“My background is as an editorial manager, originally for Picador and for the last two years for ‘digital’ as well, which means Pan Macmillan’s eBook and online publishing programme. I was brought into the project team because they had got to quite an advanced stage before realizing that creating an eBook is not as simple as File, Save As, and editorial input was needed to resolve some of the new questions proposed by the new medium. I’ve also been involved in the Digitalist, which some of you may read, and so Jon asked me to contribute from the perspective of a ‘digital editor’ in a trade publishing house.
     The first part of the advertisement for tonight’s session asks what new skills are looked for by those hiring and promoting under the ‘growing influence of technology and the Internet’. Having joined the industry twenty years ago, before we had computers, before we had email, and before the Web, if not the Internet, was invented, I have seen the ‘growing influence of technology and the Internet’ all my working life; but the essential skills required of editors, and for the purpose of this talk I’m using ‘skills’ in the sense of a coherent set of knowledge and the techniques for applying that knowledge, such as the skill of reading or of driving, have not changed radically: from acquiring a book and negotiating the contract to editing the text to inspiring the sales and marketing people, the skills remain essentially the same. And while the way editors publish books has changed it has not changed radically, although the tools have changed, and the idea that using any tool more sophisticated than Outlook or Word requires a separate skill set that can be delegated is unlikely to disappear for the foreseeable future, sad though that is. There are important and successful authors who don’t have computers, email, or the Web, and it would be entirely possible for an editor to work likewise: a straw poll agreed that an editor of 1988 who time-jumped to 2008 would, apart from the slight problem of not having read anything for the last twenty years, be able to edit and publish successfully.
     So in the context of a discussion of the ‘portfolio of skills that publishers need’ perhaps the most important point I want to make is that although I was asked to speak as a ‘digital editor’, in my view there is no need for a digital editor as such in a trade publishing house, rather an editor who understands the digital world: editors have always been needed who could publish into new markets, who could create new markets, and editors are still needed who can publish into new digital markets with the same expertise they publish print books, often at the same time with the same material, and that’s where new knowledge will be needed. Although other publishers have come to different conclusions, notably Penguin, who have thirty to forty staff who have half their rold based on digital projects, the two most important decisions we made at Macmillan while devising the digital programme this year were, first, to locate the editorial process for eBooks directly in the editorial department for books published in 2009, once the digital team had established the workflow and processes, and second to publish our standard eBooks at the same level of editorial quality as our paper books, with the same content as far as the technology allowed. In brief, this relates to two key issues: accuracy of conversion, which we set at 99.999999%, instead of some competitors’ 99.95%, and attending to the reader experience by providing accurate and appropriate metadata, which is one of the points I want to illustrate later on to show why I believe editors need new knowledge not new skills. These two together meant it was natural for an editor to work on most of their titles as if they were destination-neutral.
     So when I replied to Jon’s invitation by saying as I’ve outlined that editors need new knowledge but not a new set of skills, he suggested I take the opportunity to demystify the concern that some editors have about the ‘digital world’ and to draw some conclusions about how the digital/electronic changes we’re seeing and going to see will impact on your lives, and he gave me two main questions to address:
1. how have you found the process of moving from a traditional publishing process, where edited words primarily end up on a page, to something that incorporates the blogs and communicating with readers? And
2. what preparations, if any, should editors make for e-books, which are becoming more of a standard.

“How have you found the process of moving from a traditional publishing process, where edited words primarily end up on a page, to something that incorporates the blogs and communicating with readers?” Well, actually, I don’t think we have moved. All trade publishers are, or should be, at the early stages of incorporating new ways of composing and creating texts, and of considering what texts are, but traditional publishing always has communicated with readers to some degree – think of the nineteenth-century novels that are now classics that were written first for serialization. Twentieth-century publishing was less receptive, if receptive at all, to reader response at the creative stage, and just because Web 2.0 encourages new ways for readers and writers to get involved with each other it doesn’t follow that publishers want to, or can, take advantage of it, in much the same way that the poetry subculture of the twentieth century did little to affect conventional poetry publishing. In a way, the healthier and more active this reader-collaborative culture is the less likely it is that a publisher will want to become involved for fear of contaminating it. In practical terms a digital workflow makes it easy to chunk text and deliver it in new forms, both printed and virtual, but it’s still a one-to-many publishing process. Even new writing forms, such as Keitai Bunko in Japan or distribution forms such as MPS Mobile’s Global Reader aren’t radically different, interesting though they are, as shown by the fact that many Keitai are subsequently published in traditional print form, as of course are some of the most popular blogs. Writing that uses new media by incorporating visuals, sound, movies and so on in different delivery platforms such as the new Sony Reader, Alternate Reality Games mixing narrative and interaction by readers and contributors, self-published material, collaborative wikinovels and other kinds of informal, or extra-formal creativity, are exactly the kind of material that a traditional trade publishing house such as Pan Macmillan, however innovative, finds it very difficult to use, or even acknowledge, in a publishing process, and it’s unlikely to be seriously practical in the short term, which means until someone can think of a way to make money out of it, not least because digital projects are typically seen by customers and authors as free or very low-cost, when in fact they’re often more expensive than traditional ones because of the high set-up and development costs. Having said that we do in fact have one project of this kind, but it only exists because it hangs off a very well-established author known for his use of innovation, and it’s seen and will continue to be seen as peripheral to the editorial process, something that happens outside the editorial department, created by the digital or the marketing department and brought to editorial to be realized, and when it is approved it’s the editor who has the relationship with the agent and with the author who will attract the readers/players/contributors, the editor who presents the idea, negotiates the contract, and so on. So the short answer to this question about communicating with readers is that it’s the marketing people who have managed this change, and as long as most of a publisher’s content is sold as books, whether print or digital and whether through shops or the Web, it’s marketing that will have to continue to change the most to find new readers and new ways of reaching readers. We publish in an industry that requires content to be submitted to the trade buyers nine months before publication, and the process will remain far too inflexible for the foreseeable future. In fact of course designing or imagining a process crushes most of what makes this interesting. And more importantly perhaps our traditional process shouldn’t: the book, whether printed or in digital form, is inimical to this sort of two-way ephemeral communication. What it needs to do instead is create a new post-publishing process, a sort of après-lit, which makes clever and effective use of reader involvement through websites and with social-networking tools, but that is familiar Web 2.0 material and outside the scope of this answer.
     The second question, ‘What preparations, if any, should editors make for e-books, which are becoming more of a standard’, is more easily answered and is where we get to the practical hands-on answers you were promised. But before I answer that I should say that in my view while they are now an essential part of a trade publisher’s programme they are not becoming more of a standard: there was a rush this summer to publish only in Adobe epub format, but there are several other important formats available, not least PDF, which Adobe has been careful to ensure is supported in Adobe Digital Editions; Mobipocket, which was bought by Amazon and can be read by the Kindle as well as mobile devices; and MS Reader, which is a legacy product that has some useful if under-exploited features. So to answer this question I’ll also answer the underlying one, ‘How much is digital going to change the way I work?’ In doing so I have chosen ten key islands of knowledge.
1. Get the rights. Penguin got 700 titles up for the Waterstone’s launch – then had to take 120 down as they discovered rights hadn’t been agreed.
2. Understand moral rights. The new formats mean titles that had no moral rights will re-acquire them once republished. When commissioning indexes, state that the index will be used in all editions.
3. Assign ISBNs correctly. Each format of a title needs a unique ISBN.
4. Understand localization. Harper didn’t get any UK titles up for the Waterstone’s launch – all theirs are US titles.
5. Understand version control and decide on a strategy – there are no impression numbers in eBooks.
6. Get to know your output formats.
MS Reader
i, ii, iii – good. Jeremy Paxman, A Portrait of the English (pub. Penguin) – hyperlinked table of contents, hyperlinked index, text is well laid out with extracts distinguished as on the printed page. Comfortable to read without distractions.
iv, v – reasonable. Abbeys and Priories of Great Britain (pub. Heritage Trail) – excess leading between paragraphs, hyphen not an N dash in the title bar: too much leading in the glossary. Not very comfortable to read.

Mobipocket
vi – bad. Cult of Dr Who – no page break for a new chapter, artwork missing, straight inverted commas, no italics for book title, basic grammatical error in the heading.Mobipocket
vii – good. Pocket Oxford Dictionary: each word has its own page, colour is used intuitively, the distinction between underlines and hyperlinks is clear, navigation is easy. Although it has straight inverted commas, it’s obvious that a lot of thought has been put into making the best use of the medium.
viii – bad. A Passage to India (pub. Rosetta Books): no sign of any thought. Meaningless emblem to go with the chapter heading, every paragraph is full out, no italics for book titles, basic typesetting mistakes.
ix – bad. 9/11 Commission Report. Artwork unreadable, leading wrong between and within paragraphs, endnotes not hyperlinked.

ADE
x, xi – mixed. Dr Who (pub. Pocket Essentials). Clear layout, helpful bookmarks, italic and bold all converted successfully; but the index is not hyperlinked so is useless.
xii – mostly good. Thirteen Moons (pub. Random House).  Chapter titles, large and small caps, leading generally correct.
7.  Get to know your conversion or output process. ADE officially imports from XML, Mobipocket from HTML, Word, PDF or text, MS Reader from Word.
8. Understand metadata and decide on its importance for your books (bookmarks in Perdido Street Station; bookmarks in a Tor book).
9. Build in metadata-friendly elements to your books at the earliest stages.
unnamed sections in Electricity (‘or was it goodbye’).
10. Understand a digital workflow.

‘While publishing companies invest significantly – if cautiously – in new technology, and the ‘digital age’ continues to accelerate, the portfolio of skills that publishers need is expanding rapidly. From editorial to production to marketing, the growing influence of technology and the internet can be felt keenly throughout the industry. So what are those doing the hiring and promoting looking for?

For anyone keen to remain on top of digital developments in books this meeting aims to answer these questions. Hosted by the Society of Young Publishers with the support of JFL Search and Selection and MPS Technologies, our experienced panel will take you through what you need to know.’

I’m contributing from the viewpoint of the ‘digital editor’, and also contributing is Chris Meade, Director, if:book (Future of the Book), London; the chair is Ros Kindersley, Managing Director, JFL Search & Selection. It promises to be an interesting discussion. More details here.

Like Cultural Amnesia, it was definitive, although it boldly claimed that in cases of discrepancy it was reality that was wrong. The one major feature it omitted was to allow the user to annotate it, then collect, save, distribute and share this marginal metadata with other readers. It’s some of Clive James’s marginal metadata that comprises the special feature of this edition, ideas and themes that were ‘parked to one side’ then span off and found individual form, and which have now been included.

The idea that a special edition eBook can contain marginal material produced before, during, or after a print edition features in two other eBooks to be published by Picador this year. Sid Smith’s China Dreams, which we published in hardback in January 2007 and in paperback in January 2008, will be issued in a uniquely up-to-date edition, in the author’s latest version, with corrections, changes, and new material, and a foreword in which he considers the process of composition and revision. Cliffhanger, by T. J. Middleton (the alias of our established Picador author Tim Binding), takes this idea in the opposite direction: alongside the print edition, which we publish in October 2008, will be an urtext: a composite version of the novel as it was before it was edited here at Picador, with the text in its original form, reinstated and modified scenes and characters, and a radically different ending, also with a foreword by the author explaining the urtext’s conception and the editing process that turned it into Cliffhanger.

These special eBooks are developments of, elaborations of the print books – the texts as they might have been, perhaps ought to have been, perhaps will be – and apart from the medium of delivery they would not have seemed strange to the reader of 1979. The production process for these special edition eBooks would also be familiar to the Pan editor in 1979: they’re copy-edited, designed, typeset, and proofread in the same way as a print book, and then sent to the printers, except in this case to their eBook division. The production details would be different, of course: phototypesetting only replaced hot metal in the 1980s, making possible features such as automatic application of hyphenation and justification rules, infinitely variable leading and kerning, and text wrapping and overlay; and the different features and limitations of the applications we’ve chosen for reading our eBooks have their own opportunities and problems.

So if special edition eBooks are a natural development of their print titles, and can be approximated to films released as DVDs, with extras including unseen material and director’s versions, what of the titles that exploit the new medium, and new reading environments and communities such as those found on the Web, in a way no print title could? Well, naturally, we have plans for those too, in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1979 (the Web itself wasn’t around until 1990), but, we hope, still recognizable to those visionaries. Stay posted.

The digitizing partner chosen is Microsoft, with the actual work being done by a German firm, Content Conversion Specialists; the library ‘retains the rights to all the data being collected’ but Microsoft has the right to host the collection on its Live Search Books site, for a duration not revealed by the library. The team of five people scans 50,000 pages a day to complete the project in two years. Books smaller than 28 x 35.5 cm can be automatically scanned, and so 20-30% must be scanned manually. All books are visually checked for loose or torn pages, then placed under a lectern with two Canon 16.6 megapixel lenses; the operator turns the first few pages then the machine uses suction to turn the remainder, at one page every two or three seconds. The operator at the station sees all the pages as thumbnails on a PC, to fix errors. Fold-outs that can’t be scanned by the machine are around 1% of the total, and they’re scanned separately and integrated later by software. The project has a 12 CPU blade server with 40TB of storage.

Resolution is 300dpi for both text and images, which the library says is ideal for reading online but also suitable for print on demand if required in the future. Output formats are JPEG 2000, PDF and plain text; OCR is used to capture plain text which is ‘specially processed’ to deal with antique orthography and typography. A secondary check takes place in Romania, and the library batch-samples files delivered by CSS to ISO 2859-1.

Scanning takes place underground with no natural daylight, to ensure colour consistency, and the scanning room is air-conditioned: ‘Just one degree in temperature changes the light tuning and requires colour adjustments.’

To deal with copyright issues the library is using ‘a database of authors’; those in copyright (less than 1%) won’t be digitized, and orphan works (about 40%) will be but with a ‘notice and takedown’ procedure on the website.

Note: the article uses ‘scan’ throughout but it’s clear from the diagram that a static photograph of each page is used.

Both start with the design: Wilson thinks it looks like ‘a vintage pocket calculator’, apparently not seeing the six-inch screen, while PC Pro remarks that ‘Jeff Bezos has himself claimed that one of the key design points is to allow the reader to forget they’re using the device at all, becoming immersed in the book itself.’ Wilson does notice the screen, however, when he writes ‘One thing to be said in its favour [actually the only thing he can think of in its favour] is that the Kindle is not a scroll but a codex’, in that text is presented in whole pages that the reader can turn, which he thinks doesn’t happen on a computer: the change from continuous text to page realized ‘a peculiar intimacy’ that effected the birth of Protestantism (he’s reading Luther’s translation of the Bible to learn German). Had he seen one, or even looked at Amazon’s page, he wouldn’t then have written ‘Presumably you can flip back a page, but even if you can do so in seconds, this will be longer than the split second that it takes us to turn back a page when you want to check the name of a character in a novel or to refresh your memory of who is speaking’: PC Pro’s reviewer, who had, wrote ‘much has been made of the half-second “flash”, where the image is inverted to white-on-black before the next page displays. In fact, we found that we quickly became used to this and, within a few pages of a suitably compelling text, we found that we stopped consciously noticing it at all.’ Its only complaint was that the Prev Page button was easy to press by mistake.

So as Wilson reads his Bible in the dark ‘by torchlight’ (really) he reflects on the intimacy he enjoys: ‘It is simply you and it, with no electric battery, no lit-up screen . . . alone with my book I am impregnable’. Well, you can be alone with a Kindle, the battery is silent and lasts for a week or more, and the screen is not lit up but uses ink on electronic paper. PC Pro points out that, as intended, it can be read even in bright sunlight, which is surely a more likely environment. But Wilson’s final point is that this intimacy can never be consummated on a Kindle: ‘how do you scribble telephone numbers on it, or half-finish the crossword?’ Without getting too Kristevan about the matter, crosswords aren’t supplied in the Kindle newspaper editions, but of course ‘because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes, highlight and clip key passages, and bookmark pages for future use’, as Amazon explains, and a dictionary is included.

So why consider this nonsense? Because A. N. Wilson is an influential reader who’s frequently perceptive about things that matter to people who read, and to get his account so badly wrong, quite apart from the fact that he thinks it’s acceptable not to look up the basic facts about something he evidently considers he can live without, is itself revealing. It’s been said before, but not often enough (and even PC Pro thinks it’s worth mentioning): whether on dedicated devices or familiar platforms, eBooks don’t replace books, they replace libraries. A. N. Wilson in his bed reading Luther in his cell inherits a tradition and practice that astonished St Augustine when he saw Bishop Ambrose in Milan. ‘When he read his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent’: for St Augustine, reading had been a matter of physical involvement with a text, speaking it aloud, infusing and suffusing it with one’s breath; reading it aloud was communal, involving all those around, literate and illiterate, in its consumption. PC Pro’s reviewer wrote ‘we found that we quickly became used to this’; while the Kindle or its successors are $399, this sharing will be physical, but eBooks invite, or demand, a new consummation with the texts they hold: they’re no longer confined to the printed page, plastic (noun and adjective), scriptible, missible; the text your Kindle receives is not yet like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, receiving updates and revisions over the sub-etha net, but it is truly palimpsestic in ways that traditional readers like Wilson haven’t the experience to imagine. The scholars and pupils in St Augustine’s youth were engaged in a one-to-many relationship, reading communally in a lithographic practice: the text was immutable and the metadata ephemeral. In 2007 eBooks are beginning to find a new form: ‘enhanced’ or digital-only editions; editions that carry a history of their composition; editions that link to other editions or resources, textual, visual, graphical; editions that exist in a many-to-one relationship with their readers, who are also their authors (and here author, from the Latin for ‘increase, originate, promote’, not writer, from the Old English ‘score, form (letters) by carving’ conveys the change from lithography to a new sense for demography). ‘The book changed my way of feeling . . . For under its influence my petitions and desires altered. All my hollow hopes suddenly seemed worthless, and with unbelievable intensity my heart burned with longing for the immortality that wisdom seemed to promise . . . It had won me over not by its style, but by what it had to say.’ A bezonian is an old word for a raw recruit, and in Henry IV Part Two Pistol brings news from the court; Shallow, the bezonian, says: ‘If, sir, you come with news from the court, I take it there’s but two ways: either to utter them, or conceal them.’ Like St Augustine we should be astonished, but not at the new, rather at the old. Tolle, lege, communicare.