Taiwanese Publishing's Digital Metamorphosis

Since opening in 1995, Amazon.com has been hailed as the world's largest bookstore. Its virtual shelves are stocked with 1.1 million titles, six times that of the US's largest physical bookstore, the Barnes and Noble in Manhattan, which has a piddling 180,000.

Virtual bookstores may be unencumbered by space requirements, but the downside is that they can't provide a cozy spot for a customer to curl up and leaf through a good book. Seeking to address this lacuna, in 2001 Amazon launched the Look Inside function, which allows buyers to get a feel for a book by viewing a facsimile of its front and back covers, as well as selected passages.

In 2003, Amazon began heavily promoting its Search Inside function, which helps users access titles and even book content by entering a keyword. The search system that makes this possible is so penetrating that it scans every single book-every single phrase-in the entire digital vault.

After developing the Search Inside technology, Amazon began lobbying American publishers to digitize their listings and to license their copyrights. As a result of this campaign, there were already 90,000 titles available for readers to purchase/download for use on Kindle when Amazon released the digital reader in 2007.

If books are your thing, then Taiwan is a veritable paradise on earth. Forty thousand books shoot off the presses every year, and elegant bookstores are prominent amidst the cultural landscape. Here we see Cite Bookstore.

But even for a company as well positioned as Amazon, digitizing was a gargantuan task that took six years in planning and hundreds of millions of US dollars. For Taiwan's publishers, it may well prove an even greater challenge.

"Large publishing companies may have resources, but their size also makes it hard for them to just change course," says Alex Yeh, general manager of Cite Publishing, a conglomerate that, propelled by the labor of the more than 1000 employees amongst its 30 subsidiary labels, publishes over 1000 titles annually, to the tune of NT$2 billion.

"In the past, for the sake of convenience, we've developed a few practices that may have hindered our going digital," says Yeh. Meticulous editors, for example, make last-minute substitutions in the text, or they want to swap one picture for another, even as the book approaches printing. Over the long term, this modus operandi has engendered a number of filing inconsistencies that make it hard to locate a final version. Occasionally, words and images will be saved in different places. Sorting and collating the scattered parts can be a clerical nightmare.

"The key is to try to reduce the amount of time and labor needed to convert things to a digital format," says Owl Publishing House publisher Chen Ying-ching. His own recent digital book published in January, The Old Cat Goes Digital, had to be prepared for three different formats-PDF, ePub and TXT-so as to be available for different platforms, a process which was both time and labor intensive.

As digital publishing becomes more common, traditional media are reducing the amount of printing. In the future, the livelihoods of printers may be compromised, and their survival dependent on their ability to adapt.

According to Zhou Wei-da, operations director of reading.udn.com, digital musical content is much easier to convert into different formats. One can stream music from a website (like iTunes) or import from a CD into a computer, MP3 player, or cellphone and retain 99% of the original content.

"Digital publishing is entirely different. Print is a visual medium, so the dimensions of the layout are integral to perception," explains Zhou. Readers can be attracted by the skillful play of layout and words; conversely, discrepancies between different layout formats can cause headaches for readers-and editors.

For digital publishers, the ideal is for a book's content to be as fluid as possible, to flow effortlessly between media, whether it be a mobile phone, e-reader, iPad, or computer. Readers should expend as little energy as they would reading a book. There shouldn't be any need to constantly scroll up or down or to adjust the size of pictures and text. Unfortunately, the gap between the current software capabilities and the ideal state is still quite large; only when different formats become more compatible will this goal become tenable.

Last year, the government agency that guides the development of the digital book industry in Taiwan, the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, met with prominent members of the industry to discuss formatting issues, during which they prevailed on them to utilize the globally ubiquitous ePub format so as to be consistent with international convention.

Books are a visual medium, and their size inevitably impacts the reading experience. Reader habits in the online age also differ from those of ages past. How to attract readers is the major challenge facing the publishing industry today.

After hammering out a strategy for the industry's development last year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs is planning to light a fire under the industry by investing NT$2.134 billion over the next five years to integrate e-reader and e-paper technology. By 2013, 100,000 books in digital format should be available to domestic consumers, as well as two or three online libraries from which to download.

Judging by digitization's plodding pace in Taiwan thus far, reaching the 100,000 digital book mark within three years seems a daunting proposition.

Chen Ying-ching recommends getting the ball rolling with public-domain titles. Every year, 10,000 master's and PhD dissertations are published in Taiwan. Then there are the collections of rare and ancient books at the National Library, Academia Sinica, the National Palace Museum, National Taiwan University and other institutions, and government publications-a significant quantity of titles when added up. Since it is the government's policy to facilitate the growth of the digital book industry, it makes sense to start with public-domain material that can be digitized quickly and made available. "Just because a book is housed in a particular institute doesn't make it private property that needs to be hoarded away," opines Chen.

In 2004, search engine behemoth Google began working with libraries around the world to digitize 10 million public-domain books, which were stored on Google's servers and made available to users free of charge. Though the move was viewed in some quarters as controversial, there's no denying that it has profoundly changed reader habits.

"Taiwan could learn a lot from Google. There's no sense in scanning duplicate copies of books. Hardware manufacturers and platform developers should cooperate and divide up the scanning, so as to take advantage of the existing public-domain material," Chen suggests.

Recently, the Taiwan Digital Publishing Forum applied to the government for financial assistance with their project to convert 1000 of the best Chinese-language books published between 1840 and 1990 into the ePub electronic book format. The selections were made by a committee of nine experts assembled by publishing veteran Jan Hung-tze with the intention of making classic Chinese writing more accessible to readers.

Cite's Alex Yeh, who serves as secretary general of the Digital Publishing Forum, wants the government to focus on creating a "digital-reading-friendly environment, as opposed to simply boosting the industry-subsidizing the industry won't necessarily stimulate consumer spending." As a means to spur digitization along, he supports government-issued purchase coupons for digital books as an incentive to consumers, mirroring the government's distribution of shopping vouchers in 2008.

Books are a visual medium, and their size inevitably impacts the reading experience. Reader habits in the online age also differ from those of ages past. How to attract readers is the major challenge facing the publishing industry today.

However, no matter what other problems may be present, the improvement most fundamental to the success of digital publishing pertains to the logistics and habits of the industry itself.

"Most editors are still trapped in the old 'paper book' paradigm," says Yeh. When baking bread, he says, there is a fixed ratio between baking powder and flour, as well as baking time. But if you're making a cake, that ratio is different, and so is the order in which you do things.

The publishing industry will have to undergo significant restructuring in order to go digital. Publishing is a skill-intensive field that demands creativity from its workers. Editors will have to absorb new skills and change work procedures in order to meet the demands and technical requirements of the media involved in the different varieties of digital publishing. Workloads will increase, naturally resulting in grumbling and resistance.

"Our approach at Cite is to prepare our publications for all the applicable formats up front; otherwise, if we have to redo things down the stretch, it costs us a fortune!" explains Yeh. As an example, he points to the newly developed workflow protocol at United Daily News. When reporters finish gathering material, they first prepare a brief, 70-character-long snippet to be sent out to mobile service subscribers in real time. Oftentimes they must film a short clip of footage with a voiceover (also prepared by them) to be broadcast on the UDN online news channel. Then they write a longer segment several hundred characters in length to be posted on the website. Only after these first "teasers" are securely in place do they return to the main body of their written work, a 2000-character article comprehensively presenting the story for publication in print the following day. Contemporary readers are used to flitting back and forth between different media; to rigidly hew to old-fashioned print journalism standards would be business suicide.

What does the future of digital publishing have in store?

"Until the technical side of things becomes clear-i.e., format, media, methods of transaction-old-fashioned paper books will continue to dominate the market, and business models will continue along the old lines. But perhaps a new gadget will revolutionize consumer habits," Yeh says-something like the super-cool multimedia player iPad, which is more attuned to the reading habits of the younger generation, but perhaps taking things one step further by refining how we teach and learn.

When imagining the future of digital books, some have evoked Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Book of Sand. In this fantastical tale, there is a large, clothbound hardback book that when opened reveals content as boundless and undefined as a sand dune, with no beginning and no end, no first or last page. Each time the content is different, whether the pictures or text or colors; all of the books of the world's libraries are contained within.

After obtaining the book, the protagonist becomes enslaved to it, retreating from the fellowship of his friends and confining himself at home. He is trapped between loving the book and fearing that it is taking him over.

Philosophical implications of The Book of Sand aside, the book described 30 years ago in the story does closely resemble the mercurial content and design envisaged by those in digital publishing. Contemporary reading habits are as desultory as shifting sand-a page here, a page there, sand slipping through the cracks between fingers.

Faced with such an uncertain future, publishers are understandably concerned about how to entice readers. But an unknowable future with no correct answers can only be navigated by yielding to the greater ebb and flow, and dealing with each hurdle as it arises.