Words on a page

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.

A few years ago, I blogged about an interesting printing/publishing technology called the Espresso Book Machine. Since then, I’ve learned that the Espresso is being updated and upgraded. You can learn more about it here and here.

I’m actually a bit surprised at the number of Espresso Book Machine locations, especially in Canada. I’m hoping one will show up in Toronto soon.

What this means for personal publishing is anyone’s guess. But I get the feeling that it will make self publishing easier and cheaper, if the penny per page production cost is accurate. This is definitely something to keep watching.

And speaking of watching, here’s a video explaining how the machine works.

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 …

read more »

Ebooks can be great marketing tools. They showcase your knowledge and expertise, and (I hope) demonstrate that you can explain and express an idea clearly. Heck, a well-written ebook can also make you a few dollars if you pick the right subject and are able to draw in buyers.

But the problem is finding the time to write the ebook. If you’ve got an idea, and an outline, then the next step might be to read this post. It explains how you can write an ebook in a week. The author of the post makes a great point:

If you can write 3, 400 word articles per day, you’ll have an ebook in a week.

Give it a try. You never know what will come out of the attempt.