for e-books
Joe Clark on web standards and workflows for e-books in the latest A List Apart:
The canonical format of a book should be HTML. Authors should write in HTML, making a manuscript immediately transformable to an E-book [sic]. A manuscript could then be imported into that fossil the publishing industry refuses to leave behind, Microsoft Word.
Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes. This should have started happening about five years ago. (The section from which this quote is taken is about halfway through the article.)
HTML is a pretty good language for describing the contents of a book (it would be even better if it had a decent way of captioning images) — and in my opinion it’s easy enough to learn that authors (or the editor, or production manager) could render the first draft as a machine-readable document at the beginning of the production process, rather than at the end.
I also learned something new reading this piece: namely, that Unicode has a specification for different width spaces. Colour me the colour of a person who has just found out something they didn’t previously know.
Killing the hive mind
The New York Times reviews Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, declaring it “necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace.”
I’m intrigued by Lanier’s comments about books in particular (“If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book”) and find myself in sympathetic agreement with his suggestion (hardly unique to him, of course) that pop culture has “entered into a nostalgic malaise”.
Gonna start a new genre. It’s called punkpunk.
I’ll figure out the rest later.
Beautiful wood engravings from a 1947 French edition of Poe’s Fall of the house of Usher.
This was the first major LEGO™ set I owned. Clearly I will never achieve my dream of being the first author to include it on one of their book covers. Damn you, Jan Kraśko. Damn you to space.
The middle-class guide to the galaxy
As the publication date nears for Eoin Colfer’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy continuation novel, the Guardian surveys the place of the original work (which is to say, the radio series, novels and TV series combined) in the British psyche. “The Hitchhiker stories make up a sort of folk-art depiction, like on a tribal carpet, of the late-1970s English middle-class cosmic order,” says Jenny Turner.
Either I used to own this book, or the cover artist has access to my childhood nightmares.
Striking design by Elaine Lustig. Love the bold colours and the slight wonkiness of the shape at the bottom.
Open Library
Another way to access the mind-bogglingly huge archive of full text digitised books at the Internet Archive; very neat site design and great options for refining searches.
Public domain weird fiction at Wikisource
Includes a selection of horror and Gothic fiction, scientifiction, fantasy and sword and sorcery.
The best laid plans lead writers astray
“If novels are going to combust imaginatively, shouldn’t they be written spontaneously?” writes Hannah Davies.
Fabulating the Australian desert: Australia’s lost race romances, 1890 – 1908
A look at the bizarre adventure-romance novels set in the Australian interior at the turn of the twentieth century, including George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian.
Pirates and printers
A brief account of book smuggling in the British Isles in the late eighteenth century.
