Printed publications are highly portable, a consumer-preferred quality in today’s rapidly increasingly mobile—and short on patience—world. But with the eBook reader showdown heating up and the media clamoring with every new rumor, the formats that have become standards for eBooks are making their mark and showing your content in multiple dimensions. Learn which formats you need to be aware of and able to provide to readers born digital or converted by digital readers. The following selection summarizes a presentation of the session The XML Files: The eBooks Are Out There, part of the Allen Press Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing™ seminar that was held April 8, 2010 at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C.

The Mobile Devices and eBooks Are Out There!

James Wonder, Director of Emerging Technologies, American Institute of Physics

This year I was given the opportunity to speak about mobile publishing strategies and techniques at the Allen Press Emerging Trends seminar in Washington, D.C. Mobile publishing is the ability to publish your content on the various portable devices available on the market today, and can currently be broken down into three basic areas: eReader publishing, mobile web publishing, and on-device application development to facilitate publishing of content on a mobile platform.

I first addressed the use of ePub XML on current eReader technology and how the readers are the limiting factor to general success on these devices. Marking up and formatting content for these devices is painful at best, even for straight text content such as novels and books. Math can be tagged as MathML, but no mainstream reader that I am aware of currently supports it. There are many differing graphics format (JPG, GIF, SVG, etc.) limitations on these devices and support for tables is limited. Almost always you are developing content for one specific platform and need a different format for each device. The use of DRM for these devices is inconsistent and moving purchased titles from one device to another is almost nonexistent. The prognosis, however, is not all that bad. When a mainstream reader that follows the ePub specification is created, we will have many resources at our disposal to quickly begin creating content for that device. In short, ePub is a very good specification that is hampered by the eReaders on the market today.

I continued by speaking about the “mobile web,” which is the ability to format your web pages for the mobile platforms available. Almost all portable devices today include a web browser; hence formatting your views for these small screens is very important. Building mobile web sites typically can be done with little overhead and, more often than not, quite quickly using a Web Content Management system. When formatting for a mobile web platform the publisher needs to consider what is of most interest to their mobile readers and then design the page to give them that data in the first page view. American Institute of Physics mobile customers first see the current journal issue and top article content. With the launch of the iPad and its large form factor it might be possible to forgo eReader technology and simply use the web for mobile publishing. The coming months will be very important for the future of mobile and web publishing.

To conclude, I discussed the design and development of mobile applications for the various devices available now. Most mobile device vendors have created very flexible programming interfaces to entice developers to create programs on their device. There are also many third party consultants/developers available to assist you in creating an application. The development of a user story is the most important part of the design criteria for those who are serious about creating a mobile application. That story should carefully consider the context of “What, When, Where, Why, and How” your user will use your application. Almost all very successful mobile applications do one thing very well. Do not try to develop a fully featured end-to-end system for a mobile platform; users simply do not use these devices in that way. While tablets seem like they may change the way we look at our mobile applications, it is important to remember that creating the user story is equally important for developing on these platforms.

Mobile publishing is here to stay and your customers expect you to embrace it. Having a mobile publishing strategy is key for publishers. If you do not have one now, begin developing one. Start small. Create a user story and try it. The goal is to find out how your users wish to use your services. Do not be afraid to try various new technologies to see what your users want. The age of perpetual Beta has already been thrust upon us and gives us the license to innovate! Most of all, have fun!