Notes
Chapter 18 Imagining a Future of Multimedia E-books
Sylvia K. Miller
Scholarly books in digital or “electronic” form (“e-books”) should routinely include multimedia content. Multimedia e-books not only will publish today’s multimodal scholarship more accurately and appropriately than traditional books, but also will more easily engage and excite audiences, including scholars, researchers, students, and the general public.
Scholars are increasingly frustrated as the multiple forms of work that they find useful and inspiring are sidelined. Although they continue to pursue multimodal scholarship anyway, the richness of this scholarship is being stripped away during the publishing process, providing an impoverished experience of authors’ work for the readers of today and tomorrow—not least tenure and promotion committees, which focus on the book as the most important form of scholarship. The limited nature of book publishing is one reason that the multilayered complexity of today’s scholarship often goes unappreciated and uncredited in the process of faculty advancement. This lack of scholarly credit, in turn, discourages academic institutions from supporting the multimodal scholarship that faculty and graduate students want to carry out, putting barriers in the way of development and sustainability so that digital scholarship too often vanishes into old servers and outdated software, leaving little or no trace of the work for future audiences to study and emulate (Miller, “‘Horrors of Recoding’: Reflections on the 2019 UNCG Scholarly Communications Symposium”), or it requires continued editorial attention and technological investment indefinitely into the future (Hansen, Milewicz, Mangiafico, et al.). I see the publication of multimedia e-books as a potential key to breaking this unfortunate cycle.
This chapter is a highly limited manifesto, focused on incorporating multimedia into the established book-publishing infrastructure in the humanities and the social sciences (reflecting my particular experience). I outline a series of juxtapositions setting the current scenario (“Now”), admittedly in simplified form for concision, against an “imagined near-future.”
In my proposed model, each multimedia e-book publication would provide an important snapshot of scholarly work that occurred in multiple simultaneous modes, and the publication would serve as an archival record of that multimodal work. At the same time, the imprimatur of the scholarly publisher would present to the academic world a convincing statement of value that carries with it the potential to legitimatize the nontextual forms of scholarship that are currently regarded in many departments and institutions as superfluous. The larger effect, therefore, would be to encourage disciplinary and institutional support for multiple forms of scholarship.
This proposal is based on my experience in scholarly publishing, including more than twenty-five years in the publishing of e-books, digital encyclopedias, and grant-funded digital editions and e-publishing experiments. (See the glossary at the end of this chapter for definitions of the key terms discussed here.) For updates on the current state of publishing technology, I consulted a number of publishing professionals, some of whom are quoted herein and all of whom are acknowledged in the list of interviews accompanying this chapter. These conversations were carried out in a journalistic spirit, and they revealed information that was new to me and might indeed be new to others, leading to the exciting conclusion that normalization of multimedia e-book publishing might be closer to reality than I had expected when I started this project. I also mention enhanced e-books published under the Mellon-funded Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project (2008–2012), which I directed at the University of North Carolina Press (UNCP).1 (See Figure 18.1, from a video explaining one such e-book.)2
Figure 18.1. From video by the Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement team demonstrating UNCP’s enhanced e-book version of Katherine Mellen Charron’s Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2010). Video copyright 2012 University of North Carolina Press; reproduced courtesy of University of North Carolina Press.
Figure Description
Two versions of the book Freedom’s Teacher sit side by side on a wood-topped table, leaning on an antique iron tabletop letterpress. On the left is the hardcover book, showing a closeup of a sepia photographic portrait of Septima Clark, and on the left is the same book cover shown on a digital tablet, with a round medallion visible on it that says “Enhanced E-book.”
Inside the Publishing Process
What is the editing and publishing process that produces books now? And what might it become if we imagine our way into the future?
Editorial Planning and Guidelines
Now, editors advise authors on the number and type of illustrations, according to their own editorial experience, knowledge of the available budget, and curatorial sense of the right balance suited to the content of each book. They refer authors to company guidelines on acceptable formats and limits for photographs and line drawings; such guidelines form what we might term the author-editor toolkit. However, if an author asks whether the publishing company is interested in publishing other aspects of a multimodal project, editors usually say “No.”
In an imagined near-future, editors would universally develop the experience and judgment to say “Yes.” New production guidelines would support them. Even better, editors would proactively ask authors to tell them about their multimodal project, not just their book.
In addition to audio and video materials such as interviews and documentary footage, the author and editor could discuss how to represent other components of a multimodal project in the form of short videos. While not the same as the original experience, whether digital or physical, such videos might become the most long-lasting, archival representation of ephemeral project elements.
Publishers also would develop ways to embed digital items other than audio and video that are common to many multimodal scholarly projects. John Sherer, director of UNCP, envisioned a multimedia toolkit of about five elements, including an interactive map. “Let’s start with a few things that people would use pretty often,” he suggested. These would become part of the standard author-editor toolkit.
The following list suggests items to be added to publishers’ existing guidelines for manuscript preparation in order to produce multimedia e-books routinely:
- Suggested types of video content (content types such as interviews, music, exhibit tours, and demos of digital humanities projects)
- Limits on the number and size of multimedia excerpts
- Preferred and accepted file types for multimedia excerpts
- Manuscript callout style, including how to distinguish callouts for the print book from callouts for the multimedia e-book
- Sample permission-request letters and general advice on fair use for audio and video
- Accessibility guidelines, including alt-text and transcripts
- Instructions for preparing the captions manuscript, including how to distinguish captions for the print book from callouts for the multimedia e-book
- Any revised guidelines on including outbound links in the text and captions
- Submission instructions for multimedia excerpts, including labels/file names
- What to expect when checking “page proofs” of multimedia e-books
Peer Review
Now, peer reviewers usually review illustrations (including photographs, line drawings, maps, and charts), along with the text of a book manuscript. However, other elements of the scholarship that are not in traditional narrative-plus-image form are not submitted to the reviewers, who indeed may not even be aware of them. In an imagined near-future, the manuscript to be reviewed would include the multimedia elements, already selected and excerpted for publication. Editors would devise specific questions for the reviewers about whether the multimedia elements are well chosen and contextualized, and whether they are integral to the scholarship and enrich the narrative. Reviewers would not need to be experts in digital scholarship, but rather, as usual, they would review the manuscript in the role of a disciplinary or area expert and a potential reader of the published book.
Copyright Permissions
Now, publishers require authors to obtain written permission to include images and long quotations. In an imagined near-future, they would similarly require permission for multimedia content. Releases signed by subjects interviewed by the author during the research process would include multimedia publishing rights. For multimedia from other sources, the editor and the author would discuss proper interpretations of fair use, just as they do now. Appropriate sample permission-request letters would be provided by the publisher.
Manuscript Preparation
Now, authors insert illustration callouts in the manuscript and provide a list with captions. In separate files, they provide illustrations per the publisher’s guidelines. In an imagined near-future, they would do the same with multimedia elements.
Design and Digital Production
Now, the interior design for a book includes all the standard elements, such as chapter titles and picture captions. Production editors supervise copyediting, typesetting, and assembly of all the book’s elements. In an imagined near-future, the design would also include a standard visual design and function for audio/video controls, or possibly an icon to signal the inclusion of multimedia. Video might be represented by a still image in the print book, while audio could be represented by transcripts, building in accessibility. Multimedia might be added to the list of elements that the copy editor would be asked to tag and check. A digital production editor would help cut audio and video excerpts and even out sound quality—a new skill requirement. There would be a moment at which production of the multimedia e-book would diverge from the print book; for efficiency, the later in the production process they diverge, the better.3
Embedding Versus Linking
Now, there are no normalized standards for including multimedia in e-books. In an imagined near-future, publishers would work out the ideal length (run time) of multimedia elements (1) from an editorial perspective, considering audience engagement, and (2) from a technological perspective, considering file size and load time. In our UNCP model, in the captions, we offered outbound links to archives where the full files could be found.4 If the archival file became inaccessible or the link failed (the infamous “link rot” that plagues publications of all kinds), at least the excerpt embedded in the e-book would be unaffected as an archival record. An embedded MP3 or MP4 file is remarkably stable; audio and video in the e-books that we produced at UNCP in 2012 still function.
If the author originated the multimedia material, they would deposit it with an appropriate archival partner. If the archive planned to make the material available online, a new publishing challenge would be aligning the publisher’s and the archive’s production schedules so that the permalinks could be included in the book. New grant-funded publishing platforms developed by university presses offer storage and linking solutions to support multimedia in e-books; this chapter is published on one called Manifold. Publishers may not be aware, however, that it is possible to publish an e-book with multimedia files embedded directly in common e-book file types (PDF and EPUB). One unified file seems more efficient to store and distribute than a linking system, but publishers should experiment with the various possibilities until they find the balance between embedding and linking that works best for them and best suits the content of their books. In other words, the author’s content, the editorial perspective, and usability for audiences should be the guides. A proliferation of systems for publishing multimedia e-books might be useful for experimentation, but eventually, it would be efficient to settle on a simple and ubiquitous infrastructure that works routinely for all publishers large and small.
Distribution and Discoverability
Now, publishers launch a text with static images into a powerful stream of established dissemination and discovery mechanisms, while leaving the other components of the scholarship behind. Most readers think that publishing e-books is easy and cheap compared to print books and have no idea that varying metadata and file-format requirements make e-book distribution complicated and costly for publishers, who are naturally wary of adding more complexity in the form of multimedia e-books. Publishers have so many files to keep track of in transmitting e-books to multiple vendors and platforms that they have to rely on digital asset management systems. One reason that grant-funded systems to support multimedia in e-books have limited reach is that they come with a commitment to publish free of charge (open access), making it difficult to sustain these platforms financially and to include the books in standard commercial wholesaler databases and digital aggregations for libraries. Publishers work hard to avoid having their multimedia e-books, which they publish in relatively small numbers, sidelined and undiscoverable. Libraries struggle to combine many separate publishing platforms and aggregations into a single usable catalog. Where multimedia publications are included, readers have to click through to access multimedia that are stored separately (sometimes several clicks are needed, which is a usability challenge).
In an imagined near-future, all the standard outlets for e-books would accommodate multimedia. Multimedia e-books would be discoverable and accessible, along with all other e-books.
Now, publishers are not aware that some of the most common publishing platforms already accommodate multimedia. In an imagined near-future, they would collectively review each of the platforms and distribution mechanisms that they use and put pressure on the ones that do not yet accommodate multimedia content. The following is an initial review of some of the most common distribution mechanisms for scholarly books and their current capacity to include multimedia.
Kindle and Kobo. Now, the Kindle reader for tablets and smartphones can play multimedia embedded within an e-book. However, on a computer screen (whether desktop or laptop), the media is “not supported” (see Figure 18.2) The Kobo reader has the same oddly persistent discrepancy (more than a decade after we produced model multimedia e-books at UNCP, it is still “not supported”!), which inappropriately relegates multimedia e-books to the category of apps and games. In an imagined near-future, multimedia e-books would be responsive; that is, they would function fully on all devices. Clearly Amazon and Rakuten Kobo could fix this overnight—if only they felt significant pressure from publishers to do so.5 Publishers, put on that pressure!
Figure 18.2. “Audio content not supported by this device.” This is the explanatory error message offered by the Amazon Kindle app on my computer where, on a smartphone or tablet, audio content is available to be played. Kobo books have the same problem. Publishers should pressure these companies to correct this odd discrepancy so that audiovisual content in e-books sold individually will play on all devices.
Figure Description
This closeup screen shot shows a place in the text of the book Freedom’s Teacher where links to supplementary digital material appear. Where a link to an audio excerpt ought to be, this error message appears instead, in comparatively large type: “Audio content not supported by this device.” Links to the audio transcript and a navigation link to the List of Enhancements are underlined and appear to be clickable. Following these links the text of the book continues, “This was Septima Clark’s civil rights movement: direct action meant registering to vote. . . .”
It’s likely that if these platforms can accommodate multimedia, other scholarly aggregation systems already can, too. Publishers should gather this information from all their distribution platforms and demand multimedia across the board.
Library Aggregators. Now, the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), originally invented to create flat image files to reduce file sizes and freeze layouts, has functional characteristics, apparently unbeknownst to most publishers, who are not using this capability. In an imagined near-future, publishers would take advantage of the fact that JSTOR, Project MUSE, and Oxford Scholarship Online, nonprofit publishing platforms for scholarly books that are ubiquitous in academic libraries, now seamlessly ingest audio and video embedded in PDF e-book files.
Now, of the approximately 80,000 e-books in Project MUSE, only “a handful” of e-books include embedded multimedia. The number is hard to confirm because “these features flow right through if they are integrated in a PDF,” said Phillip Hearn, publisher relations manager at Project MUSE. “An influx of more of this content would not cause any issues on our end, as our system is built to accommodate them without requiring any additional intervention from our production team. Our tech team might need to make adjustments to accommodate file size to optimize download speeds and hosting capabilities, but this already takes place routinely with large files.” JSTOR has the same capability, but it appears to have a modest number of multimedia titles as well.6 Oxford University Press’s multipublisher e-book platform, Oxford Scholarship Online, is merging with Oxford Academic, combining e-books and journals in one platform. “You can have as much audio and video as you want on that platform,” said Tanya Laplante, senior product manager at Oxford University Press.
Preservation and Access: One Half of Sustainability
At its basic level, preservation should provide information to support the possible future revivification of online experiences that become defunct (“dark archiving”), but libraries demand more; they increasingly rely on publishers not only to preserve publications but also to make them accessible and functional indefinitely, and publishers have responded by committing to digital archives and bearing the associated monetary cost. However, these archives may not preserve multimedia. In an imagined near-future, multimedia would be included in preservation. Publishers are already working to address this challenge.7
Markets and Business Models: The Other Half of Sustainability
Now, there is an unfortunate assumption among publishers that there is no market for multimedia e-books because early examples fell flat after initial excitement about them in the early twenty-first century. In an imagined near-future, publishers would remember that early “enhanced e-books” were not published for what trade publishers sometimes dismiss as “the academia segment,” and therefore provided no evidence whatever concerning the scholarly publishing marketplace. In an imagined near-future, publishers would recognize that there is a great need for scholarly multimedia e-books. Some already have. “Any publisher in the business of current and future scholarship has to support this [multimedia publishing] if they want to sign authors, because authors demand it,” declared Laplante. User statistics so far indicate that “the use of media in chapters creates more engagement and discoverability,” she added.8
Now, grant-funded multimedia publishing platforms focus on publications that are open access only, which are a challenge to sustain financially in the long term.9 In an imagined near-future, both funders and customers (individual readers and librarians) would respect publishers’ need to charge a fair price for their publications. Multimedia publishing platforms would be business-model agnostic. People who produce books would be fairly compensated for their labor and expertise, and the costs of maintaining and improving the publishing infrastructure would be recognized and supported. Publishers would continue to seek new business models to sustain open access for worldwide equity, and sources of funding for scholarly publishing would continue to expand in number and shift where and how they enter the publishing ecosystem. Multimedia e-books, along with other kinds of publications, would benefit from these changes but would not be forced to take the lead in being made available free of charge.
Now, as always, achieving scale is important from a business standpoint. For a university press, “our goal is to reach the widest possible audience with limited resources; that makes it hard to justify putting resources into developing something new that that can’t be disseminated widely yet,” explained Ellen Bush, digital initiatives and database director of UNCP, echoing other interviewees. In an imagined near-future, this barrier will be swept away.
The Future Is Now
This highly limited manifesto focuses on the publication of multimedia e-books at scale because a limited format is practical and makes scale feasible. Taking advantage of the scale of already established infrastructure creates time and financial savings, as well as broad distribution. As Charles Watkinson, director of Michigan University Press, put it, “Why wouldn’t we use our existing infrastructure?”
Now appears to be a moment in which technology has developed just enough that it is possible to establish a practice of routine multimedia scholarly book publishing. Rather than “relying on those who are going to display the e-book to tell us what to do,”10 publishers should demand this capacity from every publishing platform that does not already offer it.
The proposed next-step evolution of e-book infrastructure is a new expression of the ever-unfolding magic of the codex in time and space. That such technological enhancement produces books that talk and sing like those in fairy tales or science fiction might indicate that they will engage and fascinate readers, and inspire authors and artists, in the generations to come. Experiments with new kinds of storytelling and audience engagement within digital publications are underway that are more ambitious and creative than the limited multimedia e-book format described here and will lead to greater digital-publishing innovations in the future.11 Meanwhile, however, it’s important to implement at scale a future that we have already invented, and indeed have at our fingertips ready to launch, if only publishers can collectively muster the will.
Glossary
- Archival
- In the context of this chapter, describing a publication that is accessible and readable for future generations.
- E-book
- A book in electronic form, typically made available to readers via software that allows the text, at the most basic level of functionality, to be scrolled through and read. For the purposes of this chapter, I make no distinction between “electronic” and “digital.”
- Enhanced e-book
- A term for a multimedia e-book that was popular in the early 2000s, when Amazon first made it possible to include video in an e-book.
- Interactive map
- A digital map offering features such as sliders or clickable icons that the reader can navigate at will. For example, one might see the development of a town over time, follow a travel route, or access archival documents or oral histories related to particular spots on the map.
- Monograph
- In academia, a longform scholarly narrative told predominantly in words (70,000 of them, more or less). In the publishing model that I am focused on in this chapter, the monograph is the unifying center of a constellation of project components or, similarly, it is an interface to a body of information.
- Multimedia e-book
- An e-book that allows the reader to seamlessly access and interact with content in audio and audiovisual forms from the book’s pages.
- Multimodal project
- A scholarly project that includes multiple components and forms of work, such as documentary films, interactive maps, physical and digital exhibits, digital archival collections drawing from multiple physical archives, databases, interviews and oral histories in audio or video form, three-dimensional (3D) renderings or other visualizations of data, augmented reality or virtual reality experiences or reconstructions, events or performances, and a longform narrative. All are connected; no single component fully represents the project. I focus on digital modes of scholarship in this chapter; other modes, such as performances or other forms of publicly engaged scholarship, could also be well represented via video in a multimedia e-book.
- Publishing infrastructure
- In this discussion, I focus on the typical production process within publishing houses, in which technologies and workflows turn manuscripts into books, and on some central and widely shared means by which scholarly books reach readers, collectively known in publishing as distribution.
- Publishing platform
- A computer interface that allows readers to search, find, and read digital publications. Usually, it connects to a system that stores and serves up the publications (server plus user interface).
Notes
1. The model described in this chapter is best exemplified by Charron. Other enhanced e-books that we produced under the Mellon grant were Castro and Ferris.
2. The actual 3 minute, 4 second video, titled “Septima Clark Biography: Demo of Enhanced e\E-book” (posted March 27, 2012, by UNCP), is viewable on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTXmqn8VasU&t=5s. (For archival reasons, the video will also be downloadable from the digital version of this book.) As this was the first video produced by the Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project, we can only hope that its uneven sound quality and homemade feeling gave it a certain charm. Sylvia Miller storyboarded and directed; Seth Kotch of the Southern Oral History Program narrated; and digital production specialist Kenneth Reed assembled and edited the video.
3. For more details on the production of Charron, see Miller, “Producing the Freedom’s Teacher Enhanced Ebook.” Note, however, that this was a retrospective project, begun after the print book was published; in this chapter, I attempt to apply lessons learned to an envisioned revised production process.
4. Allison Belan, director for strategic innovation and services at Duke University Press, suggested QR codes for the print book, but to me, these seem like slightly more trouble for the reader than Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), while just as likely to be affected by link rot.
5. Significantly, Amazon has made an effort to respond to calls for the Kindle to accommodate EPUB files. A number of easily findable blog posts review this development (e.g., Cunningham).
6. Quotation from an interview with Cristina Mezuk, books licensing editor, JSTOR | ITHAKA.
7. The Embedding Preservability project by New York University (NYU) placed preservation specialists called “embedders” at select university presses to advise on adjustments for improving preservability (see Elliott).
8. It should be noted that in Tanya Laplante’s view, “this” included additional advances not covered in this chapter, such as offering authors a choice of image-based rather than text abstracts in journals.
9. See Ricci for a helpful overview of open access models.
10. Quotation from an interview with John Sherer, Spangler Family director, UNCP. The exact quote that I noted was “Presses—and UNC is as guilty of this as other publishers—rely on those who are going to display the e-book to tell us what to do.”
11. See Levy and McKee for some examples.
Interviews
All the following interviews were conducted virtually on Zoom except where otherwise noted.
- Belan, Allison, director for strategic innovation and services, Duke University Press. August 29, 2022.
- Bush, Ellen, digital initiatives and database director, University of North Carolina Press (UNCP). September 16, 2022.
- Hearn, Phillip, publisher relations manager, and Kelley Squazzo, director of publisher relations and content development, Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press. Email exchange, August 18–September 15, 2022.
- Laplante, Tanya, senior product manager—platform, academic, Oxford University Press US. September 8, 2022.
- Levy, Allison, digital scholarship editor, Digital Publications Initiative, Brown University. August 24, 2022.
- Mezuk, Cristina, books licensing editor, JSTOR | ITHAKA. August 24, 2022.
- Ohe, Kevin, director of academic publishing, Digital Resources Division, Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. April 22, 2022.
- Sherer, John, Spangler Family director, University of North Carolina Press (UNCP). August 25, 2022.
- Watkinson, Charles, director, University of Michigan Press; associate university librarian, University of Michigan Library; and president, Association of University Presses (2022–2023). August 15, 2022.
Bibliography
- Castro, Sal, and Mario T. García. Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice [Enhanced e-book]. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
- Charron, Katherine Mellen. Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark [Enhanced e-book]. University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTXmqn8VasU&t=5s.
- Cunningham, Andrew. “Kindle E-readers Finally (Kind of) Support ePub Books.” Ars Technica blog post, May 3, 2022. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/kindle-e-readers-finally-kind-of-support-epub-books/.
- Elliott, Michael A. “The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18, no. 4 (Fall 2015). https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.407.
- Ferris, William. Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues [Enhanced e-book]. University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
- Hansen, David, Liz Milewicz, and Paolo Mangiafico, et al. A Framework for Library Support of Expansive Digital Publishing. Report. Duke University Libraries, 2019. https://doi.org/10.21428/680f3353.
- Levy, Allison, and Sarah McKee. Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community. PubPub, 2022. DOI: 10.21428/36a3e2c8.e1215c8e. https://multimodal-digital-monographs.pubpub.org/.
- Miller, Sylvia K. “‘Horrors of Recoding’: Reflections on the 2019 UNCG Scholarly Communications Symposium.” Publishing at the Crossroads (MLA Humanities Commons blog), December 30, 2019. https://publishingcrossroads.hcommons.org/2019/12/30/horrors_of_recoding/.
- Miller, Sylvia K. “Producing the Freedom’s Teacher Enhanced Ebook.” Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement (blog), April 30, 2012. https://wayback.archive-it.org/3491/20170224164244/https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/index.php/2012/04/30/producing-the-freedoms-teacher-enhanced-e-book/#more-3241.
- Ricci, Laura. “Every Book, Every Format, All at Once: Exploring the Multiverse of eBook Open Access Models.” Against the Grain 34 (2022). https://issuu.com/against-the-grain/docs/atg_july22_special_report/s/16467256.