They may not merit a Nobel Peace Prize but the organizers of the “StartWithXML” conference in New York deserve kudos for bringing together two cultures that have been reluctant dance partners in the past: trade book publishing people and representatives of the technical world. The subject was XML, the markup language for documents containing both content and instructions for identifying such structured information as footnotes, captions, tables, headers, and the like.

Obviously this is not the kind of language that book editors are comfortable with, but as digitization casts a longer and longer shadow on every aspect of their daily activities it’s clear they can no longer leave such matters to Joe the Geek.

So, the Book Industry Study Group among other industry sponsors invited both camps to participate in a daylong tutorial. People from such book houses as Hachette, Wiley, Simon & Schuster, and Oxford University Press mingled, listened to panel discussions and heard presentations by representatives of Magellan Media Consulting Partners, Klopotek North America, Cengage Learning, Firebrand Technologies and codeMantra. Attendees were treated to discussions of such XML-facilitated functions as style sheets, efficient rights management, digital production workflow, digital marketing, content licensing, and multi-format publishing. If they wished they were back in their cubicles blue-penciling action adventure thrillers, they gave no sign of it.

Futurist and book industry consultant Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company gave an introductory speech, then turned the proceedings over to David Young, CEO of the Hachette Book Group. As reported by Publishers Lunch Deluxe, the book industry’s online trade newsletter, “Young started the day by touting the flexibility, possibilities and cost savings of an XML-driven process while at the same time promising that the transition may not be as dramatic as it strikes some. At the fundamental level, Young said, ‘there is one difference – the difference between tagging a digital file and manually marking up a physical manuscript.’” Young definitely got everyone’s attention when he stated that XML could eliminate printed galleys, which he described as a “major money pit.”

“Like all evolutionary shifts, it will take time,” Young concluded, but he expressed confidence that the transition to an XML-driven trade book industry is “a no-brainer.”

Perhaps in time it will be, and no doubt everyone in the room thought it should be, but for those who only recently crawled out of the primordial ooze and mastered the difference between RTF and PDF, the challenge of XML remains, for now, very much a brainer.

RC