booktwo.org

HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC haven’t overreached themselves, they’ve simply created a site for people to join, upload their work, and read that of others’. Sounds simple, but many similar projects have failed thanks to scope creep.

Every user gets a profile where they can create a virtual bookshelf showing which other writers’ works they’re supporting – authors get the chance to create their own “cover” for a work too, a pointless but satisfying little feature which is sure to go down very well indeed.

The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all – in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being ’stolen’, enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer. The Front List, a previous attempt at a “YouTube for books”/”crowdsourcing the slushfile”-type site, solved this by hiding everything from non-members; one approach certainly, but not one likely to bring in the crowds.

Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns, and they haven’t done too much to break the site in the implementation, short of disabling right-clicking on book text. As they put it, “if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they’ll probably find a way” (Hint: turn off javascript). Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: “here at authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden – and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support.”

On the technical side, users upload books by chapter (as few or as many as they like) in Word or RTF formats, which are then displayed as is – imagine hitting ‘Output as web page’ in Word, if you’ve ever done such a thing. It doesn’t result in the prettiest pages, but it does mean the book appears on the site as the author made it, which is, quietly, quite a thing.

Authonomy has been a long time in the making, and in the wake of the disastrous relaunch of HarperCollins.co.uk, we feared the worst. But Authonomy (still very much in Beta, which HC.co.uk can’t claim to be) looks like a very good little set-up which is bound to get plenty of attention and users. Nice one, HC.

With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was.

After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do (which wasn’t much) I learnt from this video demo (uploaded to YouTube for ease of viewing, from this source). There’s something in the menus about ‘publish book for Apache server’, but that spewed out a bunch of files with no information on what to do with them.

Here’s some screenshots of the interface, the only useful menu, and the ‘halo’ tool configuration:

I’m not sure what’s being created here. Is this a standalone document creator? There’s very little you can do to your content once it’s in Sophie, so you need external text and image editors for most things (for example, I couldn’t work out how to search-and-replace the incorrectly-encoded apostrophes in my Gutenberg source text). Most of the tools are very simple, but then so are the results – this looks like a CD-ROM creator circa 1993. Because, er, that’s what it is…

Sophie’s either sixteen years in the making or nearly three depending on whether you go back to the beginning or not. The beginning was at The Voyager Company, an early electronic publisher … Back in 1992 Voyager released the Expanded Books Toolkit which enabled people to make simple e-books without any programming… Shortly thereafter, Voyager Japan released T-2 which has gone on to become the leading ebook software in its home country. In 1996 a group of Voyager employees formed Night Kitchen with the intent of creating an authoring/reading environment that would extend the Expanded Books Toolkit concept to include rich media. The result TK3 never officially came to market… The Mellon Foundation approached some of the TK3 team and asked them to build a new multimedia authoring program which would be open-source and would extend TK3 by enabling time-based events… That became Sophie. [Source]

Can you imagine the code? It’s clearly inspired by existing rich media applications such as Flash, but it’s target users – the technologically unskilled – don’t use such applications. How are they supposed to get their heads around concepts such as ‘flows’, ‘timelines’ and different server versions? And if they do get that, why aren’t they using the existing apps?

It’s all very disappointing, and I think if:book know it, which is why they haven’t supported or trumpeted this release in any way. But if they’re looking for feedback, here’s some, and we hope it’s constructive:

• Figure out what it’s really for – “Sophie’s raison d’être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming.” Can we get some examples? Are these just tarted-up ebooks, or something more?
• Figure out who wants it – who are these sophisticated but unskilled users? I regularly use Adobe and ex-Macromedia products including Flash, Photoshop, InDesign etc., but I had a hard time figuring out Sophie.
• Make it stand out - I don’t know what differentiates it from other media creation tools. Where’s the killer feature?
• Really open source it – We found the developer site, but there doesn’t appear to much of a community here. The source forge lists about thirty developers, but only about five seem to have done much. What’s going on?
• Smarten it up and Speed it up – it looks terrible and handles worse.

The potential is all there for… something, but I don’t think anyone, least of all its creators, know what. if:book is an academic, not a technical organisation – sorry guys, but I think you’d agree – and this project seems somewhat directionless. As an example, take the comments on the release notice – while there are some questions about the source, most want a long-winded discussion about the theoretical nature of the book.

Yes, this is an alpha release, but it’s still startlingly naked. We need some good examples of what this can do, and at least some basic documentation, to get any kind of a handle on what’s going on.

[UPDATE: Lots of discussion in the comments. Please read on...]

Fascinating review of (the not terribly new) The Future of the Page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, over at Blogcritics.com.

Immediately, we confront the first puzzle not directly discussed within the book, but nevertheless obvious the instant we pick it up in our hands. This book is palpable. It is larger than a paperback. It is filled with illustrations. In fact, one chapter is printed on glossy paper. Why a book? Why not a website? Why not a collection of web pages?

…

It may simply be the case that 500 years of entrenched reading habits have not yet met the right catalyst to undo our literary inertia. The generation which has driven a revolution in the delivery and enjoyment of audio and video is not yet mature enough to have an impact upon the publishing industry. We have yet to witness amongst publishers the same sort of uproar that gripped the RIAA as teenagers around the world began to share audio files through Napster. But the publishing industry’s day may yet arrive. Shortly after this book’s release, Google announced a partnership with several major libraries to scan their collections as fully searchable text. As the use and architecture of the world wide web is increasingly determined by those (younger) people who have been weaned of or have never really felt attached to print media, the publishing industry will have no choice but to adapt. And it will have to begin by reconceptualizing the page. It is in this task that The Future of the Page may prove most valuable.

…

Again, in the silence, we find ourselves drawing a conclusion which is not so surprising after all: the challenge we face is not about adjusting to new ways and new ideas; it is about the age–old struggle for power.

That’s on order at Amazon, then.