Change thinking, change habits
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.
Warning: Paradigm shift ahead
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.