A lot of fuss today over a CD full of work that should have gotten to me but didn’t. Ah, well. The work is underspecified anyway; the last time I did work of this type, I came up with a bunch of questions for the customer, questions that have not as yet been answered.
The curious thing about the questions I have is that they are not, by and large, highly technical. Quite commonsensical ones, in fact. For example, this customer wants a pagecount (based on the printed book) for each book section. Exactly how the pagecount is to be defined is left as an exercise for… well, me.
A section that starts on page 6 and ends on page 7 has one page in it, if I use the obvious pagecount algorithm (last-page minus first-page). But that means that a section starting and ending on page 6 has zero pages. Is that right? Or does the page-6-to-page-7 section actually contain two pages?
Common sense. Common sense. This is a bloody obvious problem. That it is not resolved in what is otherwise quite clear documentation is conclusive proof that nobody tried to do this for a real book before sending the specification to vendors.
And that particular bit of tomfoolery—coming up with content specifications in a management cleanroom completely divorced from production experts and production testing—is utterly epidemic in the ebook industry right now. It’s enough to send a poor production grunt like me right around the bend.
The example I just gave is quite tame. Believe me, there’s far worse floating around than this. I can’t talk about it, because of the usual rash of idiotic NDAs. I wish I could. None of the garbage specs I work with was an inevitability, and most of the garbage parts can be fixed—but the other illness running rampant in the ebook industry right now is arrogance, blind clinging to bad specs (and worse, imposing them on production people who know better!) for fear of somehow wasting the huge amounts of money that went into developing them in the first place.
Look, the real waste is cleaning up after a crappy spec once its crappiness can no longer be hidden or explained away. The sooner a crappy spec gets fixed, the better. But try telling that to a publisher who’s paid millions to a consulting agency for a crappy spec.
Gee. Maybe if I charged millions for markup specs, instead of idiotically offering my advice for free (as I did not too long ago, only to get shot down) these publishers would listen to me. They wouldn’t lose by it. Neither would I.
