"authoring" entries
NaNoWriMo Now Underway
One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out the website for ways to support and participate….
Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online
Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel)….
New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System
O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs: Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is…
StartWithXML Research Report Now Available for Sale
If you weren't able to attend the StartWithXML Forum last month in New York, the accompanying research report is available for sale. The report covers topics like: Where am I and where do I want to end up? How much benefit do I want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing? How much work do I want to do myself?…
BeyondPrint Offers Helpful Review of StartWithXML
A review of the StartWithXML forum and research paper supports the effort but questions why we are silent on the quality of XML tools.
What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)
Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for … well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging — all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."…
Why You Should Care About XML
There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."
Writing Novels with Twitter
ReadWriteWeb has a brief survey of mini serialized novels in the U.S.: In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetsu" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon. Some of the novels tweeted so…
Author Paulo Coelho Illustrates the Upside of Openness
Budding authors may not be able to duplicate the success of Paulo Coelho, but Coelho's willingness to experiment across mediums is certainly worth studying. From Jeff Jarvis' Guardian column: Coelho is the thoroughly modern author. But he still believes in print. For him, this isn't a matter of print v digital. It's a question of what comes when you add…
O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures
Andy Oram offers an open response to issues raised by Baron Schwartz, lead author of O'Reilly's "High Performance MySQL, Second Edition."