Industry Talk

Chronologically the birth of desktop publishing dates back to 1985, though the first signs of its genesis were observed around the late 1970s. Desktop publishing whose popular acronym is DTP, at a glance would refer to layout and design of books and related publications. But it is not so much the work that gave DTP its current name but the software used in the process that accredits its nomenclature.  Desktop publishing is synonymous with the applications of the WYSIWYG software and a PC. This software was a landmark in the publishing solutions industry. It was a first attempt at large scale publishing and a much awaited answer to the publishing demands.

WYSIWYG: The Software that Changed the Face of Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing was undoubtedly a revolution especially with the substitution of TeX with LaTeX which led to a mass upsurge of the publishing industry.  It is Paul Brainerd of Aldus Corporation who marketed the ‘desktop publishing’ by emphasizing on its affordability and applicability. This new and revised concept of innovative publishing caught the attention of the newspaper industry. To keep up beat with the book publishing industry, the newspapers did away with the Atex and instead trained themselves in ‘desktop publishing’ software. Interestingly, the DTP sensation of the 1980’s is just a shadow of the modernized desktop publishing solutions.
The early versions of the desktop publishing software were in no way foolproof. Besides the frequent crashes recorded there were anomalies with regard to the essential features of typography and layout.  Letter spacing and kerning were among the most notorious problems that the DTP software could not make good. This insufficiency however did not deter its users instead more experts began to take a sneak peak at these problems. Before the issue could bombast to magnanimous proportions Adobe Systems launched a more comprehensive set of professional desktop publishing applications.

Paul Brainerd :The Man who Marketed Desktop Publishing

Mackintosh fairly dominated the DTP market irrespective of its obvious failures at the onset. But the GEM based Ventura Publisher which was introduced for MS-DOS which automated the layout process made desktop publishing an efficient process. The earliest evidence of a desktop publication is the Barter Book which was published in Campbell River British Columbia Canada. But since then Desktop publishing has come a long way.  While in the initial years it was the unskilled DTP professionals who seemingly repudiated the demand for the desktop publishing, in the 21st century the DTP experts not only need to be proficient in their own immediate field but learn the intricacies of communication design, prepress, programming and graphic designing solutions.
Sometime in the mid 80s QuarkXpress and Pagemaker raised a huge uproar in the publishing services industry. However the web marked a conspicuous change in the desktop publishing industry. No longer did the DTP software pertain to print publications rather they had been updated to meet the requirements for web design. At one point in time it was alleged that skilled DTP professionals happily crossed floors and engaged in graphic designing and web designing. But the criticism was revealed to be pretty baseless from the perspective of publishing solutions. The improvement could only be assessed as a boon as the publishing industry slowly ascended the industry charts.

I’ve uploaded a video preview of PocketBible for iPad to YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/laridianinc. Because the video resolution isn’t as good as the iPad screen resolution, I’ve reproduced some representative screen shots below. Click on the screen shot to see the full-resolution image.

Nearly full-page casual reading mode with increased line leading and margins. Tool bar and title bar can be removed if you really, really have to see one more line of text.

Control panel provides quick access to search results, highlights, bookmarks, notes, and eventually more features. Control panel follows home button as iPad is rotated and can be removed in portrait mode.

PocketBible for iPad quickly searches your entire library at one time and displays number of hits per book. Select a book to see list of results; select a result to see it in context in the book. Control panel shown expanded.

View a list of all your highlights, or all highlights in a particular color in your entire library. Similarly, you can see a list of all bookmarks or all bookmarks in a particular category.

Easily choose a different font and size. Dim the display for reading at night.

Split the screen to show two Bibles side-by-side. Bibles track each other — as you move through one, the other moves to the same verse.

Open a commentary beside a Bible and the two are synchronized. As you view a verse in the Bible, the commentary follows along.

Split the screen into up to five windows.

We reserve the right to make changes to the user interface (UI) and to functionality before we ship. In fact, there are a few things still in flux and at least one major feature that hasn’t been plugged into the new UI yet. So expect changes from what you see here.

We’re especially excited about the flexibility the control panel gives us for new features and for giving you instant access to search results and bookmarks. We also have enjoyed just reading the Bible in full-screen mode.

While the iPad is faster than the iPhone, we’ve also made changes to the code that have really sped up the display of text, making scrolling by verses and even chapters significantly more useful. The nice thing is that the iPhone and iPad code is the same at this level so the improvements will spill over to the iPhone.

Having said that, it should be obvious that not all the features of PocketBible for iPad will find their way to the iPhone. We’ll probably add split-screen, but not more than two windows.

One thing we’re concerned about is app approval times on the App Store. We submitted Romans Road for release on the April 3 iPad release date. We followed Apple’s instructions for making sure our app was available on April 3, but then we never heard anything further from them so we’re not sure what the status of that app is. We’ve heard the same thing from other developers.

We don’t have a schedule for releasing this version of PocketBible yet. As you can see it’s very nearly complete but there are some big features that need to be plugged in.

I’ve uploaded a video preview of PocketBible for iPad to YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/laridianinc. Because the video resolution isn’t as good as the iPad screen resolution, I’ve reproduced some representative screen shots below. Click on the screen shot to see the full-resolution image.

Nearly full-page casual reading mode with increased line leading and margins. Tool bar and title bar can be removed if you really, really have to see one more line of text.

Control panel provides quick access to search results, highlights, bookmarks, notes, and eventually more features. Control panel follows home button as iPad is rotated and can be removed in portrait mode.

PocketBible for iPad quickly searches your entire library at one time and displays number of hits per book. Select a book to see list of results; select a result to see it in context in the book. Control panel shown expanded.

View a list of all your highlights, or all highlights in a particular color in your entire library. Similarly, you can see a list of all bookmarks or all bookmarks in a particular category.

Easily choose a different font and size. Dim the display for reading at night.

Split the screen to show two Bibles side-by-side. Bibles track each other — as you move through one, the other moves to the same verse.

Open a commentary beside a Bible and the two are synchronized. As you view a verse in the Bible, the commentary follows along.

Split the screen into up to five windows.

We reserve the right to make changes to the user interface (UI) and to functionality before we ship. In fact, there are a few things still in flux and at least one major feature that hasn’t been plugged into the new UI yet. So expect changes from what you see here.

We’re especially excited about the flexibility the control panel gives us for new features and for giving you instant access to search results and bookmarks. We also have enjoyed just reading the Bible in full-screen mode.

While the iPad is faster than the iPhone, we’ve also made changes to the code that have really sped up the display of text, making scrolling by verses and even chapters significantly more useful. The nice thing is that the iPhone and iPad code is the same at this level so the improvements will spill over to the iPhone.

Having said that, it should be obvious that not all the features of PocketBible for iPad will find their way to the iPhone. We’ll probably add split-screen, but not more than two windows.

One thing we’re concerned about is app approval times on the App Store. We submitted Romans Road for release on the April 3 iPad release date. We followed Apple’s instructions for making sure our app was available on April 3, but then we never heard anything further from them so we’re not sure what the status of that app is. We’ve heard the same thing from other developers.

We don’t have a schedule for releasing this version of PocketBible yet. As you can see it’s very nearly complete but there are some big features that need to be plugged in.

The Rich Content post I wrote back on March 29th keeps popping into my head.  I think our industry has spent way too much time trying to force-fit video and other types of content in with the written word.  Meanwhile, the real solution to rich content has probably been right here under our noses the whole time: the index.  Actually, what I’m talking about should be called an "index on steroids" or an uber-index.

For years publishers have generated those backmatter elements we’ve grown to know, love and rely on…the index.  Index specialists are charged with finding all the critical terms, synonyms and other entries then compiling them into one of the most important elements of the book.  Up to now those indexes have been static and almost exclusively focus on providing pointers within the book the where index appears.  In tomorrow’s ebook, the uber-index should grow as more related content is available on websites, blogs, other books, apps, etc.

Liza Daly expressed a similar vision in this excerpt from an iPad-related interview she did with The New York Times about a week after my "Rich Content" blog post:

I see the consummate iPad reading experience to be one that is, on
the surface, traditional: heavily textual, quiet, hand-held. But lurking
beneath the words is the whole Internet, ready to be questioned — “Find
other works that quoted this,” “Where was the Marshalsea prison?”,
“Which of my friends is also reading this?”, “What is that attractive
person across from me reading?”

None of that requires a publisher to “enhance” the e-book prior to
publication. A truly modern e-reader is one that is intimately connected
to the Web and allows a user to make queries as a series of asides,
while reading or after immersive reading has ended.

So what this all means is that authors and publishers could continue to build books they way they’ve done for hundreds of years, but a new effort needs to be dedicated to the index itself.  Not the print index, of course, but the uber one that works within the e-reader.

Imagine an e-reader/app that lets you read a book in the traditional way but below the surface it offers smart links to all the related content and resources you could hope for.  As I mentioned in the 3/29 post, some of this could be automated but then it’s little more than a set of algorithm-based search results.  I want something more and I’ll bet you do too.

How about applying the wisdom of the masses to the problem?  Just as the Wikipedia provides encyclopedia-length entries on subjects far and wide, what if there were a community-based service that created nothing but the most relevant pointers to all the best content?

You’re an expert in 70’s music and you spend all your waking hours looking for the best sites, videos, interviews, etc., on the subject  Why not share your discoveries about Thin Lizzy and Mott The Hoople by adding to and helping curate the uber-index on these topics?  The uber-index would then be made available to e-reader apps so that when someone clicks on Glen Frey’s name in Don Felder’s (terrific!) book about The Eagles, Heaven & Hell, they’ll immediately have access to a growing list of outside resources that confirm Felder’s point that Frey was a complete jerk!

All of this functionality would be included, btw, with little to no work required by the publisher.  A utility would run the book’s contents against the uber-index and generate all the relevant links.  You could do this when you buy the book or periodically as you’re reading it, to make sure it’s always up-to-date.

How about that?  An infinitely deep index, the uber-index, that dramatically enhances and extends the reading experience while preserving it at the same time.  Isn’t that what we’re all after?

P.S. — Now take it a step further.  Are you familiar with the "Sponsored Links" area of the Google search results?  These are the links someone has paid to have included in your search results  Why not introduce a sponsored link section to this as well, where monetization can occur?  So when you pull up the menu for Glen Frey mentioned earlier it also includes a paid link from Amazon where you can buy his latest CD, if you’re so inclined.  Click that link and the publisher/author get a cut of the sponsored link payment.  If a substantial enough AdSense-like ecosystem builds up around this it creates an additional revenue stream that could be shared by all parties.