eBogsdigtere på barrikaderne! (om digtning og omløbende tekst)

Digtningen har ingen helle i ebøgerne: De mest anerkendte digitale formater kan laves til omløbende tekst (reflowing text), hvilket smadrer digterens intentioner. Det er nu, at et statisk format må findes – før det er for sent at påvirke formatkrigen!

Jeg har før været inde på [omkr. udgivelsen af Peter Poulsens ebog “Rulleteksterne”], at udgiver af ebøger skal være opmærksom på, hvilket format de vælger at udgive digte i. Her følger eksempler på, hvad der sker, når digte udsættes for funktionaliteten “reflow”, omløbende tekst.

Skærmbillederne er fra Adobe Reader 9, men kunne lige så godt have været fra de ebogslæsere, der understøtter “portable ADE” (Adobe Digital Editions). “Digtet” er på engelsk, fordi jeg ikke har tænkt mig at helme, før nogen tager problematikken alvorligt!

Et digt

Der er mange grunde til at bruge PDF til at udgive digtsamlinger i/med, men en udbredt holdning hedder: Et standardformat må findes, som alle kan bruge. Det ér bare gerne sådan, at nye formater oftest har afløst gamle, når behovene forandredes eller teknologien viste nye veje. Hvad udgivelse af digte som ebøger angår, ér der bare nogle ufravigelige placeringskrav, som kun de færreste digitale formater til en vis grad kan honorere. Og ingen er helt sikre.

Formatet EPUB – stort set adopteret af de fleste ebogsudgivere – fungerer rigtig godt med prosa, men gør vold på edigtning, hvoraf den mest åbenlyse årsag er nemheden hvormed læseren laver omløbende tekst: Man vælger blot en større skrifttype, og VUPTI er digterens hårde arbejde forvandlet til ren tekst, der hverken er fugl eller fisk.

Continue reading “eBogsdigtere på barrikaderne! (om digtning og omløbende tekst)”

App for the poet, please!

I want an app for poets. Developers regard this as too tiny an audience for all the hard work. I don’t care. Just do it.

 

The poet has no home on App Store, nor in any other software.

This is mostly because no-one knows the need of poets. Take any poetry app out there at present – they all reflect the (mis)conception that poetry is all about rhyming and finding synonyms to create better poetic images, presented in a christmas tree of lines, dead centered on the page.

That is not the case. A poet often “paints” with his broken lines, not  to achieve a visual effect (even if some do), but to indicate states of mind or a concept’s placement in a mental or emotional “space”. Thus, even if readers of novels and essays and journalism on e-reader devices cherish nicely re-flowing text, poets are at the mercy of the reader and format-designer if published in a re-flowing format: Once readers re-size their font, the visual image is distorted, the poet’s lines break and shift, and his or her breath and hard work at rhythm breaks with it!

Poetry is not broken prose – and should not be seen or presented as such.

Poetry is breath and beat and rhythm and pregnant pauses, poetry
is the hand on the roller of the typewriter
a well flowing pen
pencils B and H and HB too
coloured speed-markers permanent and degradeable, poetry

is text physical, resizable
round hard soft long short like the body
length of lines and typography to suit the shifting moods, and
precision
hard precision
for the mind to excert.

A poet’s typing app should be like an instrument

easy to play, easy to tune, easy to modify.

I want an app for a poet.

Funky, easy, and build to work with typography as both fluid matter and stringent with meaning. Having been published for 25 years and working with Macs for 18, I want it yesterday.

Specifications, a beginning – and we are talking specific, extendable and expandable functionality here:

tabulation. Tabulation is not just empty space; it’s indicative of fixed pause and distance from the line break above – how long to hold the breath/tension. Spacebar tapping can do, but if you work fast, you want to be precise and not have to count 15 spacebar taps rather than pressing tabulation 3 times.

easy access to punctuation. Punctuation is the breath of the poem. All characters in punctuation are pauses of various length, pauses roughly in this order: charactersintoone, space between words, , – tab ( ) ; ” ” : . ! ? line shift  – with a variety of other pauses thrown in, like tab on new line after another character, Capital letter on new line after tab without full stop or other character etc.: Pauses are important. Teaching this, the Music of Pauses, makes some poets suddenly see their poems as scores. While others become aware of their visual leanings. Plus they never again need to remind themselves of the importance of breath.

Hard line breaks definition of what to do in a text with long lines. This could be achieved by interspacing a series of optional line-breaks, created by test-setting of larger fonts. Eg. desired result could be to place broken text at right margin at AUTHOR’s own line breaks, or at a certain distance from right margin, OR as re-flowing text, perhaps indicated by insertion of tripple space, when the line breaks, or by fixed number of tabs. And it need to be exported as code or image of the desired size and dpi.

– some poets need fixed placing of words for their poetry. Thus a monospaced font could be desired as option. Even if most poets are aware of the visual representation of their poem, you could say some poets are more visually demanding in their approach to writing than most writers. The shape of the text becomes important, thus line-spacing is important. Preferably in points with decimals or what is possible in (easy) code. Kerning would probably be asking for too much, but still.

re-sizing individual characters. For those visually inclined. And here an approximation to fluid  line-spacing makes sence

typewriter. if you could ROLL the page up and down and sideways, while tapping the keyboard (eg. looking through a magnifying glass in the middle of the screen or though a cross hair’s), you would make concrete poets very happy: They would then be able to draw with the keys, and produce visual poetry. This would probably need to be converted to image upon export, but that’s better than nothing. In fact it’s wonderful!

Process documentation. Save the production of the poem as an animation or movie, and you would make other poets insanely satisfied.

Recording. Many poets work a lot with the sound of their text. Recording option should have live spectrogram and a simple editor, fade-in and fade-out, maybe an ambience effect and recording to format of choice.

Write on an image. Import an image, and write on it. Choose tool, font, size and colour, as well as placement and fluid line-spacing. Save with image, or save as alpha channel.

Snippets holder. Working with poetry one sometimes kills everything off, but has a nice two lines that could well form the basis of a future poem, or be incorporated somewhere. Give it a time-stamp and/or an visual expiry date, and the poet will be happy not to have too much clutter in his workspace, but still able to find it upon inspection of snippets.

Undo/redo. undo back to the beginning, and redo back to the end. Observing the chain of thought can get a poet back on track, if he lost his way.

Alignment. Some poets like the christmas tree model, centering, and should have that option, plus line spacing, fluid or fixed by desire. Right margin is used by some. A mixture of all is also employed by some.

Clean table. No menus visible. Eg. corner points for calling menus out.

Music control. Many poets like to listen to music while writing. Turning off, changing song, turning volume up and down fast is an advantage to focus and flow. Maybe a one touch interaction with the mp3 app?

Fixed size paper. Many poets work with limitations in paper size. Could just be a dotted barrier on the page to indicate the selected size. When it comes to publishing, the most normal format presently is 3:4 (1:35), but why would a poet want to limit him or herself to the size of e-reader screens AS THEY ARE NOW?! An ebook is for ever, meaning it also exists in the future, of which we know nothing…

Endless roll / page breaks. For ease of writing the endless roll of paper is a gooood thing. To indicate the page breaks means also to indicate quantity of production. Can be satisfactory to know how far one has gotten. Ease of shifting bewteen the two

– Think well of those poets writing in different directions – left to right, top to bottom! And prepare for people working in other languages. You would want this to be the only Poet’s App a poet would ever need. Subtle, yet amazingly powerful.

– And remember that it could be used as a proofing tool as well! So, plenty of annotation possibilities.

Interlinking. As we go digital, we want Anchors! TOCs! Outside linking as part of writing! Possibly linking to specific page in another book @ as yet unfound on the net!

Illustrations, yes we want pictures too, fluid placement, anchored to text, under over inside the text. Please.

–oo0oo–

In November I will join a discussion at the Book Fair in copenhagen on the topic of “publishing of digital poetry and the possibility of abuse of poetry made available on the net” (sigh). Here, among other things, I intend to mention the lack of modern Danish or contemporary English ePoetry in the Danish iTunes Store (or any other language for that matter), as well as the lack of Danish ePoetry in Amazon, Sony or Barnes and Noble…

Okay, alright… There aren’t any! ePoetry collections for sale. The very few “best of” of selected living and dead poets are mostly all there is. Free poems and collections of poetry are bountiful on the net. Most are self-published, and they are un-edited by professionals and it shows.

Today, large Danish publishers don’t believe in poetry as flagships of their business identity anymore. They might slowly be turning towards digital poetry, but it is ever so slowly, and waiting for everyone else. Gyldendal, the largest publisher in Denmark, has signed up with an eReader producer, but it’s all DRM and no Reader Experience. The largest Danish internet bookstore, Saxo, sells ebooks without DRM, if the publishers want it. At present, there is ONE non-anthologised (ie new’ish) collection of poetry for sale, over-priced and the publisher has forgotten to incorporate the author in its own searchable databank. And references to the digital version is nowhere to be found (a POD can be found and bought instead…)

Well, all aside:
I want the Danish poet, no, ANY poet, to have a tool, a digital tool that can grow over platforms. A way to think and interact with poetry. I want the poets themselves to show publishers and re-sellers that digital poetry is not rigid, nor (forever) bound to 6 or 9 or 10 inches or a computer screen, but that poetry in itself is a way of thinking, which transcends e-reader devices and document formats.

I want for poets to go slower, to get in closer touch which their audience. If necessary for comfort and clarity more in the observer role than as present-participant, but closer. An app as the one described, or out of similar mind set in regards to the actualisation fase of writing poetry, gives the poet a beginner’s handle on WHAT to use digitality for and WHAT to demand of digitivity in terms of options. A real instrument.

kind regards,
kenneth krabat
poet

UPDATE Jan. 7th, 2011: The app should most likely produce/work in an SVG file, if not an image file with layers. SVG (vector graphics) is scalable in ereader devices – though device makers don’t yet care for SVG, even if EPUB supports embedding of SVG. (EPUB itsef is hopeless, when it comes to poetry – reflowing text kills poetry.) Working in image formats could be a solution – as presenting poetry in image formats could be a solution – but not a really good one. It takes poets and epoetry collections away from mainstream publications and into an area, where it can only be read via Comic Book (format) apps.

The Reinvention of Print, One App at a Time

Programmers, not individual book designers, will shape the face of litterature in the years to come. Amazon already sells 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books and this is a trend that is only going to accelerate, especially as more and more titles become available in digital format.

ScrollMotion has programmed 11.000 apps in 24 months. Adding more than quiet persuasion to the opinion that large company programmers, not individual book designers, will shape the face of litterature in the years to come.

and

“Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicts that e-book sales will eclipse the sale of paperbacks in the next nine to 12 months. Amazon already sells 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books and this is a trend that is only going to accelerate, especially as more and more titles become available in digital formats.”

via The Reinvention of Print, One App at a Time.

Udlån af ebøger

Der arbejdes hårdt på at finde en ebogs-udslånsløsning. Det er ikke nemt, og ikke billigt.

“Den 15. september mødtes ledere fra danske forlag, større danske biblioteker og Styrelsen for Bibliotek og Medier for at drøfte mulige modeller for udlån af e-bøger på folkebibliotekerne.

Som optakt til drøftelserne gav direktør for Bibliotek og Medier, Jens Thorhauge, en introduktion til e-bøger og Danskernes Digitale Bibliotek. Kontorchef Jakob Heide Petersen fortalte om erfaringerne med formidling af digitale medier på bibliotekerne og direktør Steffen Sørensen fra Publizon orienterede om e-bøgernes udbredelse og formater og kom ind på mulige forretningsmodeller.

Den efterfølgende debat viste ingen tydelige præferancer for udlånsmodeller, men mundede ud i, at aktører fra biblioteks- og forlagssektoren i fællesskab ønsker at afprøve én eller flere muligheder baseret på en online-løsning. Bibliotek og Medier ser positivt på en henvendelse om økonomisk tilskud.

Dialogen mellem parterne fortsættes løbende.”

Flg diskussionsoplæg om e-bøger på danske folkebiblioteker, udarbejdet af Jakob Heide Petersen, giver et rigtig godt overblik over problematikken med udlån af ebøger, samt en generel definition på, hvad pokker ebøger egentlig er.

via. http://www.bibliotekogmedier.dk/nyheder/arrangementer/artikel/temamoede-om-e-boeger-paa-folkebibliotekerne-1/

We support Zhook (ePub and HTML5!)

EPUB is dead

3.8.2010
Get over it: ePub is dead and HTML5 wins

3.8. 2010
We support Zhook.

26.8.2010
ePub export comes to Pages in iWork 9.0.4 update | Publishing | MacUser | Macworld.

27.8.2010
Test-driving Apple Pages with ePub export : Threepress Consulting blog.

9.9.2010
Yet another e-book format

How a Zhook may be split into components

Listen, mediebranchen hader og frygter!

Siden 1500-tallet (og sikkert også før) har spindoktorer på vegne af tidens fremmeste informationsteknologi forsøgt at knægte nyere teknologier.

I hvert fald siden 1600-tallet har spindoktorer på vegne af tidens fremmeste informationsteknologi forsøgt at knægte nye teknologier.

Følgende liste er kondenseret fra en artikeldseneste.dk af Mark A. Lemley, Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology (oversat af Søren Storm Hansen). Tekst i citationstegn er taget direkte fra artiklen. Jeg har lavet et par tilføjelser til listen.

Falder himlen ned over musikbranchen, medier, film, tv, radio, forlag?

“Trykpressen, fotografiet, det mekaniske klaver, grammofonen, radioen, kabel-tv, fotokopimaskinen. kassettebåndet, videooptageren, DVD, MP3, billigt bredbånd. Alt sammen ødelæggende teknologier, der har truet med at tage brødet ud af munden på tusinder. Hvor galt gik det så?”

Continue reading “Listen, mediebranchen hader og frygter!”

Gyldendal slæææber sig ind i en elæser

Sådan kommer Gyldendal frem til, at ebøger skal koste næsten det samme som trykte bøger.

Fremtidens marked

Det vil koste 1.999 kroner at erhverve sig den nye Cybook Opus, og køber man den via g.dk, vil man i introduktionsperioden få flere aktuelle danske og udenlandske romaner gratis med i købet. I løbet af maj vil det også blive muligt at downloade nye e-bøger direkte fra g.dk for cirka 80 procent af prisen på almindelige trykte bøger.

via Gyldendal træder ind på det digitale bogmarked

WOW! I forhold til ordinære bogpriser er der så sparet 40-45% af udsalgsprisen ex. moms på boghandleren, 10-15% på trykning, så, selvfølgelig kommer det større overskud forfatterne til gode. Klart! Helt Klart! Super Klart! Fantastisk… (Ironialarm!)

Hvordan mon de er ankommet til “80%” af den vante udsalgspris?

Lad os antage, det er foregået sådan hér:

“Vi skal have nogen priser på de der nye produkter.”
“Ja, det skal vi!” Continue reading “Gyldendal slæææber sig ind i en elæser”

Gyldendal træder ind på det digitale bogmarked

“Det er selve definitionen af, hvad en bog er, som er sat på spil”.

Information:

Det danske forlag tog i går et stort skridt ind i den digitale verden med lanceringen af sin helt egen e-bogslæser, Cybook Opus. Om få år vil de elektroniske bøger have erobret store dele af det internationale bogmarked, lyder prognosen.

Adm. direktør i Penguin Books, John Makinson, lagde ikke fingrene imellem, da han ved en konference i London i sidste måned adresserede bogens fremtid i den digitale tidsalder.

»Det er selve definitionen af, hvad en bog er, som er sat på spil,« sagde Makinson.

Ingen i den internationale forlagsindustri synes længere i tvivl om, at fremtidens bogmarked er digitalt. De sidste tvivlere kunne i den forgangne uge lade sig overbevise af dugfriske tal fra det amerikanske bogmarked, der viser, at salget af fysiske bøger fortsætter sin tilbagegang, mens e-bøgerne stormer frem. I 2009 steg salget af elektroniske bøger med hele 175 procent, og fremgangen forventes at accelerere yderligere i 2010 med lanceringen af Apples iPad og den nye Nook fra Barnes & Noble.

Omtaler: ORDLØST • 119 digtere i Dansk Forfatterforening

Foreløbig.

 

Bjarne Kim Pedersen – Forfatter: ORDLØST fra Dansk Forfatterforening

Herlev Bibliotekerne – Ordløst — Herlev-Bibliotekerne

Helsingør Dagblad – Helsingør Dagblad – 119 digtere med i gratis digital digt-antologi

Jens Fink-Jensen – Länkar om “Luk op for lyrikken” | Facebook

Brian P Ørnbøl – Brian P Ørnbøl – forfatter – Nyhedsarkiv

Søren Sørensen – Mød forfatteren Søren Sørensen

Litteratursiden – Lyrik Læseklubben | Litteratursiden

Oplysningskontoret – Oplysningskontoret

Jan Hatt-Olsen – Lyrik-instalation – Jan Hatt-Olsen

Kulturnyt – Sørgmodig ørkenblues fra Vestsahara – dr.dk/P1/Kulturnyt/Udsendelser

Harning – Digte,Haiku,Senryu,Gendai « Harning

Per-Olof Johansson – Supplement til litteratursiden, Per-Olof Johansson DK

Henriette Elmøe – Henriette Elmøe’s MySpace Blog

Lonni Krause – August nyheder 2009 « Dette er ikke en blog

Claus Høxbroe – Claus Høxbroe´s armé | Facebook

Pia Valentin Lorentzen – piavalentinlorentzen.dk/om

Marianne Slot – Forfatter Marianne Slot 链接| Facebook

Patrick Thimm – Patrick Thimm – Personen / Infos zu Name Patrick Thimm – Personen …

 ORDLØST.dk