Chapter 1
Which Came First?

Which came first, the book or the inter­net? Obvi­ous­ly, the book. And that’s the point. We’re liv­ing with over five cen­turies of print­ed-book tra­di­tion. And it’s very hard to extin­guish that tra­di­tion. Yet the new dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy opens infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties for estab­lish­ing new tra­di­tions in book mak­ing. How to rec­on­cile the two? This book pro­vides a start­ing point that builds on tra­di­tion but expands the con­cept of a book.

Web tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides you the means to pub­lish a book com­pe­tent­ly and attrac­tive­ly in one ded­i­cat­ed website.

• HTML and CSS pro­vide all the typo­graph­i­cal con­trol you need for your book.
• A wide vari­ety of type­faces (fonts) are avail­able online for free use in web­pages (e.g., Google fonts).
• HTML can pro­vide a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem to trav­el around your book.
• HTML enables the inclu­sion of col­or graph­ics (e.g., photos).
• HTML hyper­link­ing can link to dig­i­tal resources any­where on the inter­net and pro­vide inter­ac­tiv­i­ty with­in the book itself.
• HTML5 makes it easy to embed audio and video into a webpage.
• JavaScript, a sim­ple pro­gram­ming lan­guage, which almost every pro­gram­mer knows, enables inex­pen­sive cre­ation and embed­ding of pro­grams into a webpage.
• Togeth­er or sep­a­rate­ly HTML and JavaScript can enable a wide range of interactivity.
• Embed­ded pro­gram­ming using advanced pro­gram­ming lan­guages is also pos­si­ble, albeit more com­pli­cat­ed and the realm of pro­gram­mers, not webworkers.

These capa­bil­i­ties will enable you to cre­ate a book nice­ly type­set but also one that includes col­or graph­ics, diverse media, embed­ded pro­gram­ming, and even com­plex interactivity.

Diverse Media Publishing Series Book 2  This is the second book in the Appworth^® Diverse Media Publishing Series. The first book is Publishing by Voice (https://PublishingByVoice.com), a webbook. The third book is Publishing with Diverse Media (https://​Pub​lish​ing​With​Di​verse​Me​dia​.com).

Envi­sion a book con­sti­tut­ing a web­site where­in each chap­ter is a web­page, and there are no web­pages that are not part of the book. The book web­site has a Table of Con­tents (with links for nav­i­ga­tion) and a search func­tion to act as an index.

Why is it so very impor­tant to use the form of a print­ed book as the form of a web­book? The answer is sim­ply that it’s a stan­dard form. If you want to know what the form is, look it up in the Chica­go Man­u­al of Style or just pick up any print­ed book. Every­one knows exact­ly what to do with a book, because all books are in the stan­dard form. Because the book form has been adopt­ed for ebooks, the form of the book con­tin­ues its tra­di­tion of being the stan­dard form, which every­one under­stands. Why would you do any­thing dif­fer­ent with a book website?

It’s admirable that some peo­ple cre­at­ing book web­sites have come up with new for­mats to orga­nize a book. But if it’s in a non­stan­dard form, users have to learn how to use the form before they can read the book. And every book web­site that a user runs across that’s not in the stan­dard print­ed book form presents a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence; so a user has to learn a new book for­mat for every non­stan­dard book web­site he or she reads.

Con­sumers don’t like prod­ucts with­out stan­dards. They expect to find their steer­ing wheels on the left side of every Amer­i­can car, not in the right side. They expect to find stop signs big and red in New Hamp­shire and the same in Arizona.

If it looks like a book, it’s a book. If it does­n’t look like a book, what is it? Is it a book? Is it an online course? Is it online sup­port (or help) for some­thing? Is it just a sideshow on a larg­er website?

But it’s not enough to look like a book. It must look exact­ly like a book. And although you might be able to get away with chang­ing cer­tain things for prac­ti­cal rea­sons in the flow of the book (e.g., the first page of a web­book togeth­er with the book cov­er is the Table of Con­tents), users still have to be able to eas­i­ly and quick­ly rec­og­nize that it is indeed a book iden­ti­cal to any print­ed book they’ve ever read.

If the book is part of a larg­er web­site, it can cause con­fu­sion in a user’s per­cep­tion as the fol­low­ing ques­tions illus­trate. Why is there more to the web­site than just the book? Is the greater web­site worth my time? Is the book just an after­thought on the web­site? If the book is part of a larg­er web­site, why doesn’t the book include the addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion that’s on the larg­er web­site but not in the book?

So what’s the point of all this dis­cus­sion? It’s obvi­ous. A web­site is a great way to pub­lish a book. To read the book, users (read­ers) don’t have to go to an online book­store to buy your book. All you have to do is mar­ket your book web­site, and users have con­ve­nient access to your book via their web browsers. Read­ing a book web­site in a brows­er is vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to read­ing an ebook in an ebook-read­er app (e.g., Kin­dle app).

The web­site is the book. The book is the web­site. There’s no con­fu­sion. It’s a web­book!

All in all, this is a great way to pub­lish a book if your sole objec­tive is to just pub­lish it. But that’s not the end of the sto­ry. How about mak­ing some mon­ey? Why not add adver­tis­ing to pay for the book and give free access to the web­book? I believe this can work well for infor­ma­tion­al web­books as well as oth­er webbooks.

Affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is avail­able to every­one who wants to use it (to make mon­ey). At one time, web adver­tis­ing was gener­ic and an irri­tant to almost all users. Today web adver­tis­ing is very focused, rel­e­vant, and poten­tial­ly use­ful to users. Read Chap­ter 26 to under­stand how it works today and how you can use it. Read Chap­ter 23 on adver­tis­ing in books for a greater overview of this inevitable practice.

An infor­ma­tion­al web­book typ­i­cal­ly cov­ers a vari­ety of top­ics expressed in a vari­ety of chap­ters. Such infor­ma­tion can sup­port a vari­ety of affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing. A greater vari­ety of adver­tis­ing in your web­book equates to greater income. It all adds up to a steady income stream (an annu­ity) for your web­book. There is no book­store to take a sub­stan­tial part of the income.

For fic­tion, make the web­book pass­word pro­tect­ed and require users to buy a pass­word. That’s easy to set up. You sell the web­book by sell­ing pass­words. But some fic­tion books may sup­port adver­tis­ing; so don’t rule that out.

Experts esti­mate that as much as 50% of peo­ple read­ing books now read them in dig­i­tal form. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is hard to prove that fig­ure because sta­tis­tics pub­lished by estab­lished pub­lish­ers and book­stores now cov­er only a por­tion of all print­ed books and dig­i­tal books. And Ama­zon with over 50% of the US book sales and 80% of the known ebook sales does not pro­vide com­plete sta­tis­tics. It appears that a sub­stan­tial por­tion of indie pub­lish­ing in dig­i­tal for­mats is invis­i­ble to the sta­tis­tics. Thus, I think the like­li­hood is sub­stan­tial that dig­i­tal read­er­ship is sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than offi­cial pub­lish­ing sta­tis­tics show. In any event, the breadth of the dig­i­tal book mar­ket is substantial.

More impor­tant­ly, sta­tis­tics tell us about 70% of the peo­ple read­ing books in dig­i­tal form use their smart phones. That means a web­book has to be in an HTML for­mat that auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjusts itself to be easy to read on a smart phone: a respon­sive design. In oth­er words, you need to use a web­site tem­plate engi­neered to be respon­sive. There are many such tem­plates avail­able on the web. Build­ing a cus­tom respon­sive web­site can be expen­sive, although there are sim­ple ways to do it too.

This idea of a web­book is very easy to exe­cute in Word­Press (one of the eas­i­est web­site pro­grams to use for web­books) because of the way Word­Press is set up. Any­one can work eas­i­ly with Word­Press. And for­tu­nate­ly, mak­ing a respon­sive web­site with Word­Press is con­ve­nient too. You have noth­ing more to do than sim­ply use a respon­sive Word­Press theme (tem­plate) of which there are many.

Some ben­e­fits to you (assum­ing the use of Word­Press) are:

• Built-in nav­i­ga­tion
• A search func­tion that you can use for an index
• A huge vari­ety of inex­pen­sive tem­plates available
• Many plu­g­ins avail­able to enable spe­cial­ized functions
• Users (read­ers) can make comments
• You will learn about your typos from users and can cor­rect them in a time­ly manner
• Some of your users are like­ly to have more exper­tise than you regard­ing cer­tain infor­ma­tion in cer­tain chap­ters of your book, and they will com­ment on your mis­takes or inad­e­quate cov­er­age of cer­tain issues. You can then make cor­rec­tions accordingly.
• And many more handy functions

That being so, you can kill all birds with one stone. Pub­lish a web­book using Word­Press nice­ly type­set with an attrac­tive type­face and respon­sive form. Use affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing for rev­enue. Include col­or graph­ics, diverse media, and embed­ded pro­gram­ming wher­ev­er appropriate.

(Note that Word­Press is just one exam­ple of web author­ing soft­ware. It has many competitors.)

In many cas­es your mar­ket­ing will be less com­pli­cat­ed. And best of all, you keep more of the rev­enue than with most oth­er pub­lish­ing schemes.

If you want to pur­sue this idea, check out the Jour­nal of Elec­tron­ic Pub­lish­ing, Vol­ume 18, Issue 1, Win­ter 2015 (http://​quod​.lib​.umich​.edu/​j​/​j​e​p​/​3​3​3​6​4​5​1​.​0​0​1​8​.​1​*​?​r​g​n​=​f​u​l​l​+​t​ext), which is a com­pendi­um of the 2014 conference.

So we start­ed with the idea of a book as a web­site and reached the con­clu­sion that the web­site is the book. The book is the web­site. And thus defined, the book becomes a webbook.

One issue, how­ev­er, remains. What about doing some­thing inno­v­a­tive with the form of the book. After all, isn’t the new dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing all about innovation?

There is some prece­dent for sup­ple­ment­ing the form of print­ed books. Some­times addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion, typ­i­cal­ly about the author or about oth­er books by the author or pub­lish­er, is found at the end of the book. Indeed, I encour­age you to do what­ev­er you want in order to expand the scope of your book. But do it at the end of the book where peo­ple will under­stand that it is some­thing dif­fer­ent, and it will not con­fuse them.

In oth­er words, what­ev­er the brave new world of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing enables you to do that doesn’t fit neat­ly into the tra­di­tion­al for­mat of a book, put it at the end of the book. That will give peo­ple clear notice that your web­book has more to offer than a print­ed book or even an ebook, but it won’t be as con­fus­ing as it might be were you to graft it into the mid­dle of your webbook.

What does fit into the tra­di­tion­al form of a book is: col­or graph­ics, audio bites, video clips, ani­ma­tions, link­ing, sim­ple embed­ded pro­gram­ing, and oth­er diverse media. So long as they fit into the flow of the web­book, you don’t need to put them at the end.

Why a web­book now? Well, HTML5 web tech­nol­o­gy is now com­plete (as of 2014). Using only HTML you can now eas­i­ly embed audio, video, and pro­gram­ming into web­pages. Audio and video stan­dards and resources have emerged to make their use in pub­lish­ing sim­ple. And Word­Press and oth­er sim­i­lar web author­ing soft­ware have become robust and easy-to-use. The stage is set. The new diverse media ebook is the webbook.