threepress: open source software for publishers

I had a great time at the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference last month.  I covered a few of the talks on digital publishing on various blogs:

• On TeleRead, I discussed some observations about the adoption of e-books by academic (rather than trade) publishers.
• My favorite talk was the agile software development panel, which I discuss on TOC

I’ll be at ALA at the end of June and expect to learn a ton, and hopefully party with some librarians.

The IDPF says either .epub or EPUB, which have got to be the worst of all choices.  For some reason PDF and HTML are fine with me because they’re unpronounceable, but I don’t like EPUB.

Epub?

ePUB?

My first on the TeleRead blog is up: Small pieces, loosely joined. This reflects my thinking in working with epub these last few weeks and with open source publishing in general.

There are a number of projects I’ve got lined up and they’re all going to follow the famous imperative that good programmers should be lazy. The kind of laziness I discuss in the article (re-use and domain-specific languages) isn’t what Larry Wall meant, but I’ll maintain it’s a solid foundation for digital publishing.

I’ll be at the annual meeting for SSP, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, this Thursday and Friday in Boston, MA. I’d love to meet with people about ebooks, the epub standard, and digital publishing in general.

There are a number of talks I’m looking forward to, especially in the areas of deep web reference discovery, ebooks (obviously) and applying the lessons of agile software development to publishing workflows. It should be a good conference.

Drop me a line at liza@threepress.org if you want to meet up.

threepress.org is a repository for open source software designed for use by publishers.

What this means is:

1. All of the software is free, meaning there is no cost associated with it. It also means free in the sense of unencumbered: it can be modified or re-purposed for any use, including commercial use.
2. Most packages re-use other tools (which are themselves open source, but may have slightly different licensing restrictions). One of the goals of threepress is to maximize existing toolkits — carefully modified to suit the needs of publishers — but not to re-invent whole processes.

More pragmatically, theepress also serves as a sandbox for me to experiment with projects as part of my consulting business. Although in many cases it will be impossible to do so, I hope to convince publishers that it is in their own interest to use and release projects in an open source context. For more information on consulting, see this About page.