What if Tim Berners-Lee had Invented Twitter?

This is one of those nicely ambiguous counterfactuals. Contrast, as David Lewis does:

If Caesar had been in command [in Korea] he would have used catapults
If Caesar had been in command he would have used the atom bomb

In this case I am thinking about catapults. I mean Twitter is obviously a much simpler system than the web and in that respect it might have been easier for a researcher in 1992 to dream up a good way of sharing citations amongst internet-connected scientists. Also the grammar of Twitter is much thinner, less ambitious and more constrained than the grammar of HTML. Precisely because Twitter is a lot simpler than the web, it would seem at least possible that it could have evolved sooner than it did, just as catapults came before atom bombs (OK -- I know that we didnt have SMS in 1991 so it wasn't there to be canibalised, but please don't spoil the fun). Let us suppose that Twitter had come first, that Tim Berners Lee had come up with some consistent, open, distributed, asymmetrical protocols for sharing references and very short messages across the internet. Surely that was the kind of scientific communication tool and update system that the CERN bosses would have been looking for? They could have given him a straightforward promotion. Why did he have to give them so much more? What would be so different with the way the internet is now if he had given them less?

The web would be a lot smaller. There would not be so many big files. So many big web pages. The web would have been very different if TBL had limited a web page to 140K. The web as a Twitter-verse would presumably be a lot flatter, more horizontal. Fewer pools of database-driven depth. There would still have been spam (Twitter has about as much spam as the web). There would have still have been porn and nice graphics (Marc Andreessen could have saved himself several man months and invented Twitpic, which would have been much easier than writing Mosaic). There would also have been much more indirection (bit.ly, tinyurl would have taken the place of Yahoo and Google) a lot more opacity (domains, countries, languages being harder to organise in the Twitter framework). TBL would have found it as hard as the Twitter founders to discover a business model for the invention (that is the penalty for inventing a new syntax). But it could still have spread like wildfire, as indeed Twitter has spread like wildfire these last three years....

However it is a good thing that Tim invented what he did, catapulted us into the 21st Century with his super-collider of an invention and left it for Dorsey, Stone and Williams to pick up the other simpler, similar, idea. Later. These counterfactual musings are prompted by yesterday's announcement that Twitter is now developing a new @anywhere service layer, which suggests to me that Twitter will become an even finer-grained and more diaphonous network, parasitic on the web, but aiming to interconnect as many web resources and web services as possible in a layer of commentary and shared perception. It is as though the Twitter founders are trying to fill the conversational interstices in the gaps left by the operation of web services. This proposition may have important implications for publishers and media.

Does XML really matter?

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 in a well-formed XML file is the sun. The book, an output of a well-formed XML file, is only one of an increasing number of revenue opportunities and marketing opportunities revolving around it. It requires more discipline and attention to the rules to create a well-formed XML file than it did to create a book. But when you're done, the end result is more useful: content can be rendered many different ways and cleaved and recombined inexpensively, unlocking sales that are almost impossible to capture cost-effectively if you start with a “book.” What the Hell Is XML? Publisher's Weekly 15 Dec 08

At the risk of being taken to be the kind of oaf who burps loudly in the presence of royalty (questioning the supreme value of XML is a bit like breathing garlic all over her majesty), I am inclined to pour cold water over this.

XML has been with us for 10 years. It certainly has its uses, especially in managing large complex texts and integrating text databases. But XML has not been and is not the be-all and end-all of digital publishing. XML is a property of texts, a style of handling them for flexible representation. In the last five years (especially since Google Book Search started motoring) it has become increasingly apparent that the book-as-book is the critical output of book publishers. Indeed PDF's are still a crucial component of the book publishing process and for many of the most useful applications of the digital book, the PDF file is the crucial starting point. Copernicus, after all, was right, the sun is the centre of the solar system. Books really do matter and they are at the centre of the GBS system.

In one crucial respect XML has been and is a damagingly misleading tool for publishers (as deleterious in its effects on newspapers and magazines as on books) it has encouraged the mistaken view that text objects can only be used on the web if they are repurposed. XML was invented primarily because it was seen as a flexible way of 'marking up' the incredibly diverse world of print in ways that could be reconciled with HTML and the web. Everything printed would be repurposed for the web and XML would facilitate this step. This now looks like it may not be an efficient way to look at things. Google Book Search and other digital representation platforms are showing us that repurposing a book or a magazine is not necessary and usually results in the loss of important information. It is certainly a mistake to suppose the XML is necessary if books are to be effectively used in the web or in databases -- as Google Book Search, the largest print database, demonstrates. Above all, XML, and any particular implementation of XML is only as good as the design for which it was crafted, XML is not future-proof, and it is highly misleading of Shatzkin to recommend:

"You'll save the most money right away if you create many books that are similar in structure and thus can be rendered from the same “style sheet.”

Books should only be similar in structure, and their texts should only share the same style sheet, if they are similar in purpose. A rigid XML style sheet for the whole of a publisher's list is for many publishers a lousy idea. Designing, or selecting, your books to fit your style sheet is putting the cart before your horse.

Launch Party for a Blog?

Charkin Blog is a blog published in book form by Macmillan. I missed the launch party, but from several reports it was an enjoyable and intriguing event.

I was amused to see in the Macmillan page about the book that it is listed as weighing 0 Kg. That seems to me very light for a book of 576 pp. Could it be that the weight is indeterminate, customisable according to requirements, the book is after all Print On Demand? Perhaps one can order a deluxe version on Indian paper, that would weigh very little, but surely at least 0.2 Kg? The British Library (which presumably gets a free copy) should look after posterity with a copy printed on vellum.

The weightless version of Charkin Blog is still here.

Print going with the grain of the Web

It is an article of faith for Exact Editions that:

Print works well on the web when it is represented exactly the way it is.

Exact Editions works on the assumption that the web can re-present print perfectly adequately and there are many advantages in having magazines (and books) accessible on the web as exact replicas of the print editions. Actually, buried beneath this 'article of faith' is a very deep conviction that print publications are incredibly strong and will survive and prosper as digital editions (oddly enough, many in conventional publishing doubt this).

On the other hand, we do in various ways try to enhance or improve the print editions so they work better as a web resource than would a mere print replica. First, by making the titles individually and collectively searchable. Second, by adding elements of helpful interactivity (clickable contents pages, e-mail addresses, URLs, phone numbers and ISBNs, for example).

For all these reasons, we find it hard to think of digital publishing as being inimical to print publishing, to reading, or indeed to civilisation as we know it. If you want some gloomy hand wringing about the future of print, of fiction and of literacy you can find it here, here and with rather more insight and optimism here.

We have been thinking more about the ways in which print and digital can interact. And it really is a matter of interaction. This is not a market in which digital will simply replace print and paper. Publishers, booksellers and retailers really need to think long and hard about the immense advantages of working with a medium in which print sales can be used to help digital sales, and vice versa. Having a physical bookstore or news kiosk on the street is potentially a great way in which to leverage digital sales. Having a virtual bookstore or kiosque is an amazingly good way in which to leverage sales of the printed book or to garner more print subscriptions for a magazine. Getting the two media flows to work together is the biggest challenge that we face.

Kindle Reviewed

There was an amusing, very watchable, but unkind review of the Amazon eBook reader by Robert Scoble



The review is rude and harsh to unfair (and Scoble admits as much), partly because he doesn't dwell on the good/interesting points. He does however say that he read two books on the device, serious books (at least one of them was since it was by Greenspan). That seems to me an important plus for the Kindle. He had lots to complain about but he read two books.

A more thoughtful review comes from Ars Technica. John Timmer gives a convincing account of what it is like to use the Kindle and he introduces the fruitful concept of a 'Reading Model' (different media influence how the text they contain gets read in different ways). You should read the whole piece but you will get the flavour of the discussion from this:

I'll leave it to you to ponder the reading models of newspapers and magazines in order to focus on the Kindle's reading model, which is largely enforced by a combination of the E Ink screen and the underlying operating system. Like a book, the Kindle enforces arbitrary page contents based on what can be rendered in a single screen, and is read left-to-right.
......
There are only a couple of cases where books probably won't work well. One is with books that feature heavy use of illustrations or pictures, as not all images display well on the E Ink screen. The delays involved in flipping long distances forward or backwards page-by-page means that books without a good chapter structure or readers that constantly shuffle around their book will have problems with the Kindle's reading model. Otherwise, Amazon clearly has the book thing down. [Ars Technica]

This review gives insight into what its like to read with the Kindle. Its very helpful that John Timmer has tried to define the style of reading to which this machine lends itself (he guesses that commuters will like it). We have the impression that the pagination of a book on the Amazon Kindle is not the same as the pagination in print (clearly the newspapers and magazines are 'repurposed' and lose their print pagination). That is a pity. But the Kindle may have a more promising second coming when the engineers have absorbed Scoble's usability strictures. In mid 2008 it will probably look and feel a bit more like the iTouch/iPhone!

Flickr Typefoundry?

Eric Kastner's clever simple idea:

Exacteditions

Hat tip to John Naughton.

Print lives on the web (1)

There is a view that the web is such a potent and direly competitive medium that newspapers, magazines, books will not be able to meet the challenge. As though these wonderful cultural artefacts will be replaced by something else....... whatever that may be.

We think this gloom is misplaced. Print thrives on the web, and so far from being dead it gets a second life when relaunched as a digital edition and a searchable resource.

And its all too easy to underestimate the amazing cultural and social attachment we have to these systems of communication.

As an instance of the unreasonable love of newspapers and newspaper culture, consider Scott Walker, assistant managing editor of the The Birmingham News, Birmingham Alabama, who has re-engineered a coin-operated newspaper box so that it now sits in his living room and displays on an LCD the current front pages of his favourite newspapers.



We think its time that some devotee of magazines, took a leaf from Scott Walker's book and made the real coffee-table magazine. Manolis Kelaidis is already building the book with circuitry which hyperlinks.

Hat tip to Martin Stabe.

Shipping times

We live in Italy and we currently have subscriptions by mail to three British magazines: The Economist, The Tablet and the Times Literary Supplement. They all charge a premium for posting to Italy, and they arrive in a very strange order. The Tablet gets here usually on the Saturday one day after its Friday publication in the UK. Presumably it is printed on the Thursday. The TLS usually gets to Florence five or six days late. Thursday this week. The Economist seems to be the slowest of all, usually arriving a week late, as today. This is too slow for a topical magazine.

I have a sneaking suspicion that The Tablet may be making a special effort over Italian distribution because of its strong Roman audience. Its a pity, in more ways than one, that the World Bank and the Nobel Prize for literature are not also based in Rome or Milan.

It is high time that these excellent magazines had proper digital editions. Then there could be no complaints about slow delivery. They all offer their print subscribers certain priveleges from their web sites, but these repurposed web sites are confusingly different from the print publication and limited. They are none of them a patch on the print products. Sigh.......

Kerning and Knuth

Although I started in publishing at OUP (Oxford University Press) more than 30 ago when hot-metal printing was still alive, I missed out on the proper training in print and typography that might have been appropriate at that time and in that place. I am embarassed to admit that I first heard about the concept of kerning, a few years later, when an enthusiastic philosopher pointed me in the direction of Donald Knuth and the mathematical typesetting language and system TeX which Knuth developed.

Knuth is an extraordinarily brilliant and unusual thinker. His home page gives you a flavour of his genius.

The maths behind kerning fascinated Knuth and is touched upon in the current issue of Wired. See the wiredblog for some discussion of kerning and the switch between page design in print and web. Carl, who linked me to the blog, must have been thinking, that Exact Editions would have solved the problem which troubles the blogger here:

The same goes for Wired’s new logo. It alternates between letters without and with serifs, yet the area between each pair of letters is about the same, thanks to the serifs on the I and E and lack thereof on the W, R and D. This equivalence makes the logo easier to see and read across a crowded supermarket aisle. The alternating fonts also make the letters seem to blink on and off as you read them from left to right, in emulation of digital ones and zeroes.

The blogger then went on to make some remarks which get trashed by comments and which he has now withdrawn. Some of the comments are very neat. Designers really care about their art.

The problems would not even begin to arise were it not for the fact that Wired on the web is a repurposed/redesigned/repackaged version of the print magazine. If Wired were on the Exact Editions platform you would just look at the digital edition exactly as it is in print. Here is an example of kerning in the typography of a title.


And here is another effect, shadow type, which can not easily be emulated in a web page design:

Of course it is trivially straightforward to include kerning, or any other subtle visual typographic effect such as shadow type, in a web page which is an exact edition or simple replica of the original print page.

Google, Microsoft Live, and Porfolio

Interesting blog from Michael Cairns of Personanondata. Like the rest of you I have been paying a lot more attention to Google Book Search than to Microsoft Live Search Books. But if Microsoft are developing systems which work for publishers interests and also for end users, then they have taken an important step forward. [Yes I know there were two 'ifs' in that sentence!]. Google Book Search is making such rapid progress that it is certainly going to work. But Cairns is right, having more than one digital avenue is really important for publishers and authors.

Portfolio, mentioned the other day, has been getting some ecstatic reviews from Samir Husni, several of them, and a more cautious one from the Printisdead blog. I am not so sure about the printisdead idea. When you think about it, Google and Microsoft would not be investing so much in Print Search and digital editions if they thought it was dead or dieing. So you might expect Conde Nast to do a digital edition? So far nothing there but a repurposed magazine (most of it) and a repurposed, but not permalinked, table of contents.

Web Sites and/or Digital Editions?

Yesterday a publisher asked me why a user would prefer a digital edition to a comprehensive web site which reproduces all the magazine's contents? It is a good question. There are at least three reasons why a publisher who cares about his subscribers and has a comprehensive web service will also want to offer access to a digital edition:

1. A digital edition just is the magazine on the web. It has all the design qualities and stylistic strengths of the finished article. The magazine nearly always looks better than a web site and a digital magazine will have those same design values. A comprehensive but 'repurposed' website is really another thing. Another edition of the magazine with reduced style and impact.
2. Comprehensive web sites are not (ever?) strictly comprehensive. They do not include the advertisements. There is a kind of 'editorial' bias that says that the ads do not really count as part of the magazine and that a web service will do well enough if it reproduces all the editorial in the magazine. But of course the ads do count (they really, really count for the advertisers) and funnily enough they also matter to the readers. That is why advertisements in magazines work. So a publisher needs to think about the digital edition as a way of adding value to and through the ads in their magazine.
3. This is an ALSO question. The digital edition should not be seen as choice a which excludes the 'comprehensive web version'. Some readers will prefer the HTML version of the magazine, especially if it has been running for a while. But some readers will certainly prefer the digital edition. The digital audience is likely to grow (see what has happened with Scientific Periodicals). It may be an interim measure, but cater for both parties.

One thing is certain: no publisher should think of the digital edition as replacing the magazine's web site. There are plenty of services (blogs, podcasts, user forums to name but three) which need to happen on the web site and NOT in the digital edition. Putting out a digital edition is just a part of the comprehensive range of services which a magazine publisher will use in developing the magazine's brand on the web.