The Web is old enough that history can repeat itself. What’s happening now with E-books parallels what happened with Web sites in the early Aughties.

Then vs. now

• Back then, multinational consulting startups like Razorfish and MarchFirst saw the real Web, made up of text and graphics, and tried to make it like television by shoving Flash down our throats. Most of us were using analogue modems at the time and browsers crashed every day.

  Today, publishers see the book, even more solidly constituted of text with occasional graphics, and try to make it like television by shoving “multimedia” down our throats in the guise of “enhanced” E-books. Most of us are using E-readers that can’t even display a photograph adequately, let alone a video.

  Nobody wanted Flash Web sites (a sentiment in resurgence today) and nobody wants enhanced electronic books.

• Back then, the consultants pushing Flash were the same ones so incompetent at the basic underpinning of the Web, namely HTML, that everything surrounding the Flash content barely worked.

  Today, the consultants pushing enhanced E-books cannot turn out a valid, semantic ePub document (XHTML 1.1 in a highly specific zip container with a set of table-of-contents and index files).

• In hindsight, there was a reason why early Web sites sucked. We only barely began to know what we were doing. The concept of Web standards was just coming into being. It took a few years to establish fundamentals like separation of content, style, and behaviour. This was no excuse for misreading the Web as a kind of TV station, but it offers an explanation.

  E-book developers have no excuse. Except in Canada, there are no professional developers who churn out Web sites with “FONT tags” and IE6-era presentational markup. (Your in-house sinecurist who couldn’t get a job on the open market is not a “professional developer.”) Outside Canada, everybody who claims to know anything about the Web knows the fundamentals, even if their ability to deliver varies.

  None of this knowledge has spread to E-book developers. Apart from two artisanal shops I know of, exactly nobody knows how to create a real ePub. There is no coding ability in the field of E-books. (It’s much worse than Web developers’ skill level circa 2001.)

• Razorfish and MarchFirst learned the hard way that consulting doesn’t scale. Those two artisanal shops are learning the same thing. But scale is a crushing issue given that tens of thousands of books have to be converted or created each year just in U.S. English.

Reasons

• Then as now, executives use Windows all day, not the Web or E-books. Who hired Razorfish? Who gives the order to OCR thousands of backlist titles in India and pass them off as E-books? Executives in their late 40s who don’t actually use the medium they manage. (Many wear bifocals, which make reading from any screen uncomfortable.)

  • In the early 2000s, managers didn’t use, let alone know or understand, the Web.

  • Today, they don’t use, know, or understand E-books.

  Executives refused and refuse to learn the rudimentary technical facts necessary to understand what a Web site or E-book is. (Fundamentally the same thing, as it turns out.)

  Working in Windows all day is, as I keep saying, a crucial factor. Lest you think “publishing” is a Macintosh bastion, note that only graphic designers use Macs in that field, with many book designers and nearly all front-office staff using Windows.

  • These systems cannot be said to be ugly anymore; Windows Vista and 7 may not be your personal taste, but they were thoroughly graphic-designed. But they are still user-hostile, they still train users to be afraid of their computers, and, via their default settings, they teach people the wrong way to do things: A “document” uses Times “New Roman” at “12” (really 14) point across a 6½″ measure with full justification and blank lines between paragraphs. (How do I put in page numbers again?)

    In a specific crippling detail, Microsoft Word perpetuates the notion that you write a document then “format” it, which fatally misrepresents what happens with the Web and with ePub books. Not a single one of the latter contains “formatting.” (Kindle E-books are also HTML and there is likewise no such thing as “Kindle formatting.”)

  • Windows systems have phenomenal Unicode support, but not one user in a million knows how to type an opening single quotation mark or a capital C with cedilla. You need a whole flowchart and a half-dozen keystrokes to manage that. (Then what do you do with the next “special” character? What if you’ve got a whole page of them, then 300 pages after that?)

  • Using Windows all day teaches you that not only can computers not be trusted, which you kind of suspected all along, they cannot be understood. Of course you aren’t going to bother taking eight minutes out of your life to learn what structured markup is. (That’s how long it takes me to teach Windows-using executives – or blind teenagers – the basics.)

• Related: Defaults are harmful. I have one example here and it remains make-or-break. If you don’t understand why full justification must never be turned on by default on any computer device, you aren’t qualified to call bingo at the old folks’ home, let alone manage electronic books.

• There is no culture of quality. At a conference I no longer talk about because people who initially claimed to love my presentation relentlessly attacked me later, I spent 45 minutes talking to Michael Tamblyn of Kobo (né Shortcovers). What we discussed isn’t for publication, but the fact we had a discussion is, and I can assure you they were well aware of my Shortcovers challenge. I surmise they have simply thrown up their hands at the task of producing legitimately coded (i.e., real) E-books. It is no coincidence that Kobo was founded in and is headquartered in Toronto, a city with three known qualified Web developers, the rest of them having long since left for Vancouver or been picked off by the Americans.

  I realize I have been fighting my entire life, even from childhood, against people who don’t give a shit. Apart from two artisanal developers, I see nobody who does. Hence I scoffed when I read that Random House will use agent Andrew Wylie’s “files,” but will begin “making changes… to have them soon mirror our… E-book standards.” What “standards”? These people think Track Changes in Word is mission-critical high tech.

• Tools let us down. There is no such thing as an automated process for producing or converting E-books that gets you even 80% of the way toward correct semantics. How much further you could ever get is open to dispute because a human being must decide, at one point or another, what’s a paragraph and what’s an H2, but let me tell you one thing right now: Not every single thing in your E-book is a DIV, as the Apple Pages export-to-ePub function claims.

  I posited the solution to this problem months ago – write everything in HTML. The fact that few authors will be able to do that remains unchanged. What also remains unchanged is the publishing industry’s refusal to hire and train editors who can mark up manuscripts properly.

  It gets worse: iBooks on iOS has access to a high-quality HTML-rendering engine but provably cannot lay out an E-book properly.

What happened in the early Aughties?

I diligently wrote the NUblog (for an audience of dozens) decrying the rank stupidity of management, executives, and Web consultancies, all of whom have made out famously from the Web. I was right all along, of course, but this is hardly news or the sort of thing that helps me at all.

The question is: Can publishing executives count on failing upward the way Web executives did? Is the fact that last decade’s Web executives failed to kill off the Web proof positive that today’s publishing executives won’t kill off publishing?

Clippy thinks you’re formatting an E-book. Would you like help?

It’s in the most overrated book of the year, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, a man with no sense of flow or dialogue. The cause is concisely revealed in Rachman’s condensed bio – “born in London and raised in Vancouver.” Nobody’s more dogmatic about proper British English, but less able to produce it, than a Canadian Brit from B.C. (Pop quiz: Pronounce “water.”)

Our young anglophile even weaves in a zinger in the form of a character named Menzies. So very few people know how that’s pronounced. (Kind of like “zinger.”) Mostly people who wouldn’t pronounce a postvocalic R if a gun were pressed against their temple.

If this thing is a bastardization of British English written by a Canadian who in turn is a traitor to his dialect, why is the whole book rendered in American spelling? The type, more or less competently handled for a change (designer: Barbara M. Bachman), uses a face that works only in a printing technology from two centuries back. (That era is about right for the book’s subject, newspapers.) But the typesetting interferes all by itself from time to time, as in the book’s opening words: LLOYD SHOVES. Is that like orange groves?

Isn’t it the role of editors to compensate for authorial failings? Sure, if we still had editors, or if anyone at all knew what line-editing was and why it’s important, or, at the very least, if we had editors with a legitimate ear for dialogue and an eye for repetition. (Another pop quiz: What are Kathleen and Dario busy eating? Could it be olives? Is it possible what they’re doing is eating olives?)

Who, then, was the editor or editrix? Rachman credits Susan Kamil, clearly old enough to know better, for a “wisdom and deft touch” – complete hands-off approach? hitting Print on the delivered manuscript? – that “helped make The Imperfectionists that much less imperfect.” Not much less enough.

Neologisms in Super Sad True Love Story, whose äpp sücks.

1. äppärät (pl. äppäräti)
2. alkalinized water
3. AlliedWaste, AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup; ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit; LandO’LakesGMFordCredit; UnitedContinentalDeltamerican
4. American Medicle Response
5. AmericanMorning portfolio
6. ARA (American Restoration Authority)
7. armo[u]red Fung Wah bus
8. ass hookah
9. ass-plug (v.)
10. AssLuxury
11. Bipartisan Party
12. Boston-Nanjing Metallurgy College
13. bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact
14. BRIC [Brazil, Russian, India, China]-A-BRAC High-Performing Nations Fund
15. Brownstone Brooklyn
16. Cervix (“the newly hip bar in newly hip Staten Island”)
17. Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser
18. Child Abuse Multimedia
19. China South Airlines
20. China-Worldwide
21. Community Parameters
22. Credit; Media; Retail
23. Credit Pole
24. CrisisNet
25. Debt Bombing (v.)
26. dechronification
27. Desking Ceremony
28. durability (health)
29. EmotePad
30. extro (adj.)
31. FAC (Form a Community)
32. five-jiao men
33. fuckability index
34. FoxLiberty-Prime; FoxLiberty-Ultra
35. GlobalTeens; teen (v.)
36. GlobalTrace
37. H-Mart (or H-mart)
38. Harm Reduction (displacing the poor)
39. HNWI; LNWI
40. HolyPetroRussia
41. Hyundai Town Car; Hyundai Persimmon
42. Infinite Sadness Endurance Test
43. ITP (impossible to preserve); Fallacy of Merely Existing
44. JuicyPussy summer dress; JuicyPussy4Men
45. Lacy Twaät, starlet
46. Lao Wai foreigner passport
47. LIBOR rate
48. Life Lovers
49. Mediastud; MediaWhore
50. NORC (Naturally Occurring Retirement Community)
51. New York Lifestyle Times
52. Onionskin jeans
53. Oslo Delight sandwiches
54. Parakkeet blazer
55. Patterson-Clay-Schwartz Language Cognition Test
56. Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast
57. RAG (rapidly-aging geezer)
58. RateMe, RateMePlus
59. the Rupture
60. Saaami nippleless bras
61. Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency
62. Secure Screening Facilities
63. “security shed”
64. SecurityState Israel
65. SmartBlood
66. Soft Policy
67. Staatling-Wapachung; Wapachung Contingency; Wapachung Intelligence; Staatling Property Relocation Services
68. Stability(-Canada)
69. StatoilHydro (Norwegian state oil company)
70. SUSTAINABILIT¥ score
71. whorefuckrevu (magazine)
72. TeenyBopper
73. ThaiSnak franchises
74. TotalSurrender (or Total Surrender)
75. UGuangdong-Riverside
76. UNRC (United Nations Retail Corridor)
77. verbal (v.)
78. yuan-pegged dollar
79. Zoo York Basic Cracker hoodies

Design Is History is the new site that perpetuates the misapprehension, convincingly diagnosed as harmful by Natalia Ilyin in Chasing the Perfect, that “design history” is a sequence of discrete jumps from A to Z with stops at every letter in between.

I have received, obviously from the library, Cognitive Surplus from the much-loved Mr. CLAY SHIRKY. Why does this book exist? The system demanded it.

The book qua book makes Clay Shirky more entrenched, also richer. It makes the publisher seem like a purveyor of brave new ideas that had actually been worked out long before in a medium it is loath to acknowledge. This case, like others before, reveals structural deficiencies on the nonfiction-book industry.

• Shirky’s cognitive-surplus concept has been more than adequately explained online. You knew all about it even before he explained it in the intelligentsia-ratified environment of the TED conference. The concept isn’t so intricate it requires 213 pages of explication (with, as expected, poor copy quality and half-assed typography). The concept does not comprise that much content. But there is a fallacy at work that good ideas need to be expanded.

• A resemblance to the Peter Principle is surely coincidental, but the Commentariat Publishing Lifecycle follows this path:

  • A semifamous commentator issues an interesting idea, usually via blog post. (Publisher: Self.)
  • It spreads to the point that one of a vanishing few magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly, commissions a thinkpiece that “expands on” the idea. (Publisher: Struggling mid-sized house; foundation.)
    • The idea has thus been ratified to the midlevel of the intellectual discourse.
    • The article does not acknowledge that the idea originated on the Web.
  • The commentator, now more than semifamous, may then be invited to further “expand on” his idea in a printed book, for which he will be paid an advance and possibly royalties. (Publisher: Multinational conglomerate.)
    • The idea has thus becomes ratified to the permanent canon.
    • The book passingly acknowledges the article as the genesis of the book.

• This process pretends to be evolutionary or benignly incremental but smacks more of the purgatory of greatest hits, in which semipopular bands are doomed to play hour-long sets in one-horse towns to dwindling crowds who showed up to hear the hit single and have no patience for anything else.

• The progression from blog post to magazine article to printed book becomes a form of velvet handcuffs for the freelance intellectual, who is forced to nursemaid the same idea, now well beyond its training-wheels stage, just when he should be coming up with new ideas. (Or already has – and, if he’s published them, those new ideas are eclipsed by the old idea or are taken as proof that the intellectual has only as many really good ideas as he has books.)

A book takes a year or two out of your life and generally costs you. Why would a public intellectual agree to write one?

• Even for a writer with a good business outside the book trade (like, presumably, Shirky), a single book advance makes for a reasonable down payment on a house or a tidy college fund for a child. Or it just makes you richer.

• The book stays on shelves – somewhere – for the rest of your life and then some. It becomes a tangible record of your achievement.

• Last but not least, the whole process is an arms race of flattery, in which people with more and more power and influence make you one offer after another you can’t refuse.

Who gets left behind in this process, which, in true power-law fashion, benefits people who are already famous and well-remunerated, like Clay Shirky, Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, and Jeff Jarvis? I could name a category or two of losers in this game.

Instead, I will mention that Carr long ago recommended I gin up one of my ideas to a form that a magazine like the Atlantic would publish. I’d be doing that just to grease the wheels of the publishing industry, which has proven to me to be inept, ignorant of its own generations-old protocols, brusque, disingenuous, mendacious (in one case to my face), dismissive, riven by fear, and broadly deserving of its own demise.

But should authors who aren’t established names have to go down with the ship?

Should Shirky, Carr, Keen, or Jarvis turn down their next book offer? Should, or why should, their next books exist?

(UPDATED) Richard Florida aggressively posits that neighbourhoods and cities that welcome gay residents are the most creative and flush with cash. (When criticized for such statements, he commissions new research and publishes that. He intensifies his point.) Florida is, of course, the name-brand analyst who believes nail-salon operators and baristas are “creative,” hence part of the “creative economy”. Nonetheless, is it really is in dispute that gay populations and creativity correlate?

But this likable self-promoter and millionaire can and did take things too far, as he did when he claimed the following: “As [Gary] Gates and I have pointed out elsewhere, the presence of [gay] people isn’t a sufficient condition for wealth creation in and of itself; gay men and lesbians are no more… economically productive… than any other group on average.”

Gary Gates knows full well that this statement is false, based on the preponderance of evidence from U.S., Canadian, Swedish, and Dutch data sources, most of which show significant earnings penalties for gay men and even more significant earnings premia for lesbians. To state this another way, gay males earn less money than straight guys and lesbians earn more money than straight girls.

(U.K. data shows no difference for males but shows a premium for lesbians. One U.S. paper [Carpenter 2005] shows no difference for either group. One paper on Australian data [Carpenter 2008] shows an earnings penalty for lesbians. The trend, however, among all research specifically on the U.S. and Canada, conforms to what I have stated above.)

Gary Gates is quite aware of this trend, having written or cowritten at least two papers I know of on the topic of lesbian and gay economics, about which I am writing the sole annotated bibliography.

Florida’s statement reeks of a “Gays are people too!” blandishment and mythmaking; it has no basis in fact. With the armies of research assistants who do the bulk of his work, and with Gates as collaborator, how did Richard Florida manage to make that mistake?

I posed that question to him via electronic mail last month. Kimberly Silk, who I presume is some kind of assistant, read or opened the message, according to the read receipt, but there was no comment since then. (I didn’t ask Gates because he wasn’t the one who made the statement.)

Update

(2010.08.24) Gary Gates wrote in to state his belief that, when all economic factors are taken into account, Florida’s statement is accurate. I wrote back stating that I disagree for the simple reason that the mainstream reader of the Daily Beast will invariably interpret “economic productivity” as wages or earnings, which are lower for gay males and usually higher for lesbians. Neither of those reported effects is reconcilable with the statement “gay men and lesbians are no more… economically productive… than any other group on average.” Civilian readers of a general-interest news blog will not be Ph.D.s in economics who understand that economics encompasses more than money.

(Cf.)

What New York, which already can’t get a handle on the concept of print-friendly pages, now thinks a print-friendly page is (“The James Franco Project” [“printable”], linewrapped):

Print Page

<http://nymag.com>

Building Printer-Friendly Page… /,"");
$("#text").append(' '+headerText+'
');
$("#narrow-bubble").remove();
}
var pageText
= d.substring(d.search
("")+16,
d.search('\<\/div\>\
<\!-- \/end \#story--\>'))
.replace(/\n/g,"");
$("#text").append(' '+pageText+' ');
getPage(pgNum+1); })
}
$(function(){ getPage(0);});
<http://www.omniture.com>
<http://www.quantcast.com/p-52tlJ-QdbVwC->

At one time, New York had an excellent site hacked into fruition by Mr. MARCOTTE. Now it has been well and truly fucked, all for the want of print CSS.

I thought all the incompetent Web developers lived here.