Unpopular Opinions: On Media Specificity and Digital Preservation
As a publisher, I spend a lot of my time considering how to structure arguments for both print and electronic formats. How to make content readable, effective. The mechanics of the text. The underling style. How an author's vision will show on a page or on a screen. Sometimes I get looped into conversations about the nature of the medium itself: the dimensions of the paper, it’s weight, how well it will absorb ink, what CSS attributes or scripts are available on different systems.
The craft of publishing can be utterly intoxicating. Each decision bears upon the next, hopefully building to something that is so harmonious it seems utterly obvious. You know—the best design is the one you never notice. But publishing is more than a craft. It’s a business. Efficiencies must be found and exploited. I work hard to find those. I enact those. I argue for those. But something is lost when that as a primary driver.
A print book is a bespoke object, made with very specific intention. Ebooks, however, are not. Respondents to a recent W3C publishing poll felt them more akin to afterthoughts. They aren’t wrong.
Most publishers outsource the production of their ebooks to vendors, using the files they’ve designed specifically for the print edition as their basis. Those houses who create ebooks internally do much the same, “forking” their content after the material has already been typeset, converting print-specific files into well-structured XML.
There are plenty of good reasons for doing this. It consolidates production lines, it maintains a consistency of experience from one format to another. I get it. But that kind of workflow also assumes that one set of decisions surrounding the expression of content applies equally well to different containers. On that score, I have serious doubts.
Editors like me strive to structure the author’s vision in ways that can be expressed equally well in both physical and electronic mediums. There’s give and take and sacrifice. The best choices for one format can be utterly unfit for another. Nominally we find solutions that work in both. But really we privilege the print and find workarounds for the electronic edition. Or we decide that an electronic edition isn't possible because of choices that have locked us too far onto the print side of the spectrum.
True, these choices are affected by the technology behind the available e-readers on the market, what reading systems folks use in the browser. But most often it's about available resources and expertise and expectations. People fawn over print in ways they don't over an ebook. Print books are viewed as works of art, physical totems standing against encroaching darkness. I certainly have felt that way about titles in my library. But what if we paid as much attention to the electronic possibilities as the we did the print? What if we made choices that privileged ebooks? What if we thought of print and ebooks as equal, imperfect manifestations of an author's expressions, each distinct, each on par with the other.
That's a space I'd like to explore. Where an electronic edition isn't a lesser analog of the print. Where neither format is an analog of another, but each something unto its own. I don't accept that the print edition of a work is the be-all, end-all version of record. It's a version of record. It's the best expression of an author's ideas in that medium. How those ideas are fixed in another medium is something else entirely.
This is a topic that comes up more when the conversation shifts to preservation. We preserve physical books in libraries and archives and climate controlled facilities. We print many copies of a single title and distribute it around the globe. It's the “keeping stuff safe by having lots of copies” strategy. No single fire or flood or volcano will blow away the knowledge stored in these texts. Digital preservation is not so simple.
Technology evolves rapidly. And the systems we have now aren't guaranteed to work for long. So how do we maintain digital content for posterity? There are a number of strategies: The “bitwise solution” is to keep all the ones and zeroes of digital content in the same order. That seems eminently doable. But what good is it? Do you preserve just the sequence for a publication? For the software that supports it? For the operating system it runs on, etc? What good is that solution if you can't actually access what you've saved in a meaningful way? Another solution is to emulate content. You record the experience of the digital material and save the archive file alongside its native environment. Great. Except you still need to preserve a sequence of onces and zeroes in a usable way against time. So now you're left with door number three: you migrate the material. Which is another way of saying you translate it from one format to another as new technology comes along. The record becomes the 8-track becomes the cassette becomes the CD becomes the MP3. This is no small task. It's very high touch and requires understanding the material and mediums well enough to create a singular new publication that is consistent with its author's original intent. This can't be a 1:1 process. Just as human expressions can't always translate from one spoken/written language to another literally.
Given that, I wonder what it would be like to consider, from the start, material set for publication in different mediums as distinct entities that leverage their own medium as a singular way of crystallizing the ephemeral into the tangible. It may not be logistically feasible, but I suspect it would open new avenues of possibility that we are presently bypassing.