P Is for Publishing. And publishing, as you’ve heard, is dying. … But “the printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone,” Zeldman says, “either because books don’t require monthly hosting and blogs and websites do … or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.”

…[Jason,] Mandy and I are about to launch a printed book series, called A Book Apart, which derives much of its thinking and some of its formatting from what we’ve learned about PDFs in the past 10 years,” says Zeldman. The Mandy he mentions is Mandy Brown, creative director of Etsy and former creative director at W.W. Norton & Co.; she’s also one of the people speaking on the New Publishing and Web Content panel that Zeldman’s organizing for this year’s Interactive Fest, along with Happy Cog’s Erin Kissane, Harper’s Magazine editor (and Harper’s website creator) Paul Ford, and Lisa Holton, founder of new-media company Fourth Story Media.

…Everyone on the panel is committed to the digital future,” Zeldman says. “But we are also all committed to the book.” And how will their—how will our—relationships to books change, and how will those relationships remain the same, as the digitization of printed matter proceeds faster than most chain saws can spin? “How,” asks Zeldman, “can we be truthful and wise as editors, publishers, writers, journalists, and marketers straddling this scary yet exhilarating new divide?

Print & Paper Über Alles: A more perfect publishing today, Wayne Alan Brenner, Austin Chronicle (SXSW cover story), March 5, 2010

Related

• Austin Chronicle, SXSW Interactive Guide
• Books Not Dead: “New Publishing and Web Content” Panel Details at zeldman.com
• Panel Details at SXSW.com: New Publishing and Web Content, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 5:00 PM, Ballroom A, SXSW Interactive Festival, Austin, TX
• Happy Cog Studios: A Book Apart mini-announcement

Photo courtesy John Morrison.

Filed under: Appearances, Publications, Publishing, SXSW, books, content, events, industry

In Publishers Weekly, blogger, novelist, and bon vivant Cory Doctorow discusses price discrimination(“the idea that you make more money by segmenting your customers based on how much they’re willing to spend”) and demand elasticity (“the straightforward idea that new customers will come into your shop if you lower prices”) and the roles played by hardcover and paperback, Kindle and iPad, Amazon and publishers in the future of book publishing.

With a Little Help: The Price Is Right – 2010-02-15 05:00:00 | Publishers Weekly

Filed under: Kindle, Marketing, Publishing, business, downloads, editorial, industry, mobile

There is still no Wi-Fi on the northeast corridor Amtrak trains that carry hundreds of thousands of business travelers each day. So quit whining and get a USB 3G modem. It’s free with monthly service, which is tax-deductible. For the $60/month I pay Verizon, I can connect my laptop to the internet from any train, bus, boat, lounge, lobby, conference room, coffee shop, or just about any other environment to which modern business takes me.

Filed under: Free Advice, business, industry

Dan Benjamin, creator of wonderful websites, apps, broadcasts, and platforms and longtime friend of A List Apart and your host, introduces a new venture.

5 by 5 Studios is a new internet broadcasting network, home to shows like EE Podcast, Tack Sharp, The Dev Show, The Ruby Show, and Utility Belt, releasing new episodes every week.

As part of the launch, 5 by 5 announces two new shows hosted by Dan:

• The Pipeline, an interview show talking with designers, developers, writers, and entrepreneurs, brought to you by Campaign Monitor. Upcoming guests include Kottke, Storey,Vaynerchuk, Coudal, Mann, and Siracusa.
• The Conversation, brought to you by Shopify, is a live-streamed talk show featuring topical discussions, reviews, special guests, news with Christina Warren from Mashable, and your calls, all live.

NOTE: I’m pleased as punch to be the first Pipeline guest. Come hear us on Friday, January 29th, 2010.

Filed under: Authoring, Community, Design, Ideas, Publishing, content, industry, launches, links, podcasts

The deaths of Leslie Harpold and Brad Graham, in addition to being tragic and horrible and sad, have highlighted the questionable long-term viability of blogs, personal sites, and web magazines as legitimate artistic and literary expressions. (Read this, by Rogers Cadenhead.)

Cool URIs don’t change, they just fade away. When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Now, not every blog post or “Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet” piece deserves to live forever. But there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?

The death of the good in the jaws of time is not limited to internet publications, of course. Film decays, books (even really good ones) constantly go out of print, digital formats perish. Recorded music that does not immediately find an audience disappears from the earth.

Digital subscriptions were supposed to replace microfilm, but American libraries, which knew we were racing toward recession years before the actual global crisis came, stopped being able to pay for digital newspaper and magazine descriptions nearly a decade ago. Many also (even fancy, famous ones) can no longer collect—or can only collect in a limited fashion. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

Still, when it comes to instant disposability, web stuff is in a category all its own.

Unlike with other digital expressions, format is not the problem: HTML, CSS, and backward-compatible web browsers will be with us forever. The problem is, authors pay for their own hosting.

(There are other problems: the total creative output of someone I follow is likely distributed across multiple social networks as well as a personal site and Twitter feed. How to connect those dots when the person has passed on? But let’s leave that to the side for the moment.)

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

Filed under: Accessibility, Advocacy, Blogs and Blogging, Community, Formats, HTML, Ideas, Publications, Publishing, Respect, State of the Web, The Profession, W3C, business, content strategy, data, glamorous, industry, work, writing

Actually, the crowd Kurtz was talking about is people who won’t patronize pay sites; that’s not a fallacy, it’s just… what they do. And if you charge your traffic goes down. That’s not a delusion of the nameless crowd you prefer to argue with but a well established fact of life on the open web.

NO NAMES, NO LINKS: WRITERS GIVE THEMSELVES A PASS AND DENOUNCE THE “INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE” CROWD.

Filed under: Publishing, industry

Live from San Francisco, it’s An Event Apart, for people who make websites. If you can’t join us here today and tomorrow, enjoy the live feed, designed and coded by Nick Sergeant and Pete Karl.

Also:

• An Event Apart San Francisco Flickr pool, featuring the photography of Kris Krug plus the attendees of AEA.
• An Event Apart Caption Contest
• They’re Letting Designers Code Now? — ZDNet live-blogs Dave Shea’s An Event Apart presentation
• Seducing Your Users With Web Design — ZDNet live-blogs Andy Budd’s An Event Apart presentation
• Upcoming listing, AEA San Francisco

Composed at The Palace Hotel. Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3208.

Filed under: An Event Apart, CSS, Community, Design, Happy Cog™, San Francisco, Standards, State of the Web, The Profession, UX, User Experience, Web Design, Web Standards, conferences, industry

Today in Print, Ellen Lupton interviews Jeffrey Zeldman (that’s me) on web typography, web standards, and more. Part one of a two-part interview.

Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She is the author of numerous books and articles on design, a frequent lecturer, and an AIGA Gold Medalist.

This has been a nutritious part of Web Type Day.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2932

Filed under: CSS, Design, Fonts, Press, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Web Type Day, better-know-a-speaker, creativity, industry, webfonts, webtype

Web fonts are here. Now what? In Issue No. 296 of A List Apart for people who make websites, Nice Web Type’s Tim Brown debuts Web Font Specimen, a handy, free resource to see how real fonts really look on the web; and Jason Santa Maria discourses on web type, showing how to avoid using fonts that don’t work on the web, and achieve graceful pairings of fonts that do.

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, Fonts, Formats, Jason Santa Maria, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, Tools, Web Type Day, industry, webfonts, webtype

For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were there and seek to savor the memories, here is An Event Apart Chicago, all wrapped up in a pretty bow:

AEA Chicago – official photo set

By John Morrison, subism studios llc. See also (and contribute to) An Event Apart Chicago 2009 Pool, a user group on Flickr.

A Feed Apart Chicago

Live tweeting from the show, captured forever and still being updated. Includes complete blow-by-blow from Whitney Hess.

Luke W’s Notes on the Show

Smart note-taking by Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, frequent AEA speaker, and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008):

1. Jeffrey Zeldman: A Site Redesign
2. Jason Santa Maria: Thinking Small
3. Kristina Halvorson: Content First
4. Dan Brown: Concept Models -A Tool for Planning Websites
5. Whitney Hess: DIY UX -Give Your Users an Upgrade
6. Andy Clarke: Walls Come Tumbling Down
7. Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All (not captured)
8. Aaron Gustafson: Using CSS3 Today with eCSStender (not captured)
9. Simon Willison: Building Things Fast
10. Luke Wroblewski: Web Form Design in Action (download slides)
11. Dan Rubin: Designing Virtual Realism
12. Dan Cederholm: Progressive Enrichment With CSS3 (not captured)
13. Three years of An Event Apart Presentations

Note: Comment posting here is a bit wonky at the moment. We are investigating the cause. Normal commenting has been restored. Thank you, Noel Jackson.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2695

Filed under: A List Apart, An Event Apart, Appearances, Authoring, Browsers, CSS, Career, Chicago, Code, Community, Compatibility, DOM, Design, Education, Fonts, Formats, HTML, HTML5, Happy Cog™, Information architecture, Jason Santa Maria, Markup, Real type on the web, Scripting, Search, Standards, State of the Web, architecture, art direction, bugs, cities, conferences, content, content strategy, creativity, development, downloads, editorial, engagement, eric meyer, events, flickr, glamorous, industry, javascript, photography, social networking, speaking, spec