The State of Ebooks Update

Standard Ebooks

I continue to make ebooks for Standard although my rate has slowed down. This is mostly due to choosing longer projects instead of sticking to plays. I think I am on number 38 now (a collection of Wodehouse’s golf stories). I also do reviews of others’ submissions, which is this weird mishmash of proofreading, code checking and editorial oversight—a combination of skills I didn’t think would be all that easy to acquire.

All in all I enjoy it immensely and intend to keep participating for the foreseeable future.

Bright Wing Media

Back just before the new year I interviewed with Bright Wing for a job I hadn’t applied for. That didn’t turn out (afaik they just didn’t fill the position) but I kept gently reminding them of my existence and finally picked up some work. So far I have created/remediated four public domain ebooks for them: Theodore Dreiser – An American Tragedy, Charles Dickens – Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South and T.E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And it looks like I have another project in the pipeline for next week and it might even be something original this time. Hopefully this will turn into an ongoing gig.

It’s been interesting work, mostly for the understanding of different publisher’s systems and requirements and I was finally forced to learn to use Sigil (which I had played around with previously but ultimately ignored in favour of using a straight-up text editor).

The General State of Ebooks

This (different publishers’ systems and requirements) brings me to an important topic that I am trying to learn/participate in/promote. Just a disclaimer first, this is a huge topic and well worth a much, much longer post, but I am just going to give you a bit of a rant and leave the meat of the issue for later.

Ebook Accessibility

A traditional bound book sucks for accessibility. You need two good hands and two good eyes to read it. You could probably get away with one of each but the experience starts to deteriorate rapidly. But what could you do? But ebooks, ah, ebooks offer a world of possibilities, don’t they?

Way back when, when ebooks were in a fledgling state and sales were minimal, publishers embraced ebooks reluctantly and, quite frankly, poorly. But these days — sadly (to me) much under the influence of that monolith of capitalism Amazon — ebook sales have increased to over 20% of a publisher’s total book sales revenue. The books themselves are getting more and more sophisticated in design and format and the readers much more ubiquitous.

Industry standard programs lie Adobe Indesign has made great strides in their approach to converting a print book to digital format and many other tools have continued to progress to the point where creating an ebook is relatively simple for any publisher.

In conjunction with all that the issue of accessibility has also continued to be addressed and many working groups like NNELS here in Canada, Accessible Books Consortium, The DAISY Consortium
Creating the best way to read and publish, Benetech, and the World Wide Web Consortium have all been working together to develop and modify standards that will hopefully help the broadest swath of disadvantaged readers.

As a result there exists now a robust standard now that allows an ebook to be created in a way that helps various technologies to present the material to make the experience enjoyable and fluid for a broad range of disabilities.

Great stuff.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is change is hard and publishers are stubborn.

I know, I know, that’s not totally fair but it is a realistic overview of the situation. In order to create a born-accessible ebook certain jobs have to shift around, new skill sets have to be learned and priorities have to change. To remediate old ebooks to the current standard takes more money, more time and an even more specialized skillset. All this costs money and time and most small publishers don’t have either. The big ones — the ones who should be showing leadership and have a bit more money — are a bit more on the stubborn side if you ask me; although I admit shifting a production process is infinitely harder when you produce 1000 books a year than when you produce 10.

Still, you get the point.

What’s the solution?

Hah, if I knew that I would be a lot richer than I am now. But…

  1. First they need to look at the problem from a different angle. It’s all just code and if there is anything this world has a lot of, its coders. It’s not that hard to automate a lot of this — working Standard has taught me that.
  2. Second we need to stop focussing on profit. There is no profit incentive for wheelchair ramps, braille letters on elevators or TTY machines. Just invest in making the process easy and publishers will fall in line and someone will figure out how to make money from it later.
  3. Publishing needs to grasp that change is good and rearranging and retraining some key personnel will make this go a lot smoother — and they will eventually reap the benefits of that change. Personally I don’t believe it means hiring more people or spending more money. It’s no worse that the transition to desktop publishing from paste up — eventually the benefits spoke for themselves.
  4. And finally, and most importantly someone needs to conk the standard setters on the head and remind them that just because standards organization have been speaking in something even worse than legalese for decades, that it really, really isn’t helping anyone. In fact, even for me, it is a huge disincentive.

You’d think if the technology types could sit with the communication types to make the process clear and then the government types provided a bit of money then this would straighten itself out pretty quick. Right, I know. Lol.

But I watched a panel a while back talking about the issues surrounding ebook remediation and two things struck me.

  1. Someone said that publishers can’t expect to retain people with all the right skillsets. Granted he was talking about the broader idea of accessibility and that included braille, audio books, etc. as well as accessible ebooks but still… It’s not that hard to train/find people to understand standards, code and software as well as design and traditional production — we already did that once back in the 90s. It’s not hard or unreasonable, it’s just different and, again, I acknowledge change is hard. I don’t know what the design schools are teaching these days but this really should be a priority.
  2. The person who represented small publishers said she had gone through a back-and-forth process with NNELS to produce a fully compliant accessible ebook and she now has a template. As a result their ebook production time and difficulty has decreased significantly. Exactly. Set a standard and follow it. Any press could do that and if the template was freely available and easily customizable, well…

Of course it’s not always that simple. Especially if you are dealing with textbooks, or specialized publications that require a lot extra coding. But there is absolutely no excuse for producing a traditional fiction-style ebook that is not fully compliant with the accessibility standards. None. It’s just ignorance and/or laziness.

And we can fix both of those. So let’s…

P.S. My biggest issue remains the kind of communication and misinformation that surrounds the whole ebook production process. It’s just not that hard, and making an ebook accessible in the first place (or remediating old ones if you have to) is currently wrapped in some sort of mystique and arcane-ness — and a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo. Again, to me, it comes down to piss poor communication and misguided advocacy in an age where driving public perception, propaganda, and manipulating the message have reached a high art. I can’t help thinking it’s a matter of mistaken priorities.

P.P.S. If you want to learn more about ebook production, coding and even what’s necessary to meet the standards, I encourage you to take a swing at volunteering for Standard Ebooks. There is a great step-by-step and I have even written a guide on how to go about getting started for those of us more editor and less coder.