Mute is an independent editorial and technology initiative, a key space for critical independent cultural writing in the UK, a magazine, a book publisher, and a collective since 1994. Over the years Mute has produced multiuser CMS, live coding AV software, community wireless networks, and OS software packages alongside innovative online and material print projects, commissions and events. They have been generating exceptionally powerful Print on Demand book projects since 2005 (and are right now doing great experiments with paper types and new printing techniques in this area). Their experimental approach is informed as much by financial constraint as by critical artistic intrigue. Indeed their resilience and lateral movements have only become more inspiring following the announcement of 100% cuts to their funding by Arts Council England, just as they are forming unique technology and business partnerships to work up some of their latest publishing initiatives.
Simon Worthington @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg
Progressing Public (Publishing) Goods
Co-founder of Mute, Simon Worthington, framed the Mute platform for the Open Publishing Tools workshop attendees via the organisation’s attention to meta-issues, or “overall publishing”. The group are fundamentally invested in the notion of public independent publishing infrastructures, which entails pragmatic, research-based responsivity to the real present needs of fellow independent publishers locally and worldwide. Their current focus is on ebooks, html5, and print on demand. These are the tools that are really going to keep ‘critical’ cultural writing independent in to the future. In the discussion time afterwards, Simon summarized in the following:
… our goal is about keeping a culture of criticality in place. If you’re publishing in an independent way then you don’t exist in the market because the market doesn’t give you a reward because you don’t sell enough titles because of the way culture is valued – as creative industry – which pushes out the cultural writers and cultural journals. This period of living through the free web.. we’ve embraced it but there is no solution to the demonitization of the web. There is no balanced ‘flat fee” across the web… so (what Mute focusses on as) the ‘end’ (c.f. the means) is about public infrastructures for culture and community.
Mute’s ‘Progressive Publishing System’
The core of Simon’s presentation introduced Mute’s very exciting ‘Progressive Publishing System‘, an “ePublishing conversion, distribution & remuneration software system” designed to break though barriers to access for creative, remunerative e-publication by independents. The system makes it much more possible for small publishers and e-authors to:
* generate eBooks for kindle, Tablets, HTML5, and Print On Demand books
* easily convert and repurpose books, journals, articles, web content, blogs, back catalogues, and archives
* distribute digital books to major online retailers
* supply POD publications through Amazon FBAs (‘Fulfilled by Amazon services’)
The Difference the System Makes
PPS most significantly conquers the huge problem of conversion: the necessary technical breakdown of a document’s inbuilt markup code for layout, font and images in to (re)publishable formats. Until now this involved huge incontrovertible hours of human-computer interaction, breaking down texts in to bits, rebuilding and reproofing them within next / other platforms prior to republication. Existing tools like Word, Indesign, Web CMS are unfit for this work; and publishers’ workflows otherwise corrupt or don’t handle metadata. The repetition of conversion and proofing labour multiples multi-platform publishing costs, especially when texts move through differently incompatible (proprietary) softwares, limiting small publisher opportunities to output in convergent (and therefore more monetizable) ways.
The PPS system’s single source approach to coding contrarily separates out the text and images of a document, mechanically describes them so that a computer system can know what they are, and puts them into different outputs. The solution intervenes as architecture at the level of workflow – reducing the workload by a factor of 5, according to Worthington. The innovation comes in the separation of content from delivery platforms, in order to enable greater workflow integration, connect with Web 2.0 API’s and even additional services like translation, and enhance rich metadtata integrity throughout this process. The system itself is therefore both a “content repository” and a solution to outputting, in its management and splitting of just two types of publication metadata: information about the publication for sales distribution purposes; and a structured XML schema of the internal document structure readable by platform conversion services. The two metadata types are designed to synchronize with the realities of what Mute calls the “post-production life cycle of publications”: publisher’s workflows, distributor’s sales services and platform conversions. The idea is that publishers are left with enhanced conversion possibilities and removed barriers to all variety of the new platforms (e.g. tablets and eBook Readers), an increased reach by connecting to sales distributors (e.g. Amazon, Apple, Ingrams), and a healthy ePublishing presence and revenues, such as through one-stop-shop web services.
E-published Resources and Wikis for E-publishing
Mute’s thorough, collaborative research and documentation about these new tools, as well as their surveys of existing solutions to e-publishing, can be found online across a series of open docs, links and related wikis. Their new website will also be launched very soon.
http://linkme2.net/pd
http://theknowledge.aodl.org.uk/index.php/Publishing