michael said:
I have mostly, in both public and private, asked you to provide examples of the kind of eBooks you want to produce after all is said and one
yes, and that request has always puzzled me. because i've mounted all kinds of examples... surely a u.r.l. similar to this will look familiar:
that's "my antonia", which has been up for years, since jon noring did its scans a long time ago...
that's "books and culture", also up for many years, as it was the first public-domain book that google mounted, and the scans i used are the original set, as shown by the "google print" brand on each one. ("google print" was the first name for the project.) here's another example that i've pointed to a lot:
that's "the secret garden", a favorite of my girlfriend. an another:
that's "the open library", by brewster kahle, an e-book they put together for their project. there's a great picture of brewster's son here:
those are some examples i've mentioned _a_lot_. *** further, if you view the front page of z-m-l.com:
you will see a link that says this:
to see some z.m.l. examples in action
and if you follow that link, you go to this page:
where you see a list of 9 e-books, and can click on the name of one to see its z.m.l. file _or_ click its button to see the .html version which is generated on-the-fly from the z.m.l. those files show mount-dates of february 2007, so they just celebrated their 4th birthday online. but some of them have been online at other places for even longer than that... as an example of that one of those 9 e-books provides the rules of z.m.l. i'm guessing that has been around for 6 years now.
another very old one is the "test-suite" i created:
those two files -- the "rules" and the test-suite -- go way back. they were even mounted on "snowy", the web-diskspace that greg made available to me, and that was a very long time ago... and even aside from their status as "examples", those two documents are important because they are instructional on the exact workings of z.m.l. so, if you read and absorb those two documents, you should be able to create your own .zml files, without having to resort to scrutinizing examples. everything you might need is spelled out clearly... which is not to say that i don't have more examples. because i've got lots of them... *** over the course of the years here, i've taken _many_ books that were "finished" by d.p. and posted to p.g., and i've created a z.m.l. version in order to point out the _errors_ which i had located in the d.p./p.g. files. so you have those examples... i have taken many _in-progress_ files from d.p. and tracked improvements as they traversed "the rounds". most of the time, the object was to show that _most_ of the errors could have been found -- and fixed -- with a robust _pre-processing_, which could have moved the file to an "almost-finished state" which i typically represented using the form of a z.m.l. file. in this same regard, i gave _many_ demonstrations of a _comparison_method_ for finding the errors in one digitization by comparing it against another one. many of the files in those comparisons were .zml files. (one of the very big benefits of z.m.l. files is that their absence of cruft keeps cross-file comparisons clean.) like i said, i did _lots_ of these d.p./p.g. evaluations, so if you need more u.r.l. pointers, just ask for them. (or if you want to be secretive about it, comb through the list archives, since i discussed most of them here.) i've stopped doing them, because i made the point... and nobody here cared, so why should i give a darn? but the examples live on, in the place i mounted 'em. *** in addition, i've done example books for other places, which i would've been all-too-happy to mention here, if anyone here (anyone at all!) had seemed interested, at least interested enough to check out the examples which i _did_ mention, which almost never happened. for instance, here's a .zml example i did where i used an academic paper that had been offered only in .pdf:
i showed that providing a .zml copy would have made the original paper more accessible _and_ remixable, yet was capable of creating a .pdf of the same quality:
this paper was titled "preservation in the age of large-scale digitization", by an academic who is involved in the field of libraries and digitization, yet she offered her paper _only_ in the .pdf form, and i thought that was the height of ludicrousness. so i said so... and then backed it up with _proof_... that example dates to october of 2007. *** here's yet another example of an e-book in z-m-l, this time "the future of ideas", by lawrence lessig:
that dates to february of 2008, so it's 3 years old now. *** and then there were the o'reilly boys. what a gas. some of you know the o'reilly publishing company. they publish tech-oriented books, and are led by tim o'reilly, who has garnered a reputation for his company as a leading-edge source of knowledge for the publishing industry. to this particular end, they do a publishing conference many times yearly, at various locations around the world, and it's called "tools of change" -- or "toc" for short. (clever, eh?) it's usually held in february in new york, so that one just ran. they also do one at the frankfurt book fair. many of the highest-profile publishing houses send attendees to this conference, to learn the latest and the greatest, and the conference admission is steep, to the likes of normal people anyway, about $1500, although you can get discounts in a number of ways. (to be fair, many prestigious meetings cost that much.) anyway, at the february 2009 conference in new york, they had an espresso machine, so they decided they'd demonstrate print-on-demand to the attendees, so they bundled a bunch of blog articles into an e-book so they would have something to print-on-demand...
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/at-toc-best-of-toc-writing.html
this meant they had to convert all those .html articles into the .pdf form which the espresso machine wants. the .pdf product they made was embarrassingly bad... so here they are, a tech-oriented publisher who has a reputation for being out on the cutting-edge, and which even offers these expensive conventions to the rest of the publishing industry to get 'em up to speed, and they're showing off this brand new technology of print-on-demand. but they create a butt-ugly e-book. i gave them some extensive feedback on their effort:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/best-of-toc-collection-now-ava.html
and i showed them how they could've used .zml instead:
http://z-m-l.com/go/bomoc/bomoc.zml http://z-m-l.com/go/bomoc/bomoc.pdf http://z-m-l.com/go/bomoc/bomoc.html http://z-m-l.com/go/bomoc/bomocp123.html
i had to garble the text, because they claimed that they couldn't give me the permission to "reprint" the articles, but if you compare my version to their version, you can see that that's _all_ that i have done, is garble the text... and that won't prevent you from making the comparison. and that comparison will show you that i did a better job. (i could've done much better, but once i realized that they were gonna stonewall me and ignore me, i didn't bother.) *** i also converted another o'reilly e-book to .zml format -- "the missing manual for iphone" -- with the intention of garbling the text, but i didn't bother to finish all of it. i probably should, because it had lots of images in it, so it was really an excellent test of my ability to do those... *** and then there was "the book of mpub"...
a college professor had his "publishing 101" students turn their term-papers for the class into an e-book... they used a convoluted process to turn blog entries (using wordpress for the blog) into input for indesign, which they then used to create a .pdf for their output. i showed them how they could've used .epub instead:
http://z-m-l.com/go/zmpub/zmpub.zml http://z-m-l.com/go/zmpub/zmpub.pdf http://z-m-l.com/go/zmpub/zmpub.html http://z-m-l.com/go/zmpub/zmpub.epub
the professor was quite interested in my demonstration at first, because he thought it would create an ugly .pdf. (if i could get it to create any .pdf output at all, that is.) however, once i told him that i had output for him to review, and that i thought it matched _or_surpassed_ his output, he immediately became totally uninterested. all of a sudden, he didn't even want to look at the .pdf... outright refused. the funniest thing is, i had _predicted_, before-the-fact, to a mutual acquaintance, he'd do that. i learned -- from my adversaries on this very listserve -- that that is what assholes do when you show them proof: they just stick their head in the sand and ignore it totally. it's as if they think that if they can't see it, it doesn't exist. anyway, in addition, i also built a system that would allow those students to _input_ their e-book's text on the web, since that's why they'd become so enamored of wordpress, since that's what wordpress allowed them to do. however, wordpress gets in the way of writing a book as much as it helps a writer, what with its requirement that every chapter be entered separately, and then treated as a unique entity. mpub, by the way, is the system that guided development of both pandamian.com and pressbooks.com, which i have recently pointed to, as examples of the new mentality afloat out in the world at large, for a simple way to make e-books. attention on _authoring-tools_ introduces our next point... *** while some people might believe that all they have to do is build a _file-format_, and the job is then finished, i strive to create tools facilitating the entire workflow... this includes authoring-tools, collaborative-editing-tools, publication-tools, viewer-programs, and remixing-tools... let's start with the readers -- always a good place to start -- and talk about viewer-programs, specifically online ones... for instance, here's a go at a web-based viewing-app:
you might recall that "babelfish" here began life as a "collaborative" process on this listserve, like the so-called "collaborative" project we have currently. "babelfish" also ended quite abruptly, exactly like the "current" project, due to a lack of collaboration. *** of course, another "viewing environment" is the one within which i have embedded many of the examples which i gave above, where the text is on the left and the scan is on the right, so the two can be compared, and a comment can be left right there on the page to report any mistakes which were found in the text... so i'm working the "distributed digitization" angle too. *** i also consider it important to build _authoring-tools_. most of my work in that regard has been _offline-apps_, but occasionally i wander into the online arena as well... one example is what i set up to mimic the mpub system. i never showed that to you people here, but it served as a foundation on which i built the web-authoring-system that i was using for rfrank's "sitka" book. that was back in march and april of last year, if you want to look it up in the archives for this listserve, since i discussed it often. i believe i disabled that, because nobody was using it, but if somebody really wants me to open it up again, i'll do that. unless i think you're just yankin' my chain. *** then, of course, there's the "current collaboration" project, the converter-program. but you already know about that... i might mention, however, that "the jungle" is yet another example that i have used a lot, including for this project... *** there are some other online tools i have programmed, mostly as research, thus in various stages of completion, and i can dig those up if anyone asks a relevant question that would be answered by them. so feel free to do that. *** i've also used .zml in a workflow to help friends and online acquaintances create their electronic-books; if you're interested in buying them, let me know and i will point you to them on amazon so that you can... (i've done some commercial projects as well, which i might also tell people about, but only backchannel, provided that i'm convinced you have a need to know.) *** it's probably quite ironic that i've spent three hours writing up these examples, which is probably _more_ time than _all_ of you _combined_ will spend looking at the examples which i have discussed in this post... *** oh yes, and how could i forget "alice in wonderland"? i have so many versions of "alice" online that i cannot keep track of which is which anymore, but here's one:
*** in closing, i have documented many of these examples on this listserve over the course of the last seven years. so if someone asks for examples, and acts like i never gave any, i can't figure out what they're talking about. -bowerbird p.s. once you have absorbed all of this, if you desire _even_more_, just let me know, i'll be happy to oblige.