It’s fun to watch the birth of a brand new blog, and a promising new blog is Kristin Lawrence on scholarly publishing.
In a post titled on text taking precedence, she writes
Moving to a text-takes-precedence model, where design gives way to an XML style sheet and printing is offered only on demand and serves just to hold the book together, means we have to focus on content and use and search, not aesthetics.
This reminds me a lot of my days in academic libraries. But over the last few years I’ve come to a rather opposite conclusion. For 15 years I specialized in digital libraries, which primarily is focused on content and search retrieval.
After a move to South America I got involved with book design. For so long I tried to convince myself that the text-takes-precedence model had to work since, after all, that was the basis of everything I valued in developing digital libraries. But I always felt that something was missing and that was largely the aesthetics of digital content.
Most people involved in developing digital libraries and scholarly publishing are programmers, project managers, and administrators. Occasionally, someone in that crew will have learned a few things about Photoshop and labeled himself a graphic designer.
(And I will be the first to admit that I am no graphic designer but I do work with one).
If the future of publishing scholarly monographs is to store the content in XML and generate end-products in various formats via styles sheets, then it’s imperative that those involved in scholarly publishing connect with those who can bring quality design to those style sheets.
These days there are a ton of professional designers well versed in crafting great designs with style sheets. It can be done and it’s vital that individuals within the scholarly community don’t let programmers and administrators convince them that aesthetics does not matter.
Maybe … But we really wouldn’t need graphic designers and book designers if there were no text. First there was the word. And those of us who make pages are charged with bringing those words to readers, first and foremost. All the amusement and chest-beating that comes along with doing things in some way that stands out is secondary at best, and nothing ultimately, if we don’t bring those words to the reader in a way that allows and encourages that reader to stick with the reading.
Hi Stephen – Yes, and your last phrase is exactly my point. Of course, we wouldn’t need libraries or publishers either if there were no text to start with. But as everyone clearly knows, making text-based content available doesn’t stop simply after the author puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard as is more likely these days).
If people from the design community don’t work towards better design attributes for e-books and digital content, then no one will do so.
Thanks for the quote. We’re not really in disagreement. In fact, I’m on your side. This is what I hate: PDFs of a printed book that serve as a digital publication. What I like to see is design for the digital publication, a brand new design that works for the digital environment, not a carryover. I like the Digital Culture Books imprint at University of Michigan Press for setting up a digital counterpart of a book for web use. The imprint is a collaboration between the Scholarly Publishing Office and UM Press: http://www.digitalculture.org/. It’s not fancy, but it’s very readable.
Hi Kristin, Thanks for the link to the Digital Culture imprint. That’s a very interesting project. But I also would suggest that publishers also go ahead with PDFs facsimiles of printed books for those readers who do prefer to read that format. After all, it’s very simple to generate those PDFs.
The greater challenge is, as you point out, developing that brand new design that works for the digital environment. Of course, at that point, it’s gets very interesting as to how one then defines a “book”. But that’s another topic.
I’ve been working on various Rich Media ‘book’ formats for some years..with several major publishers, there are a lot of books that are non-fiction – a lot – and increasingly these are very visually rich, full of diagrams and visual explanations and for many of those books the multi-modality is what gives them communication value not just the word. The typographic layout itself adds to the ‘reading’ in its broadest sense. To consider everything but the raw text to be ‘chest-beating’ shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how words work, how communications work and the multi-modal direction of the modern world. Handy those words though – I give you that, specially for commenting…
Hi Paul – thanks for your comment. It’s nice to hear from someone who understands the visual issues with regards to rich media book formats. What gripes me are the people who believe that all books can just be dumped into Kindle or the iPhone today and, voila! – it’s an e-book. Or, as I said in another post, how to package books for digital media: “A significant problem I see with the current debate on e-books is that it views books as being only text.”