Harvard Digital Publishing Collaborative Meeting Notes February 5, 2015

Welcome & Purpose The Harvard Digital Publishing Collaborative A Harvard ABCD community dedicated to digital publishing. This group was formed with a focus on how content is authored, produced, secured, and delivered across web- and device-based content platforms. Topics of interest include content and metadata creation/conversion tools and approaches; content authoring platforms, content management and production workflow processes and best practices; content format and metadata specifications; content security models; and content delivery channels and platforms.

Reminders Harvard Digital Publishing Collaborative website – – Meeting calendar / meeting notes / links – Flipboard magazine of articles Join the group officially to get on listserv –

Today’s Topic: Production and Distribution Options for Digital Publishing Sanders Kleinfeld, Director of Publishing Technology, O’Reilly Media HTML, CSS, and JavaScript aren't just for web developers anymore; as books go digital, web technology skills are becoming more and more essential to the publishing industry. In this session, Sanders will discuss how publishers can leverage the open-web technology stack to build digital-first publishing workflows, and transition their content development and production toolchains to web-native technologies. Joshua Tallent, Chief eBook Architect, & Jenifer Lyman, Content Services Chief, Firebrand Technologies Practical considerations and potential hurtles in ebook production and distribution. Joshua will give you a survey of the various production-related tools that are currently available to publishers. This survey will include basic utilities that do one function or solve one problem, QA and validation tools, code editors, automated conversion tools, workflow enhancement tools, and full-fledged CMSes. In addition, Joshua will discuss some of the major differences between the more popular reading systems, including current support for EPUB 3, enhanced features, and common styling issues. Jen will draw on her years of experience distributing ebooks on behalf of Firebrand's Content Services clients to review the complexities of distributing your ebooks out to your trading partners, such as conveying the proper territorial rights and prices to each partner and keeping each partner up to date on all of your file or metadata changes. She will also give an overview of the different types of retailers in the market – subscription vendors, libraries, international, etc.

Forthcoming Meetings Thurs 4/2/15, 3-4:30pm (Lamont Library Forum Room) – Special session on Web Accessibility – Speaker: Peter Bol, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, Harvard University – Speaker: Richard Schwerdtfeger, CTO for Accessibility, IBM – Co-sponsored by the ABCD-WWW group Thurs 6/4/15, 3-4:30pm (Location & Topic TBD)