Gary Lawrence Murphy is writing about Open Content on Prentice Hall – the series that Prentice Hall are bringing out under the Open Publication License.
Gary refers to his earlier experiences trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Macmillan to adopt an Open Content approach to a project he was driving. The issues weren’t just with the publishers – authors had problems with a licence that wasn’t either 100% free or standard, and the publication process fell over in the middle – authors and printers were ready for XML-based document manipulation and output, but the editors in the middle were still using “their MsWord-based font-painters”
He ends with a vision for the future
XML-based publishing where the manuscript does not really exist, where it’s a collection of sections and variations, indexed, threaded and exported for books […] all of it online updated on the fly by the community who uses it. The art of the author/editor would be one of filtering, pulling what they need from the knowledge base to create other titles as well, semantically linking it all through topic-maps …
