[b]OpenMute[/b]
Pauline has described Mute’s context of crisis. She ended with the suggestion that collaborations and international networks offer possible routes out of the impasse that many independent publishers now find themselves in as they struggle with negative conditions that are fast becoming universalised. The most common of these are the free –content internet, the slow collapse of books –distribution infrastructures and the pressure on public funding, as was made very clear at recent meetings of the Eurozine network (which numbers nearly 100 member journals).
Knowing the nature of the editorial process, we see collaboration making most sense in areas like technology, distribution and publishing (print and ePub). Everyone knows that, by collectivising, things become possible that are impossible to achieve alone.
I'm going to describe two such projects, which we conduct through OpenMute, an agency through which Mute develops and shares knowledge of digital publishing.
[b]1) Progressive Publishing System (PPS)[/b]
»Progressive Publishing System« is a multi –platform conversion and publishing engine, available as a Web 2 service and in –house application. It responds to the many persistent problems small publishers face in distributing content internationally, specifically those associated with ePublishing. These range from workflow tools corrupting or not handling metadata properly to the costs involved in revising layouts for multiple new platforms (and resuscitating editorial material in anything like a malleable state!). Superficial as they may seem for individual documents, these issues become major when working at even the most modest of organisational scales.
PPS is a cleaning engine with a heuristic algorithm that learns editing style rules and formatting errors, constantly improving the system. It can be applied to the works of self publishers, professional publishers or large archives of content. Documents' metadata is maintained and used to automatically distribute publishers' files to POD printers, online and/or offline warehouse distributors (Amazon and the like).
Presently, PPS' beta version converts your Word and Google docs into eBooks. But this is only the beginning: at the core of the tool sits a technical design architecture for what’s known as ‘single source publishing’, by which we mean a ›platform independent‹ version of content, which can be outputted to any new platform without incurring problems or cost. The aim of the project is to further develop this architecture so it can serve as an element of larger publishing infrastructure serving small and independent publishers. This goes under the working title of '»Hybrid Publishing Consortium«.
[b]2) Hybrid Publishing Consortium[/b]
The revolution happening in publishing is expanding this area to encompass print, eBooks, tablets, apps, mobile, API, IPTV, syndication and rich metadata. It also involves collecting and compiling data on the person reading, via social media and analytics. The Hybrid Publishing Consortium (HPC) aims to establish a sustainable public technology infrastructure for publishing based on open standards, open software·and open access.
The consortium, which we are developing in partnership with Leuphana, aims to bring together publishers, technologists and other parties committed to our principles. It is looking to create a publishing infrastructure that is ›end –to –end‹ (meaning it covers all elements of publishing, from the very first word on the page, to live sales data and new processes like the social –book). What we don't want to do is build another new monolithic software project, rather we would like to support existing projects and develop consortium –determined quality marks to the different providers in what we call the »Publishing Technology Stack«. The combination of open standards and open source also allows for a faster turn around on development cycles and experimentation.
One of the movements this project seeks to join and complement is that of academic open access. Its analysis of the ›double charge‹ incurred to the public within present models of academic publishing has been compelling (the idea is that public funds are first used to support academic research, and then, rather than being shared, charged for again when libraries have to buy the books or readers pay for access).
The HPC will remain under intensive development during 2012.
