Arthur Attwell

Today I spoke at a meeting of the Professional Editor's Group at The Book Lounge in Cape Town. The good turnout, about forty editors and affiliated publishing professionals, was evidence of their enthusiasm to understand how digitisation affects their work. I hope I satisfied some of that curiosity in this talk. This was my prepared speech, from which I did wander a little from time to time.

Thanks to Kristina for asking me to speak today. Before I get started, can I ask:

Anyone who's said yes to any of these questions is already a consumer in the ebook industry. To get one myth out of the way: ebooks are not a big part of our future, they are a big part of our present and even our recent past. And they are not a bad thing or a good thing, they are just a fact, a product that most people do and will find useful and valuable some of the time. In a developing country, ebooks solve all kinds of cost and distribution problems, like mobile phones solved communication problems, so they're going to have a greater and greater impact on the nature of the work that editors do in South Africa.

I find that many of my talks about ebooks end up being fear-alleviation sessions, as if I'm a kind of roving therapist for the local publishing industry, or worse, an insurance salesman. I don't know whether any one talk is going to go that way till I'm well into it, so we'll see how this goes.

Now there are therapists who'll tell you what you want to hear, and there are therapists that tell the truth, and sometimes I play one and sometimes the other.

But when I give people the choice, as I'm doing by explaining this dilemma to you, most audiences ask for the truth. The truth is this: as ebook technology makes it easier to make and sell books, the publishing industry will get much, much bigger. But it's also going to be a very different industry.

If you had a horse-and-cart business a hundred years ago, and thought you were in the horse-and-cart industry, you'd have gone out of business. Your industry would have collapsed. But if you thought you were in the transport industry, you'd have had a chance to re-engineer your business to make the most of the booming demand for moving things and people around. Today, if you think you're in the print-layout industry, you can worry, but if you're in the publishing, or content, industry, you'll be fine. There is going to be a lot of paying work.

If you think ebooks are shrinking the print book market, let's think about March sales stats from the US, where ebook sales are higher than anywhere else. Stats from the Association of American Publishers show that while ebook sales grew 184% just in March this year, print book sales also grew – grew! – by over 16%. So I don't buy the fear mongering for a moment. Publishing is growing; the trick to keeping your job is adapting to how it’s growing.

Before I go into any more detail, though, I do need to know who I'm talking to so I don't completely miss the point. Can I get a quick show of hands:

Talking about ebooks in the Book Lounge is like talking about the Internet in the New York Public Library. Who needs the NYPL when the Internet has all you need? Just like the NYPL, most information on the Internet is free to anyone who visits it. And the Book Lounge – most of these books are available online to anyone who wants them. And yet both institutions continue to thrive.

At first, a physical space, like the NYPL or the Book Lounge, and the Internet may seem at odds, but once you use them it's actually easy to see how they have a symbiotic relationship. The fact that online an almost infinite amount of information is available instantly, just a search engine away, does not change anything about the particular physical environment and the personal interaction that's so valuable in a physical space like this, or the NYPL.

So what's the real difference between them? What's changing the industry like the combustion engine changed transport?

Automation. What can you digitise and automate is best done online, and what can't be digitised and automated will find a home in places like this bookshop and the NYPL. The creation, sale and delivery of ebooks is all about automating more of the publishing process.

As more and more of our world is digitised – sales, maps, encyclopaedias, books, music, phone calls, radio, TV, you name it, it travels digitally – companies constantly have to choose what to automate and what has to be done by human beings. In other words, what can be templated, and what requires project-specific creative input.

Technological progress always creates a flow towards automation, as creative ideas are captured in templates and automated.

If you have a role that can't be automated, you're fine. But we have to be very honest with ourselves about what can and can't be automated. Automated typesetting can be much better than most human typesetting, especially when most human typesetting is only 70% as good as it could be! I have here Fodor's New York City guide, it's typeset automatically within a minute or so, drawing all its text and images from a database. The text and images in the database have been carefully created and edited, and the basic template for the book was carefully created by a designer, but no typesetter worked through the pages of this book.

This isn't the first time automation has changed the industry, of course. For instance, for most of last century type was set on typesetting machines. These machines had already automated most of a Victorian typesetter’s work, but the machine operator still had to put a lot of human creativity into producing a good-looking printed page.

Today typesetting software does most of this work; fewer and fewer designers understand kerning or know why line-height is called leading, since this is largely automated. Recently, designers working for Faber and Faber developed a way to automate cover design (very beautifully) for a series of old classics.

This flow, from human creativity towards automation, is like a stream that you must keep swimming against to stay valuable – to keep your job, that is.

Only by continually moving your skills (and value-adding activities) up the flow towards its creative end can you keep your job in publishing. Any jobs at the automation end of the flow are quickly taken over by robots of one sort or another.

In the same way, in order to add enough value to the publishing process to be able to charge money for their products, publishing companies have to offer creative, human input to the content they gather from authors. That's where editors are invaluable. Publishing companies that skimp on this will operate closer and closer to the automation end of the flow, employ fewer and fewer highly skilled staff, and eventually become no more than data-scrubbing clearing houses.

So, what do you do as an editor to stay at the creative end of the flow?

Well, many editors are already pretty safely up-stream, as you may have guessed by now. It's very difficult to automate the imagination required to really improve the quality of an author's writing. But here are five tips to keep editors there.

First, the most important thing is to make sure that you're focusing on the part of your work that can't be automated: using your imagination to improve the quality of the text. Otherwise you're spending lots of your editing time working like a robot. If your editing is robotic, the publisher has little need to hire you, because they can automate your work. If you think editing is about correcting spelling and grammar, you're not doing enough and you'll be out of a job before long. In this way, ebooks actually create an incentive for greater quality in editing, by making good editors more valuable, and mediocre ones unnecessary.

As competition among publishers for readers intensifies, editorial quality is one of the few value-adds that will distinguish them, because really good, really involved editing cannot be automated.

Secondly, you must automate every part of your editing process that you can. Make time to learn about the tools that offer you automation of any sort. Most editors hardly use the automation features that MS Word offers. If you understand them and control them, they are powerful tools, and if you don't, they are just dangerous. You must, must use styling (or tagging) in programs like MS Word, and know how it enables functionality like its brilliant Outline view. It gives you automated overview and control over the structure of your document, and allows typesetting to be more automated. Without this, you're also more expensive to a publisher who has to style or tag your documents separately.

Third, think of your book content as flowing strings of plain text, not as laid-out lines on pages. Learn how to represent anything in plain text – in an editor like Notepad, for instance – including degree signs and non-breaking spaces. (If you were editing in the 1990s, when typesetters needed plain text to import into Quark, you know most of this already.) This forces you to separate the function of content from its appearance. What does this have to do with ebooks? Ebooks don't have pages or fixed line breaks. Their fonts and colours and screen size change at the user's whim. Your text must be able to flow into any form and still read well. The structure and function of the text must be firm, no matter how a reader's software makes it look.

Moreover, once typesetting is as automated as an ebook’s screen layout – as it is in this Fodor’s travel guide – from a production point of view every page of a printed book becomes a screen created dynamically from a computer, and print and ebooks become the same thing, produced and delivered in the same way, but ultimately to different physical materials.

Fourth, try reading ebooks. If you can afford it, get an e-ink ereader. If not, get your next dictionary or reference book as an ebook on your computer, so you've got a reason to use an ebook, and to learn how ebooks work. If you don't, you're working like an editor who's never opened a printed book.

And finally, enjoy yourself. We're in a country with good infrastructure on a continent that's going to be buying more and more content as it only gets richer. There are more opportunities here for us right now that we could ever hope for or ever take up. The publishing industry is already desperate for people with technological skills, or even technological curiosity. If you can be one of those people, you can have a fun, and often lucrative time.