'What are you looking so nervous about?' said the surgeon.When Jeff Jaffe declared to the world at TOC 2013 that web = publishing and publishing = web, he expected that the world of publishing would echo back his phrase only moments later. But the world of publishing doesn't move so quickly. It's not because we're slow to catch on. We understand the concept, but we are also aware of what such a statement leaves out, or has the potential to leave out if we shake hands before the terms and conditions of the deal are agreed.
She was cutting open my wife to deliver our third child by Caesarian section.
I remember working in publishing production departments in the 1990s and being frustrated by the computing departments taking for granted what we needed when it came to tech and being dismissive of the need for us to be able to read, for example, Mac-formatted disks and Zip disks received from designers, copy-editors and typesetters.
This feeling of being ridden roughshod over marred my relationship with tech people for a long time, and I am still nervous of doing or saying the wrong thing in relation to tech, even when this nervousness is unwarranted.
I am also to a certain extent suspicious, suspicious that tech is using publishing for its own goals and in the process compromising our scope in the tech world as a whole. Telling us how to package books in a way that is rapid and most convenient to them not us.
This suspicion arises because I know that tech doesn't mind focusing on the now. It isn't afraid of obsolescence, and in fact obsolescence can be a money maker. Think about the original digital cameras, what use were such low resolutions in comparison to their superior film counterparts? The only use for them was to be upgraded and deemed redundant.
Publishers, contrary to certain areas of tech, want to see the objects they produce preserved in the world for as long as possible. And the thought of a book not functioning because the format in which it was sold no longer works scares us in a way the tech world would never be scared by it. The tech world supports its users, while the publishing world loves its readers.
Publishing is a friendlier industry than tech, we have copyright laws on our side but we hate litigation and prefer gentlemanly favours to courtroom dramas. It might all look a bit pipe and slippers, but we'd rather that than cloak and dagger.
While we understand that the W3C are the good guys, working towards open standards, and we're not fearful of the organisation in particular, publishing doesn't want to give itself away to the tech world as readily as the tech world would like. We want to make sure first that our baby is safe and secure, and can thrive in this world.
We haven't fallen asleep in our armchairs. We know that the web is the most important thing in publishing right now. The thing is we're not going to pass all the paperwork and responsibility over to the web and its guardians. We are going to work and negotiate for books to become first-class citizens of the web and take advantage of the very best technologies.
Publishing is cleverer than you think. We won't buy the first house that we're shown around, and right now we're looking for something with foundations that are solid enough to last us for decades to come.
This might sound like a bizarre amount of time to a world where everything can change in less than half a decade, but we have books and readers to look after. And this is something we're going to make sure we do to the best of our abilities no matter how that makes us look.
Thanks for listening, opinions are all my own.
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