Why Your Printed Book Isn’t an E-Book (Yet)

February 16, 2012, 12:01 am

Photo courtesy of ginnerobot

If you have recently published with an academic press, or if your book is in press now, you might have been disappointed to learn that your work won’t be available on your e-reader anytime soon. While novelists take for granted that their new books will appear in all the electronic formats simultaneously with print publication, for scholars there are no such assurances. Why?

The answers fall into three main areas: (1) technology, (2) rights, and (3) money.

Technology

While novels typically consist of straight prose that is relatively easy to pour into the proprietary formats required by the different e-book devices, academic books tend to feature more complex elements. Maps, tables, graphs, and appendixes are still a challenge for e-readers, which must be able to reflow text into various fonts and type sizes according to user preference.

Krista Coulson, digital publishing manager at the University of Chicago Press, points out that while straightforward monographs are excellent candidates for electronic publishing, “math, musical notes, tables, and nonstandard characters don’t translate reliably into reflowable format, especially if the same file needs to work on every platform. Right now we have to insert them as images instead of text.”

Rights

Images work fine on e-readers, but that brings us to the next problem: Writers who borrow photos from museums or archives to illustrate their work must acquire permission to reproduce the images, and electronic rights are not automatically included in conventional permission agreements. Scholars who have spent months or years and hundreds or thousands of dollars obtaining permissions might hesitate to pay extra for e-rights in advance of publication, not knowing whether or not they will be used. Even when it becomes clear that a press wishes to publish in electronic form, a writer might be reluctant to spend more time and money to obtain additional rights.

Money

Which brings us to money: Publishers also face added expense when they decide to add an electronic edition. Technicians must convert the text into digital formats—usually several different ones—and someone must quality-check (if not proofread) the often buggy results. Conventional publishers who decide to expand into digital formats must revamp budgets and work assignments accordingly.

Although university presses are eager to publish digital versions of printed books whenever possible, some scholarly books are still nonstarters when it comes to e-book consideration. “There are a number of kinds of books that we just don’t have a good way to translate into reflowable formats,” says Ms. Coulson. “They may be extremely oversized or have multiple levels of footnotes or margin notes. If we publish a companion or commentary, where one book is closely tied to a second book, we don’t have a way to let readers move between the two books. And imagine if the reader bought one book on Kindle and one book on Nook!”

In the book-planning meetings I attend, no one is happy when we have to forgo electronic publishing because of technical or permission constraints. A favorite sport is to try to guess the speed at which technology will evolve in order to make publishing decisions one or two seasons out. About the only thing everyone agrees on is that it’s just a matter of time.

~ ~ ~

Readers with questions about academic writing, editing, and publishing may e-mail Carol at AskCarolSaller@gmail.com.

This entry was posted in Academe, Editing, Varia, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

dank48

Thank you for a concise yet comprehensive discussion of the matter. It’s so refreshing to read a summary of the situation devoid of hype. After half a year devoted to getting much of our backlist and frontlist converted into the various ebook formats–which might be compared to simultaneous publication of a print book in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, although that would probably be easier–it’s heartening to see a piece on the subject that neither claims we’re all a decade behind the times because we’re concerned with niceties like legal rights and permissions nor implies that the process resembles falling off a log.

It’s a strange fact that many academic authors seem not to realize how !@#$%^&* complex their books are; one would think they’d have noticed. Oh, well. Thanks again.

http://joeclark.org/weblogs/ Joe Clark

Actually, this piece does suggest the industry has its head up its ass about “legal rights and permissions.”

dank48

I don’t see any such suggestion in the article.

dottyeyes

So does this mean that public schools anxious to issue their students an iPad to replace textbooks and hence to ultimately save money may need to rethink this idea? Elementary school and high school textbooks seem to be the height of complexity in typesetting.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

Dottyeyes, scholarly publishing is not about textbooks. It’s mostly about research monographs by academic specialists that will be read by other researchers and advanced graduate students. Advances on royalties are rare, and print runs are modest. Most university presses are nonprofits that have to be subsidized by their host institutions. Textbook publishing is big business and another topic altogether. (And I don’t know the answer to your question!)

dottyeyes

Thanks. I didn’t think about the difference in print runs for scholarly books and textbooks. Economies of scale could make the e-publishing of textbooks worth the effort. Sometimes, considering the small print runs of scholarly works; their poor, obtuse writing; and the threats under which the authors write (publish or perish), I sometimes wonder–heresy–if print publishing of scholarly works is even worth it.

http://joeclark.org/weblogs/ Joe Clark

So let’s see: Academic presses don’t know how to mark up HTML tables or use Unicode, and authors and publishers think fair use and fair dealing don’t exist, that permission must be granted up front, and that permission varies by format of reproduction.

“Why your printed book isn’t an E-book” isn’t the question. “Why academics and publishers work in ignorance” is.

http://twitter.com/dblobaum Dean Blobaum

Joe Clark,

The discussion is about e-books on e-reading devices, not text on the web. Support for table tagging on e-book reading devices varies from non-existent to minimal to OK. Even where it is supported, the size and complexity of tables that are typical in scholarly work can make the use of table tagging result in unreadability. Unicode support on e-readers is just as variable.

Academic publishing is built on fair use. Quoting and criticism of a text is impossible without fair use. But academic publishers know what use is fair and what requires permission. We don’t steal and we’ve been stolen from too often.
Ludo Totem

You wouldn’t happen to be one of those eBook zealots, would you? If so, then you probably know that formatting even simple books for electronic publication is a tremendous amount of highly tedious work and that it’s all too tempting to settle for mediocre results.

And if publishers think that permission varies by format of reproduction it’s probably because that’s precisely how courts have often ruled.

http://joeclark.org/weblogs/ Joe Clark

Dude. I wrote a book on Web standards. I know HTML semantics like nobody’s business. Plus I wrote a perfectly complaint ePub from scratch. (It took 27 versions, but I got there.) I know what I’m talking about.

dank48

Not for the first time, the matter of rights and permissions seems to me to get short shrift from a lot of people. Heaven knows fair use is important. Part of the problem is similar to the problem with “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” “Fair use” can mean one thing to the person using the material and something very different to the person whose material is being used.
http://www.facebook.com/francis.hamit Francis Hamit

As someone who has been publishing e-books since 2004, I agree with all of the above and then some! We do straight text and often hire a contractor to format the longer e-books because getting a final product that is esthetically pleasing to the eye and, therefore, easy to read, is very difficult. Every device has its own quirks and text conversions have traps in the form of hidden codes that produce unintended artifacts that skew text all over the virtual page. It’s a mess. The economic appeal of e-books is that they are more ecologically responsible. Traditional “best-seller” publishing prints thousands of books with the expectation that half of them will be returned to be destroyed or remaindered. This not only wastes the paper and labor needed to print and bind them, but the fuel to transport them. There is a print variant of the e-book called “print-on-demand” (POD) and this is the solution many small presses, academic or not, adopt. Print copies are usually, even now, the only form accepted for review, so a small stock must be maintained for these and other complimentary copies. Not a perfect solution but a better one. But the unit cost is higher and that drives the price per copy up because of the nature of the distribution system, which takes half, or more of the cover price. There is an expectation that e-books will be priced lower because no physical assets are consumed. But you are not buying the physical asset, but the content within and the author(s) and the publisher still have to get paid somehow. The inherent costs for editing and production are still there and formatting e-books properly is an added cost, even if you do it yourself. Yes, e-books make is easier to publish. The time-to-market is much quicker and the buy-in costs are less. but they are still there and actually making money given the number of people who expect to receive free or low-price books is harder than ever. The ten years you spent researching and writing the book is seldom acknowledged as something worthy of financial reward.