Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Please tell me your name, company you work for, title, and your background.
Sure, my name is Liza Daly. I am VP of engineering at Safari Books Online.
I founded a technology consulting company called, Threepress, that was acquired by Safari.
I have been working in digital publishing since 2008 and web-development since the 90's
when web-development began.
Oh, you have a degree on Psychology.
I do. I have a master in Psychology.
Yes, and what made your change from Psychology, pretty much academic setting, to the publishing
industry?
I originally switched from Psychology to web-development because it was the time when the web first
emerged and I was really excited by the technology and how democratizing the web was clearly
going to be. This is before it was a big commercial enterprise,
but it had so much potential that it was something I wanted to be part of.
I worked in general web community for many years, but I was always interested in working
with good contents and working in a space where we were proving information to people
really wanted. That is what the publishing industry is about.
It is proving information in a way compelling and interesting and fun so the combination
of web and publishing was a perfect vehicle.
You have been a strong advocate for the accessibility issues of, that your Psychological background
and your experience as a web-developer, how does that transfer into your idea about accessibility
My background in Psychology very much informed my interest in accessibility.
In fact my research work was in reading disabilities so to me really the requirement of digital
reading material is to make it accessible to everyone.
Certainly there were many groups before digital publishing that got left behind, either they
were blind or in another ways not capable in printed material.
So, I think it is part of our responsibility as a community to provide information to all
groups of people in a way accessible to them.
What is the motivation behind when you developed Ibis Reader. Why is it Ibis Reader? How did
you name? Is there reason for the name?
My html5 base reader, Ibis was originally developed in 2010.
It was a outgrowth of earlier eReading experiments I have done with websites.
At the time, most of eReading was done on specialty devices.
To me it seemed important to make reading available on the open-web, rather than locked
into particular devices or device-makers. And initially, there was some resistance because
I think people felt there was a strong distinction between reading a book which was something
you did on a device and reading on the web was seen as something different.
But we have come to realize in last 2 or 3 years that it is all reading and more available
reading materials on the open-web, better it is for the companies, for individuals.
So, Ibis was the first attempt and there have been many better software programs to do web-based
reading. But I am very happy to have been part of Books
In Browsers movement pretty early.
I think in 2011, I saw Threepress consulting website and it was first time I saw someone
offer that, if you become a client.
Now you are working for a publishing company, how does it different from own business to
actual company that runs publishing business.
I always tried to make as much software open-source when I was independent.
Part of that was because that was a good way to promote the business and built a community
inside the larger publishing space. At Safari Books Online, we are a commercial
company and much of our software are closed-source but we are very much big believers in open-sourced.
And in fact, I have been recently taken the times with developers to take a look at all
of our software products and decide which one we should open-source, and making sure
we have the time for supporting those packages and make them more available to the community.
So if anything, my company will move into more open-source software because we feel
that business value is not really in the software but it's in how you use it for your particular
industry. And it is beneficial to everyone to release
source code, which by itself does not have much value.
Value is in the company that use it, so we can provide the source code and we are not
giving up our competitive advantage. And instead, we are helping support an entire
industry, which is good for us, too.
Would you give me an example of benefit of running open-sourced business?
I think we will see, especially this year or next few years, particularily Readiam projects
and ePub.js and Annotator. There are a lot very mature open-sourced eReading
and digital publishing tools coming out. Before those existed ,it was very hard to
start a new business because you would have to license a very expensive eReading software
or you would have to build it yourself. Now that the industry is maturing, we will
see more interesting start-ups that do not have to start from "now we are going to build
an eReader" or they can start with shared annotation which I think will be very important.
We at Safari are going to be, in fact we are adapting Annotator.JS code base for our annotation
solution. Which just means that we are incorporating
open-sourced software into our commercial software.
But we will contribute back to the open-source and have more common platform across another
eBook distribution channels because we are using similar tools.
I think it has been 2 years since the book, Futurist's Manifesto, has been published.
What is the most important change in past 2 years since you wrote the article?
Did you mean my topic specifically or the whole industry?
Well, the 2 years in general in term of accessibility.
I think the most significant change, particularly around accessibility and interactivity, which
is a lot of what I write about has been everyone realizing how important those things are commercially.
For an example, it has been clear that many school are going to move toward digital textbooks
and digital reading products. In order to do that, those texts must be accessible
that has been good rule for the government to insist that the products provided at schools
are accessible to the whole community. So now, there are both ethical drivers toward
building good accessible reading tools but also business drivers. And those two work
together very well.
I know you are involved in T.O.C. as well, unfortunately it ended this year and this
year's was the last one.How to describe the influence and role of T.O.C.?
Liza: Tools of Change (T.O.C.) was the only way I was able to be successful.
It was very early on, and it was the only place for technologists to meet publishers
and come together and talk about solutions.
For start-ups like mine, it was the one place you could have a platform to speak to try
to convince an older industry of the changes they needed to make to adapt.
And though we were sad to see T.O.C.go, Books in Browsers has really stepped into the role
so as the contacts in Frankfurt.
So, when T.O.C. first closed, I was definitely worried that the platform for new companies
was disappearing but I do not think that is true.
I have been very glad to see that innovations happening in other conferences and more informal
gatherings.
This is definitely just as active of time in digital publishing as when T.O.C. was operating.
Daisuke: For someone working in the publishing industry and interested in accessibility issue,
can you recommend 3 books? That is a good place to start.
O'Reily has published few books on digital publishing; Html 5 for Publishers by Sanders
Kleinfield is certainly a very good place to start.
O'Reily has also published several books on EPUB3, which has not seen the adaption we
might have expected when ePub3 came out. Almost anything that has been written on EPUB3
is a good advice for digital publishing in general, in term of creating quality contents,
creating accessible contents, and certainly more now than in the past are the good best
practices coming out there. A few years ago, there was just a handful
of blogs for people to read about to good markup and there are many resource available
now.
Our last question, can you give us a brief message for Japanese readers.
I think in the United States, we have seen both some of the advantages of using a single
platform like Kindle, it's great for building a digital adaption of analog reading but for
a place where there is not yet a single company so dominant, readers can play a role in supporting
a healthier ecosystem. I love the Kindle. I am a good friend of Amazaon
but they are such a dominating force that in other regions, I hope we have a greater
diversity of commercial and non-commercial publishing and distribution channels.
How do you think people will be reading 20 years from now?
In 20 years from now. I think people will always do the same kind of reading that we
see now. In a sense there are cases where you love
to be absorbed in a book. You love to be a part of the story by a single author. I
do not think the experiences never going to change.
That one-on-one communication between one author and one reader is powerful and technology
does not change the relationship. But certainly, we already see very different
kind of conversations happening online where authors and readers blur their lines and there
are commentary and exchange. I think it will only add to the reading experience.
It's like we will still have the solitary one author-one reader relationship but we'll
have a greater diversity of reading and writing experience, in addition
to that.