(Here There Bee Rantage. Ye Have Been Warned.)
An occasional gadfly who aspires to be a thorn in my side emailed me in response to my plans to put together XML tutorials next semester. He just really wanted to let me know that whenever folks like me talk about this stuff, folks like his eyes glaze over.
Thanks ever so, dude.
The more so because you’ve never actually seen me give an introductory talk. CavLec mostly doesn’t count; when I write about tech stuff here, it’s at my own meagre tech level rather than designed for beginners, unless I say otherwise pretty explicitly. I am, as it happens, reasonably good at getting tech stuff across to newbies. Or I’ve been told so, anyway.
Well, I would have laughed it off if it hadn’t been for the notion, espoused by him and some others of my acquaintance, that really, books are simple creatures and they can be represented and encoded incredibly simply. All you have to do is just…
Excuse me a moment. “Just?”
Don’t anyone even come near me with that word in relation to book production until you’ve done your time. Copyediting, proofing, typesetting, design, art work, bindery, electronic publishing, SGML work, desktop-publishing software design, I don’t care—but damn it, do your time before you tell me that book production can be boiled down to “just” anything.
Nine times out of ten, these yahoos have utterly forgotten that there’s any book in the world more complicated than, say, a Robert Ludlum novel. (I don’t think these yahoos actually set foot in libraries, though I suppose I could be wrong—they could merely suffer from acute tunnel vision.) The rest of us don’t have that luxury, in particular because Robert Ludlum won’t sell ebooks. We have to sweat over math, art, indexes, tables, links, complex layouts, production workflows, metadata, non-Roman alphabets, digital preservation issues, and all that fun stuff.
And, I mean, it’s quite arguable that we’ve sweated this stuff in entirely the wrong fashion. That’s a hell of a long way, though, from the airy insinuation that sweating it at all is utterly unnecessary. Or “simple.”
This is, it seems to me, part and parcel of a miraculous human tendency to take the familiar for granted. Because print books are familiar, they must be “simple.” Well, I am here to say, it ain’t so. There’s four hundred years of innovation, invention, and refinement in the print book. There’s plenty of craft, plenty of human effort.
Now, y’all know me better than to think I think the print book is the pinnacle of information-disseminating achievement, never to be improved upon or even equalled. I’m just not stupid or clueless enough to dismiss the very real accomplishments and complexities of the print form.
Nor, to take the opposite extreme, do I think that either print books or ebooks are utterly beyond fathoming by the garden-variety human mind. I have a garden-variety human mind, and I don’t do so badly.
Bah. I have said all this before. I wish I didn’t have to keep saying it, but I’ll repeat as often as necessary, I guess.
