Standards for Electronic Publishing An Overview Mark Bide & Associates Report Series 3 Standards for Electronic Publishing Standards for Electronic Publishing An Overview Mark Bide & Associates Report Series 3 Production Management Bureau D’Arts, Amsterdam Design Herlof Schürmann, Amsterdam Printed by drukkerij Mart.Spruijt, Amsterdam NEDLIB Report Series Editor Titia van der Werf Available from Koninklijke Bibliotheek .. Box The Hague e-mail [email protected] Title Standards for Electronic Publishing: An Overview ISBN - Author Mark Bide & Associates Date September Copyright consortium This study was commissioned by the project and jointly funded by the European Commission's Telematics for Libraries Programme. This is report of the Report Series. content Summary Introduction Terms and definitions . Definitions . Presentation or content? Publishing – some background issues . A heterogeneous community . Publishing and the production process . Publishers’ motivation for adopting standards . Publishers and metadata Publication media . Offline publications . Online and hybrid publications Content and content formats . Content types . Content formats – text . Content formats – graphics . Content formats – page facsimiles . Content formats – structured data . Content formats – audio, video and multimedia . Software . Other . Dependence on middleware . Other formats The ebook revolution . Should deposit libraries be interested in ebook technology? . Are our respondents interested in ebooks? . Ebook content delivery formats . Producing ebooks . ebooks and other content types . ebooks and metadata . ebooks and encryption . Managing ebook content Publishers and content management – an explanatory note . Historic attitudes . The arrival of electronic publishing – the ejournal . The digital revolution and books . Implications for deposit libraries The public Web . Publishing and the World Wide Web . Content standards on the Web . Digital preservation and the Web Conclusions . Reasons for optimism . Reasons for realism . Some final thoughts Acknowledgements Summary This report was commissioned by the project as a supplement to its Process Model for a Deposit System for Electronic Publications. Our intention is assist librarians to a better understanding of some of the issues that they will face in managing the deposit and preservation of electronic publications. The report is based on interviews with European publishers from different publishing sectors. The publishing industry – even the book and journal publishing industry – is a heterogeneous community. Processes in different sectors – consumer, educational, professional, academic – are often significantly different one from another. This can make generalising about trends difficult. Production and production processes do not lie at the heart of publishing’s main concerns. Most publishing production has traditionally been outsourced. Publishers adopt standards only where there are good commercial reasons for doing so. They will not adopt standards solely to aid the process of deposit and long-term preservation (unless there are good commercial reasons for them to do so). Interchange of metadata between publishers and libraries will be an essential element in managing the deposit of electronic publications. Publishers are becoming increasingly concerned about meta- data and metadata standards, driven by the commercial imperatives of selling their products – both physical and digital – over the Internet. New standards are being rapidly adopted and may provide a basis for future sharing of metadata. However, publishers have much to learn in this respect. Despite the success of some existing subscription publications, particularly in professional markets, and other offline publishing is in decline, with publishers favouring online distribution. This is good news for deposit libraries, insofar as publishing has been much less standardised than is the case with online (and the content of s is often encrypted). Online, publishers are using standard Web browsers as their primary interface, although frequently users require additional applications (of which the reader plug in is the most common). In online academic journals, there is a considerable growth in the publication of ‘supplementary content’ supplied by authors. These are published in whatever file format the author submits in – often Excel or Access, but this is uncontrolled and only standardised to the extent that authors use ‘standard’ applications. A surprisingly high proportion of the publishers in our sample are now holding significant amounts of text ⁄ archives. Almost all of the publishers in our sample are delivering page images to users; is near – universal as the format of choice for delivering page images. There is little consistency between publishers in their use of formats for multimedia elements (although these remain relatively little used). Many published products are dependent on middleware for their presentation to users (providing on the fly to conversion, for example); this middleware may often be part of the hosting service, and not under the direct control of the publisher. Educational content may be particularly dependent on integrated learning systems. Publishers are showing considerable interest in ebooks, although the technology remains immature and standards are somewhat fluid. There remains a fundamental divide between those applications that depend on pre-formatted pages () and those that use the Open eBook, -based approach. The latter is appropriate for simple texts, but cannot manage complexity of content. ebooks will create particular problems for deposit libraries both because of diversity of content formats and because of the use of encryption and other security devices. Although some very large publishers are managing more of their technical production and content management processes in house, we believe that it is likely that most will continue to look to outsourcing of these functions. The explosion of publishing that is the public World Wide Web raises some particular problems for deposit libraries, not least in developing selection mechanisms. We see reasons for deposit libraries to be optimistic about the adoption of standards in publishing, not least in the increasingly widespread use of . However, this optimism needs to be tempered with realism – the fact that publishers are using more does not solve many of the difficult questions relating to deposit and long-term preservation. Both online and ebook publishing will see the ‘network effect’ take greater and greater hold on standards. The market will enforce standardisation wherever lack of standardisation creates inefficiency for the end user. Inefficiency for the end user and inefficiency for the deposit library are not necessarily entirely congruent. However, the trends are encouraging. 1 1 Introduction is an -funded project, involving as partners the National Libraries of several countries of the European Union.1 The project is due to complete its work in December . Its primary output is a Process Model for a Deposit System for Electronic Publications; this is accompanied by a set of Deposit Guidelines and a proposal relating to Metadata for Long-Term Preservation. This report, Standards for Electronic Publishing, was commissioned by in June , as a supplement to the Process Model. Its aim is to provide an overview of the common extent to which publishers are using common standards in their electronic standards in publications (both in the publications themselves and in the processes which lead to publication). It is anticipated that a review of this topic will assist librarians to a electronic better understanding of some of the issues that they will face in managing the deposit and preservation of electronic publications. publications The report was developed through a series of structured interviews (conducted around an emailed questionnaire) with European publishers, supplemented by information focussed specifically on ebooks from -based contacts.2 (Although a number of our respondents in Europe are becoming involved in ebook production, the majority of activity and expertise today is in the United States). Deliberately, most of the contacts that we made were with larger (book and journal) publishers, since these organisations are more likely to employ specialists with the necessary experience and expertise to answer the questions that we wished to put to them. Prima facie, it may also appear that the output of larger publishers is more significant to the deposit libraries since a fairly high proportion of the published output – particularly of academic books and journals – is concentrated in relatively few publishing houses. However, technology is facilitating a move in the direction of greater fragmentation of publishing; in the next decade, smaller publishers may come to assume rather greater significance in terms of the complexity of managing deposit of electronic publications. In view of the relatively small sample size, the report is not intended to provide statistically valid quantitative assessments of the extent to which standards are being adopted by publishers, but we have aggregated the data that we have collected to the extent that this seems useful. We have included at the end of the report (Chapter ) a brief note on the content of the public Web, based on harvesting data from the Netherlands and Sweden. 1 See http://www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/