Words on a page

I admit it. Blame it on the foolishness of youth. A foolishness that’s been tempered by something resembling maturity.

What I’m referring to is this article. Written by yours truly in the early 1990s. If you have a moment, read the article to understand where I’m coming from

[For those of you who don't have the time to read it, the gist of the article was that the drive to make book digital would never create a replacement for actual dead trees.]

Times change, and so do opinions. I’m one who straddles both old and new schools. I still read physical books. But I also read electronic books. The “experience” (whatever that means) of reading both is slightly different but it’s pretty much the same.

In the time that I’ve immersed myself in digital text, I’ve come to the conclusion that many people rethink how they define what a book is.

It’s the words

What is a book? Is it a mass of bound paper? Is it a collection of bits?

It’s both.

What makes up a book isn’t its form. It’s the words. It’s the thoughts and ideas and emotions that those words convey. That is what a book is. Nothing more, nothing less.

It could be that trade paperback on my shelf. It could be, say, that nice hardbound edition of Anna Karenina that I pick up from time to time. It could be a PDF file that I view on my computer screen. It could an ePub file that’s read on an ebook reader or my smartphone. Each and every one of is a book.

A while ago someone saw me with an ebook reader and asked Don’t you think you’re helping kill the book by using one of those things? My reply, in a marginally Nietzchean vein, was Changing something doesn’t kill it. And that’s how I feel now.

The book isn’t dead. It’s just changing form. Books still need to be written. Books still need editing. They still need someone to publish them — although that can be done by the writers, too.

Even if masses of ink and paper go the way of the horse-drawn buggy books will still exist. For now, we have paper and digital. And that’s a great thing.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.

Photo credit: robootb from Photoxpress

As part of an exercise in decluttering, I’ve given away or sold a majority of my books over the last couple of years. Not that my shelves are bare — I still have a number of volumes of all sorts.

Among the books that I’ve given away and kept are a few on writing. A few of those books are 20 years or more old. I think it’s a testament to their usefulness that I’m holding on to them.

Here are a few of the keepers:

Basic Magazine Writing by Barbara Kevles. As the title states, this book outlines how to structure and write several kinds of magazine articles (like the profile, the interview, etc.). It also explains interviewing, pacing, and how to find article ideas.

Writing in Bullets by Kim Long. While I think that far too many people take the kind of advice in this type of book too far, Writing in Bullets offers some solid guidance on writing concisely.

Hot Text by Lisa Price and Jonathon Price. This was one of the first books on writing for the Web, and it’s still one of the best. Even though it’s seven years old, the information isn’t all that dated. The tips and techniques that the authors discuss are as valid now as they were in 2002.

The Freelance Writer’s Handbook by Dennis E. Hensley and Holly G. Miller. I bought this book when I was in university. In fact, it was the first book on freelance writing that I’d read. While some of the material is a bit dated, there’s still a lot of great information in this book. Like what? The need to tap uncommon markets, why you should go contrarian, and the speed writing formats.

There are other books that I’ve kept, too — including William Zinnser’s On Writing Well and The Elements of Style. But I’ve written about those books in this space before.

Which writing books can’t you live without? Feel free to leave a comment.

A few days ago, O’Reilly Media released a new book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein: The Twitter Book. You can get it as an ebook, with a dead trees version coming soon. What’s interesting about the book isn’t its subject matter, but rather the way in which it was written. Believe it or not, the book was done in PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint. A piece of software that’s generally used to create presentation slides.

Tim O’Reilly recently blogged about the book, the writing process, and how their approach to the The Twitter Book was an attempt to reinvent the concept of the book in the age of the Web. Read O’Reilly’s post for the details.

So what does this have to do with writing?

A lot, believe it or not. Each page is self contained. In most cases, you don’t need to read other pages of the book in order for that page to make sense. This approach is very similar to a concept from technical writing: topic-based writing.

As Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software said in a session he did at DocTrain East 2008, a topic is a standalone piece of content. It doesn’t rely on information from any other piece of content in a book or manual or help system. Or anything else for that matter.

While Tim O’Reilly described how The Twitter Book was created as a different approach to publishing, it’s also a different approach to writing. In a scenario like this, you need to pack a lot of information on to a single page. The space constraints force you to write very tightly. You need to contain an idea or a concept within the alloted space.

On top of that, the type and spacing are probably larger in this kind of layout — paragraphs are probably not going to be 12 point Garamond, single spaced. This means even fewer words.

Words and images

A book like The Twitter Book is also very visual. You need to work text around the visuals; everything has to blend together. Which isn’t easy.

If you’re self publishing, then you have to be a good visual designer. Or, that the very least, have a good grasp of the concepts of design. Or, you need to engage a designer.

It’s a lot of work

Doing what O’Reilly and Milstein did with The Twitter Book is definitely a lot of work. In addition to the design, doing something like this requires:

1. A lot of planning, and probably more than a couple of designs being scrapped.
2. An understanding of topic-based writing.
3. The ability to write tightly. And then some!

I’m not entirely sure that this approach will revolutionize the way in which books are written and published. But it does offer an opportunity to change the way in which we write. At the very least, this approach offers a different way in which to write and to present ideas.

Once again, I’ve dusted off the idea of turning a set of blog posts into an ebook. The inspirations for this resurrection were Wil Wheaton‘s recently-released book Sunken Treasure and a Web-to-book experiment done at the recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference.

I realized that the way in which I’ve been writing my blog posts for the last year or two — detailed here and here — makes converting those posts (which exist as files on my computer) to a format that I can compile into an ebook fairly easy.

As the second post I linked to in the previous paragraph explains, I write my posts in a text editor using a lightweight markup language called Markdown. I have a tool on my computer that will convert Markdown files to a typesetting format called LaTeX. From there, I just combine all of the LaTeX files into a document, and then use the typesetting software generate a PDF. It actually is that simple.

Assuming that I can actually find the time to do the job, what will these ebooks contain? Advice, opinion, tips, techniques, and how-tos. The content won’t simply be the blog posts as they exist now. I’m hoping to expand on some, combine a few, and add some padding material, and even include some work that has yet to be seen by eyes other than mine and my business partner’s.

So, all I have to do is:

1. Choose the posts to include

2. Find time to pull everything together and do the additional writing

3. Come up with a decent cover design

Watch this space for updates on this (somewhat mad) project.

I’ve been living with an eBook reader for the last couple of months. In that time, I’ve rarely picked up a dead-trees tome.

While reading, I’ve been thinking about formatting an eBook for the small screen. And I’ve learned a few things. Like what? Keep reading …

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