My recent niche publishing efforts made me think about the future of books in general and electronic books (eBooks) in particular. I was looking for good arguments to support going down the DocBook path and, as I was trying to convince myself that it is the right thing to do, I found very little munition to support that decision.

The main reason was the lack of incentive to justify the extra effort that goes into writing a well-structured DocBook document, accompanying XSLT sheets, and XSL-FO constructs just to end up with plain old troff source that must be manually tweaked before it is sent off to the printers. If I can do it in troff, TeX, LaTeX, or Lout in the first place, why bother with all of these extra steps? So I stayed with the tools I trusted.

One could say that I’m missing one of the key selling points of XML, which is the relative ease of conversion from XML to another markup. I wouldn’t agree. I just don’t need tat property of XML for that particular project. The importance of XML depends on the choice of the final delivery medium. If you plan to publish in print and PDF formats, then you need much more control over the final look than XML, XSLT, and XSL-FO can give you at the moment, and you stay with whatever tools you are using.

Things are different when you plan to deliver content primarily online, but even then, a lot of stuff can be delivered in PDF or HTML. And it is likely to remain that way in the near future.

What XML needs to spread like wildfire is a business model that will convince publishers that it pays to publish in that format. That new business model will quite likely require authors and publishers to abandon their current ways of thinking. Books will no longer follow the linear path of information delivery, but will instead be broken up into hundreds or thousands of tiny little tips, much like Windows Help files.

(On a side note, it is interesting that the market for alternative Help files for end user applications like Microsoft Word has not caught on. Could this be attributed to a lack of vision among publishers or the closed software that does not allow to plug alternative help?)

Another difference would be in the way these publications are distributed in. They must be delivered online and they must incorporate an easy to use and inexpensive micropayment model. How would this work in practice?

Imagine that you have a problem with document formating in Word. You press F1 and your Help browser connects to a Napster-like site and presents you with a list of tips on topics related to document formating, each with their usefulness rating (like Amazon.com review usefulness rating). These ratings will help you decide which publisher’s tip you want to download and pay for.

If the price is tiny, say $0.01, you will not mind if the tips was not helpful, and will dig deeper for additional tips, rating those that you downloaded so far as helpful or not according to their value to you (you could even add your own comments to the tip). Your opinion will be automatically transferred to the tip server and published on-line. If you fail to find information you are looking for, you could publish your own tip after you solve that problem yourself, and receive money from people who download your tips. A rating system similar to /. post rating will help sort useful information from the bad.

To make this system work seamlessly, we’d need software developers to provide a way to transmit to the tips server the GUI object identifiers that are now used to display correct Help pages when we press F1 or click on the ? icon and then click on a button, window, or an icon. This would be very easy to implement.

Such system would be a great incentive to switch to XML and to publish quality information. The tools are already there, and the only bit missing are micropayments.

This, not the portable eBook readers looks like the future of eBooks and computer books. Today’s eBook efforts are missing the point. They make reading books harder, not easier. A book that cannot be read once the batteries run out or when you forget your password is pretty useless to me. Technology ought to make our lives easier, after all.

As for my tiny book, I decided to stay with troff. My book it is not designed to be delivered in small bite-size pieces. If I ever need to publish it online, I will use PDF, and if I see an incentive to convert to XML, I will whip up a script that will do most of the hard work for me.

Could this be the future of computer books?