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When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks

 
Teresa Elsey

Teresa Elsey

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Apr 6, 2016
 

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A talk given at the ebookcraft conference, March 30, 2016

A lot of what we've talked about today, and a lot of what we talk
about at digital publishing conferences generally, assumes that all
we do is make brand new ebooks, usually to go along with brand new
print books. And so we have sessions on how to handle fonts, on how
to enhance our ebooks with JavaScript interactivity, and on what
tools and workflows to use, if you're starting fresh from the very
beginning of that process to produce the most accurate, semantic,
accessible, high-quality ebooks.

And when I started my current job, as a digital managing editor at
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, four years ago, that was primarily what I
thought I would be doing -- working with my group to make those new
ebooks. And in the present, I think that's what most people at my
company still perceive us as doing.

What one year of our work looks like

But when I started actually counting the titles my group was working
on, it turned out that working on these brand new ebooks was just a
small part of what we were doing.

In 2015, my group sent 1400 ebook files for distribution. About 300
of those were new frontlist ebooks -- almost all of them ebooks that
went along with brand new print books (maybe a few digital-only
projects).

About 150 more were titles that were appearing in ebook for the first
time -- new ebooks of old print books that for some reason didn't have
an ebook yet. This is us filling in the backlist.

The remaining 950 titles that we worked on in 2015 were updates or
redos of ebooks that were already on sale.

So only about 20% of the files we worked on were the brand new ebook
files that people think of as the majority of our work. And almost
70% were reworks of ebooks that already existed, ebooks that were
already on sale. And so why these old ebooks keep coming back to us,
why two-thirds or three-quarters of the work we do is on these old
ebooks, is what I want to talk about today.

Our entire ebook list

That was one year of our work. And now here's the total scope of our
responsibility: all of the ebooks Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has in
print or on sale. I think of our ebooks being something like this ...

Iceberg image: Uwe Kils, Wiska Bodo CC BY-SA 3.0

Where we have the perhaps 300 or 400 new ebooks we'll be making in a
given year up above the surface of the water -- that's the part of our
work that everyone sees and is aware of. That's where all our
colleagues, the editors and designers and the publicity and marketing
team, are hanging out.

And then, down below the surface of the water, we have approximately
5000 ebooks -- and we'll come back to why that's approximate -- that
are all the ebooks we've already made, and that we now have to take
care of. And, like an iceberg, it's this underwater part that fills
those of us who are aware of it with terror -- or at least significant
professional concern.

And if I can diverge a little from actual facts about icebergs, let's
also mention that this underwater portion is growing every year. The
300 new ebooks we made in 2015 have now become part of this giant
underwater mass that we need to maintain, and above water, we move on
to the 300 new ebooks we'll make in 2016.

Aren't print books in the same situation?

This is not entirely different from the situation with print books,
where there's a large backlist supporting a smaller frontlist. And
there are plenty of people at my company who work on the print
backlist, making sure our print books are reprinted as needed, and
that they stay in stock at the retailers and come back to the
public's attention when relevant.

But because this is a talk for a digital conference, what I want to
talk about is the ways in which this is totally different from print
books. And I'll point out reasons this is true as we go, but here are
a few major differences to start with.

1. Many of the ebooks we have already made are not that good

I think many publishers are in this boat, of having converted a lot
of their backlist books to ebooks in an awful big hurry when it
started looking like ebooks were going to be A Thing. So all of a
sudden you have hundreds or thousands of backlist ebooks -- made to
old standards, with poor-quality OCR, in outdated formats, never
proofread, with low-res art, built by processes incompatible with
your current ebook workflow. And perhaps ironically, your most
important backlist titles are the worst, because they were the first
ones that somebody thought to convert.

So this is very unlike print books, where, I hope, anyway, you're not
looking at books you designed and typeset in 2010 and saying "oh,
gosh, that's so embarrassing; we just didn't know anything about how
to make books back then." But that's how we feel about a large share
of our ebooks.

And so one of my group's priorities has been to triage this
5000-title ebook backlist and to think about how we are going to fix
the worst of them. What criteria do we use for determining which to
spend time improving and which to stop selling altogether? How do we
balance the time we spend on maintaining the backlist with getting
the frontlist out and continuing to innovate in our processes and
workflows? And because we're not the only ones who have noticed this
about our older ebooks: How do we respond to customer and retailer
complaints about backlist titles?

2. Ebooks last forever

Another major difference is that we expect print books to go out of
print.

When we make ebooks, by contrast, there seems to be this idea that we
are making them to last forever -- that ideally, every ebook we make
will stay on sale for eternity. We hope our ebooks will become part
of a perpetual money-making long tail for our company, but I think we
also feel that by digitizing these books, we're adding them to our
culture's eternal repository of all books ever published.

I love the idea that some of the work we do is about making sure that
our books will always be available to anyone who's ever interested in
reading them. But that's a lot of responsibility. And it's not
something I knew I was getting into when I took this job. And I'm not
sure it's a business that our companies think very much about being
in.

Not all books are meant to stay in print forever.

With print books, on the other hand, I feel like there's more of an
understanding that not all books are meant to last forever. Books
like Let's Go: Europe 1999 or Kardashian Konfidential might be ones
we could cease to publish when they cease to make money for us or
when there's more cost to keeping them up to date than we want to
invest.

And because there are costs to printing physical books, and to
storing them in a warehouse, and to shipping them to where they're
needed, there's a much higher bar for when it makes sense to keep
them in print. So the situation we find ourselves in is that many of
our backlist ebooks no longer have a print equivalent -- the print
book is out of print or print on demand. And that means there's no
longer a physical reminder of the book in our office -- no copies or
cover proofs or reprint agendas -- to keep that book in our
colleagues' consciousnesses.

3. Ebooks always look brand-new

All books have a life cycle -- usually, first, the book is published,
and for a while it's new and interesting and relevant, and then it
passes into being less interesting, less relevant, and less correct.
And some books may move into other stages, where they become
classics, or they become vintage kitsch, or interesting as historical
records or the subject of textual study.

Where a book is in this cycle becomes relevant to us as we think
about what kinds of changes we might make, what kinds of choices we
make as we continue to maintain the ebook. If we're trying to keep a
book in the "relevant" bucket, we might correct mistakes in the
ebook, update figures, add a new afterword, and the like. If we think
a book is destined for "textual studies," we might focus on making
sure the ebook never deviates from exactly what appeared in the first
printing.

But a big difference with print books is that as they go through this
life cycle, they pick up markers that show their age. We can judge
whether a print book is likely to be relevant or up-to-date or to
contain outmoded language or incorrect facts, through its physical
package, its cover design, its typography, and the wear on the actual
physical book. There are a million clues that you don't even
consciously note that set your expectations for what you're going to
find inside that book.

Print books show their age. Image: www.thejoykitchen.com

Ebooks, on the other hand, don't have the physical markers to show
you the difference. Every ebook looks like a brand-new ebook. You're
not necessarily confronted with age-appropriate typographical and
design cues; there's no wear on the ebook, no yellowing, no old book
smell. And you're reading the book on an ereader, or an iPad, or a
phone that is, at the outside, maybe two years old? So nothing about
the interface or the reading experience suggests that the content
you're consuming might be five, or ten, or twenty, or even fifty
years old.

(This is a bit of an exaggeration. I'm aware that it's possible to
put covers on ebooks.)

So what I think we lose with ebooks is the chance to set expectations
for what they'll contain. In the same way that we expect our iDevices
to "just work," we expect our ebooks to just be perfectly up-to-date,
accurate, timely, and customized to our needs at the moment we're
reading them.

Maintaining the backlist

So if you're with me that old ebooks are a bit of a different beast,
we can talk about how you're going to maintain your ebook backlist.

In his ebookcraft talk, Sanders Kleinfeld asked whether those of us
who work on ebooks consider ourselves primarily coders. And I don't
dispute his point that ebooks are made of code, or that the work we
do when we're making them is software development. But my group's
work doesn't end when we make our ebooks -- we also have to attend to
all the tasks necessary to keep them up to date and on sale. So we're
not just coders, though we work with code and we do technical work.
We're also editors; we work with content and we do editorial work.
And that's a really interesting place to be -- at that intersection of
of technical and editorial work, looking at what happens at that
place where code meets books.

When we talk about maintaining these backlist ebooks, what are we
talking about? I'm going to zip through a handful of the issues here,
without suggesting that those are all of them, or that all of these
apply to your particular backlist, just to map out the range of
possibilities.

Technical

One of the ways that ebooks are different from print books is that
they get technically out of date. They start looking out of date
faster. Compare what we thought looked like a reasonable ebook in
2010 versus 2015.

Life Mask (Emma Donoghue), 2010 and 2015 ebook editions.

My concept of backlist ebooks is that they're all basically ticking
time bombs: as soon as you make an ebook, the clock is running toward
the day when that ebook is going to look out of date and
embarrassing. And that is just not the case with print books, that
your designers feel that books they made five years ago are now
unacceptable to have on the market.

Some of these changes are purely cosmetic -- I know some of you are
thinking, just swap in the new CSS, no big deal. But some of the
changes pose new problems -- you might be able to see that we moved
from using straight quotation marks to curly quotation marks between
2010 and 2015. And though you can use your tools to automatically
determine which way 98% of apostrophes and quotation marks should be
turned, you still have the problem of figuring out how to find and
correct the remaining 2%. Imagine British dialogue, with its dropped
consonants ('This 'ere 'ouse,' 'e said); or foot and inch marks that
need to stay straight; or even the quotation marks in your HTML class
and attribute names.

We actually need to add new semantic information to do this update.
And this is a trivial example, but the idea also applies to updates
meant to add accessibility, or epub:type semantics, or more
sophisticated design or enhancements. To retrofit old ebooks up to
current standards requires human beings to think about the content of
each book and what it means. This is not information that's already
in the ebook or available in digital form; there's not an automated
way to write good alt tags or know whether a sidebar is part of the
<main> content or an <aside>.

Spain in Our Hearts (Adam Hochschild), 2015-style ebook index

Some of the need to update is us just getting better at what we do.
In 2010, we thought inserting a picture of the print book index was a
reasonable way to do ebook indexes. In 2015, we expected a
text-based, fully linked, nicely designed, easily navigable, and
actually functional index.

Sometimes we need to update ebooks to respond to technical specs
updates -- to make our epub2s into epub3s, for example -- or because an
e-reader software update unexpectedly breaks something.

Sometimes what the ereaders are able to do has changed. In 2010,
there wasn't a proper way to make a picture book ebook. (That didn't
stop us from trying.) In 2015, we have fixed-layout.

In any case, these are all reasons why you need to be consistently
reviewing and updating your ebook backlist. And let's take our
hypothetical 5000 ebook backlist: how often does each of those titles
need to come up for review and update? Based on the examples above,
five years looks like too long. At the other extreme, sometimes my
team will look at an ebook they made a year ago and say, this looks
terrible, please let us redo this one.

So, maybe we say every three years? Can you reissue a third of your
entire ebook backlist every year? For us, that would be 1600 backlist
books getting reissued every year. Last year, we did 950. So we're
not there yet ...

Legal

Keeping those 5000 backlist ebooks on sale legally takes up a lot of
our time. This is not a concern that's different than for print
books, except that we have more of these old books as ebooks, and
less likelihood that they'll go out of print, and fewer editors and
authors invested in doing this complicated work for the relatively
small returns they're seeing on ebooks.

I think there's no place where the ticking time bomb of backlist is
more obvious than in the case of rights and permissions for your
ebook, the legal right to publish and sell your backlist.

To start there's the question of whether you have the rights to make
an ebook at all. This can be complicated for a book that was
published before the invention of ebooks -- your contract may not
clearly specify whether you have the right to sell an ebook or how
much you pay in royalties if you do. That's been a huge effort for
our contracts department, just to clarify whether it was legally
permissible to make each of those first 5000 ebooks. And this is
ongoing -- I get a report every single day of books our contracts
department has just determined are OK to convert to ebook.

And once you have the right to make an ebook, that right may comes
with certain stipulations, like the illustrator gets to approve it,
or you must disable text-to-speech, or you can make an ebook, but not
one with audio or video enhancements. And that right doesn't
necessarily last forever -- another set of emails I get every week are
titles where the rights are reverting to the author, and if we have
an ebook we need to remove it from sale.

So easy enough, 5000 ebook contracts to keep track of to keep those
5000 ebooks on sale.

But the bigger piece is the rights or permissions for all the
separate assets that also exist in a book. First, the cover, which
often includes a photo or piece of artwork that we may have the right
to use for a certain number of copies or for a certain amount time of
time. And again, if that cover was designed before the invention of
ebooks, we probably did not get the right to use it on one -- that's
why you see generic covers on a lot of backlist ebooks.

And maybe your book interior contains art, or photographs, or a map,
or quotations from poetry or song lyrics. And again, you may or may
not have requested permission to use those in an ebook when you were
publishing the print book, so they may need to each, individually, be
recleared for ebook use. And again, each of those permissions may
have its own terms or expiration, where it's good for a certain
number of copies or a certain amount of time, or include restrictions
like printing at a certain size, or with a certain credit line, or
only below a certain dpi or in an ebook that has some kind of copy
protection.

Specific to the ebook is the right to embed any fonts you've decided
to use, which is a separate thing from the right to use them in print
or on the web. And my company has agreements with font foundries that
allow embedding their fonts in a certain number of ebooks in total,
so let's also keep track of how many fonts from which foundries we've
embedded across that entire backlist.

So now, for our approximately 5000 backlist ebooks, we have the
rights for the book itself, the rights for the art on the cover, and
the rights for, say, between 0 and 50 other assets contained within
the book. So now we have 10,000 or 100,000 separate contracts and
agreements, all with different terms and expiration dates, that you
need to be keeping track of in order to legally keep your ebook
backlist on sale.

Editorial

A type of maintenance that seems straightforward at first is the
editorial error -- the spelling error, the grammatical error, the
factual error. The sort of thing that is easy to fix in an ebook, and
so we do quite a lot of fixing of.

Spelling and more

The most unambiguous case is when we've introduced an error -- one
that's not in the print edition -- especially for the ebook. The most
common case of this is the OCR error, very frequent in our oldest
ebooks, where the ebook was produced by scanning an old print book
and was probably not fully proofread afterwards. And just for fun,
here's a recent favorite:

    "She did not think of it driving on Sunset Boulevard, which was
    always awake, the billboard advertisements for new films bright
    as movie screens, the twenty-foot feces of famous people staring
    vacantly in her direction."

The question here is not whether to fix the errors, but how quickly
and efficiently we can get these fixed. If it takes, on average, 10
hours to proofread an ebook fully, for our 5000 ebooks, we'll need
50,000 hours. If you have someone who can work 40 hours a week on
only that, you'll get through your backlist in something like 25
years.

And as those of you who have worked as proofreaders know, there's
really no substitute. You can use all kinds of technical means to get
closer and closer to 100% OCR accuracy, but to really feel confident
that you have not missed a single comma from the original source, you
still need to do that full 10 hours of proofreading.

Now, ebooks can easily have automated spellchecking applied to them,
and this does help a lot. My team now has every instance of the word
"feces" in our ebooks flagged for them to manually review.

But our retailers also are interested in the quality of our ebooks,
and also can run automated spellchecking on them, and so they
helpfully flag things that they think are errors for us. Which means
we spend a considerable amount of staff time processing
retailer-reported "errors" that are actually dialect, quotations from
nineteenth-century primary sources, deliberate neologisms, or other
creative uses of language.

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes). These are not errors, no matter
what your automated spellcheck thinks.

And so, you say, look at the print source. But unfortunately, my
company does occasionally publish a print book with an error in it.

And then what do you do? Thinking again of the life cycle of the book
-- some books are classics where textual errors are important enough
to study and we're taking something away from the text by making the
correction.

My company publishes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I am
petrified of making any changes to the ebook text, even when we think
we spot something obviously in error, because the integrity of the
text is something people care about. And then write scholarly papers
about.

In one of these papers, Tolkien himself is quoted complaining about a
printing of The Fellowship of the Ring:

    "the impertinent compositors have taken it upon themselves to
    correct, as they suppose, my spelling and grammar: altering
    throughout dwarves to dwarfs, elvish to elfish, further to
    farther, and worst of all elven to elfin."

Can we predict which books published in 2015 will be the Tolkiens of
50 years from now? Do we want to be this decade's impertinent
compositors?

And sometimes we're not sure if what we're seeing even is an error.
The following passage, from Philip K. Dick, displays a lot of
creative use of language, but the "zommed" in the third line -- while
matching the print book -- seems a bit suspect. Should it be "zoomed"?
How can we know?

Ubik (Philip K. Dick)

Factual errors

About Time (Bruce Koscielniak, 2004)

Sometimes a book is completely accurate at the time of publication,
but becomes factually inaccurate over time, giving the wrong dates
for the beginning of daylight saving time or an incorrect planetary
status for Pluto. In a social science book, statistics grow out of
date over time; in a travel guide, every fact becomes wrong over a
long enough period.

And again, because every ebook looks like a brand-new ebook, and
because you're reading it on your brand-new eighth-generation Kindle
Fire, these kind of factual errors are more jarring than they would
be in a print book that clues you in to its age.

Should we fix these factual errors? Do we need the author's input?
What if the author is dead, the agent is retired, and the editor has
left the company? Should we fix them silently or with some kind of
editorial note?

Offensive content

Then there's the case where the content of a book is not incorrect,
per se, but may have become outmoded or offensive.

Here's an example of a diet book from the 1980s, which -- in addition
to the diet advice now being the exact opposite of what we would
recommend today -- is a bit behind the times in referring to
Asian-Americans as "Orientals." And probably just plain racist in
going on to suggest that "Orientals" who live in the United States
are somehow not Americans. What do you do here? Do you update the
language that's incidental to the content of the book? Does it matter
who you think is buying this -- whether it's people who want the diet
advice or people who are researching the historic participation of
Asian Americans in diet programs?

The Fit or Fat Target Diet (Covert Bailey, 1984)

And here is a lovely classic children's book -- from 1960 -- that's
about two little girls, and a witch, who has a baby, and a spelling
bee, an actual bee that spells things. And there's a minor part of
the story where the girls are putting on their Halloween costumes,
and one is a witch, and the other is "a little Chinese girl ... and she
had makeup on her face."

The Witch Family (Eleanor Estes, 1960)

I think we agree at this point that a nationality is not a super-cool
Halloween costume, but I'm not clear on whether Clarissa's putting on
yellowface or has just borrowed her mother's lipstick. And so how do
we handle this? This is not Huckleberry Finn -- it's not a book about
race, where we talk about the history and the controversy. Should we
be concerned with this type of incidental racism in an ebook that
we're selling today, one that looks just like the new, and hopefully
more enlightened, children's ebooks we're publishing in 2015?

Ambiguity of source

Now if you're a strict constitutionalist, you can dodge a lot of
these questions by saying just follow the print book. But even if we
believe for a moment that our only goal for ebooks is that they be a
perfect replica of their print equivalents, we still run into
questions because print books themselves contain some ambiguity.

I think this is something we don't talk about a lot -- that the
physical print book doesn't have all the answers (particularly if we
don't have digital source files). Print books contain some ambiguity
as to their content.

Some of this ambiguity has to do with the original intention of the
author or designer, which can't be determined from the finished
product. A common case of this is the print book index (or anywhere
the print book gives a cross reference to a particular page). When
your print book index says "ambiguity, 99," we know that what the
indexer wants us to see is somewhere between the first line of page
99 and the last. But if we're working from a printed index, we don't
have any way to know the exact point in the text the reference was
meant to take you to, even though technology would allow us to take
you to the word-precise location in the ebook.

Another ambiguity is the location of a piece of art, which is often
chosen to work with the layout of the print page. If the designer
puts a photo at the bottom of the page, resulting in its being in the
middle of a paragraph in the ebook, we want to move it. But which
paragraph does it belong with, the one before or after? Below is a
book we've resisted converting to ebook for a long time, because no
one seems to know whether the position of the tarot cards that run
through the book is highly significant -- or merely decorative.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Italo Calvino)

As well, there are some conventions of print design that just don't
work correctly in an ebook. This is a print book; do you see an error
here?

Beware, Princess Elizabeth (Carolyn Meyer) -- the print book

But in the ebook, the missing open quotation mark before the dropcap
is suddenly obvious. The design convention of omitting a quotation
mark before a dropcap doesn't make sense in the digitized text.

Beware, Princess Elizabeth (Carolyn Meyer) -- the ebook

Similarly, a little text ornament in a space break is easy enough to
replicate in an ebook. But then maybe we notice that the space break
ornament appears only once in the ebook. Why? Because the designer's
only used the ornament when the space break occurs at the end of a
print book page.

Mr. Splitfoot (Samantha Hunt). There's only an ornament at the bottom
of the left page because the space break falls between pages.

And here the print book has a hyphen that falls on a line break.
There's no way to tell if it was meant to be a hard hyphen
(frame-story) or a soft hyphen (framestory).

CliffsNotes on Asimov's Foundation Trilogy

Or what about a poem that runs several pages long -- is there a stanza
break at the page break or not?

Which is all just to say that as we're cleaning up and improving our
backlist ebooks, we find places where we, the ebook developers, need
to impose editorial decisions and judgments -- places where the source
material doesn't provide everything we need to create a completely
accurate ebook.

And as I mentioned before, a major way that old print books and
backlist ebooks are ambiguous is in their semantics -- as we begin to
use epub:type or HTML5 markup or try to add types of accessibility
that are available in electronic texts, the information we need to do
that may just not be present in the print source.

Metadata

There are two kinds of metadata I worry about in relation to our
ebook backlist, the customer-facing metadata (the kind of information
you see on the book's Amazon product page), and the internal metadata
(our in-house record-keeping about the ebook).

Customer-facing metadata

The metadata describing an ebook grows out of date over time, of
course, and needs to be maintained. This is true for the print book,
as well, but again, the problem for us is exacerbated by the
never-out-of-print ebook backlist, especially when the ebooks have
become orphaned by their editors or authors.

Obviously, as new types of metadata come into use, like keywords or
updated BISAC subject codes for juvenile and YA titles, you'll need
to go back and add these to each title in your 5000-title backlist
that you plan to keep selling.

And then you'll need to keep updating the existing metadata. One
place we see a lot of this is in the author bio. The author bio may
say something like "this is the novelist's first book," when she's
since published six more; or that she lives in California, when she's
moved to Paris; or suggest that the author is living when she no
longer is. And that's been a real question for us -- should we leave
the biography as it was written originally, true as of the time of
publication of the book ("Will Shakespeare is a thirty-year-old actor
from Stratford-upon-Avon. This is his first play.")? Or should we
edit it to be true as of the current moment?

Here's the biography we have in our title database for Elizabeth
Gilbert:

    Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the story collection Pilgrims,
    a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award. Currently a
    writer-at-large for GQ, Gilbert lives in New York's Hudson
    Valley.

Which is great, except that it ignores the existence of a certain
other book, one that she published with another company quite a while
after this author bio was written.

Probably better known than Pilgrims.

But this gets tricky -- if you are updating, whose responsibility it
is to keep track of what's going on in your authors' and former
authors' lives? It gets personal: Who's going to ask where they live,
whether they're married, how the two dogs are doing, what they've
written since? If the twenty-year-old bio says "she lives with her
son," can we assume he's since left the nest?

After my talk, an audience member told me that his table had
discussed this problem and determined that the solution was to
provide a link to the author's Wikipedia page instead of an author
bio. I thought that was pretty cool. Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Elizabeth_Gilbert

The customer description of an ebook is another thing that can grow
stale quickly. You can imagine the sort of breathless descriptive
rhetoric -- this is "new," "revolutionary," "cutting-edge," the "most
up-to-date," the "best," the "only" -- that we use to sell new books.
Two, or five, or twenty years later, that kind of language just seems
silly. But revising that description is not just a matter of removing
those telling words; to do it right, we would recontextualize what is
relevant or important about the book today, and explain to the
prospective reader why it's still worth buying.

Internal metadata

I've been saying we have 5000 backlist books, but that comes with an
asterisk, because we're not really sure.

Internal metadata and record-keeping for ebooks is tricky because our
in-house record-keeping systems were probably not designed to answer
the kinds of questions we now have.

As an example, you may be making different ebook file formats for
different retailers. The technically correct way to do that is to
assign a separate ISBN to each format. But I don't believe that
anyone actually does that (and if you do, it creates its own problems
in terms of the metadata that should be common between all of those
files).

So somehow, under your single ebook ISBN, you need to be capturing
information about things like

  * What formats of this ebook have been made?
  * How were they made? (In-house, by a freelancer, by a vendor, by a
    retailer, inherited from an acquisition, by the author, as an
    experiment?)
  * Which retailers are selling this ebook? And who's selling which
    formats?
  * How many times has that ebook file been updated? What changes
    were made each time?
  * Which version of our ebook making tools did we use to make this
    book?
  * Can this ebook be updated by running it through our current
    standard tools?
  * If versions were removed from sale, why?
  * If changes were made from the print edition, what were they and
    why?

And maybe you've been capturing this data in a sort of freeform way,
because you don't have the right fields for it in your title database
that's designed for print books. But at some point it turns out that
you do need that data to be searchable and reportable, because
someday someone will ask you, How many ebooks do we have on sale? How
many of those are epub2? How many ebooks do we have on sale at Apple
that aren't at Barnes & Noble? Why does this one book exist in an
epub2 version and an epub3 version and another epub3 with audio added
and a separate Kindle file?

Hyperlinks

Many of our books have URLs in them. Particularly our adult
nonfiction books, which often have endnotes with lots of URLs. And in
ebooks, we make these URLs into hyperlinks.

And as we know, URLs can stop working.

The web community has gotten good about talking about this problem,
and they call it link rot.

There's scholarly research on the prevalence of link rot -- when URLs
stop working -- and of reference rot -- when the information at a given
URL changes from what it was when the author cited it. This study
found that more than half of the URLs cited in US Supreme Court
decisions suffered from one or the other. Which is not a great thing
for the history of American jurisprudence.

Other studies have looked at the half-life of a URL, suggesting that
it might be about two years. (The concept of half-life here is just
like that for radioactivity, the amount of time it takes for half of
something to decay, or in this case, for half of the URLs in a set to
stop working.)

What does this look like in an ebook? Powers of Two is a pretty
typical nonfiction book from our backlist. It has 275 URLs in it,
mostly in the endnotes. It was published in August 2014.

So if we use that half-life of two years model, this summer, in
August 2016, we would expect that only 50% of those URLs would still
be good.

By August 2018, only 25% of the URLs would still be good.

By August 2024, ten years after pub, this model would predict that
only about 3% of the URLs would still be working. And unfortunately,
I don't plan to be retired yet by then. So this is a real problem for
us.

When I actually tested the URLs in Powers of Two with the W3C Link
Checker, I discovered that about 47 (or 17%) of the URLs were not
working.

To be totally fair, I also discovered that some of these were errors
in the URLs that we introduced while making the print book or the
ebook. Those URLs hadn't ceased working; they had never worked.

On the bright side, 83% percent were still working. So we're running
a bit ahead of the curve there. (Or perhaps the websites our authors
choose to cite are more reliable than the average website.)

As usual, there's a "do it right from the beginning" solution, which
certain parts of the web and scholarly communities are embracing
(using things like DOI to identify electronic documents or a service
like Perma.cc that archives cited online content). I haven't seen
trade publishing take this problem on.

If only our authors could travel back in time to properly archive
their links.

But because we're talking about backlist, and we don't have the
advantage of going back in time to do ask our authors to archive
their links correctly, we're talking about inheriting tens of
thousands of old URLs that were not deliberately preserved in any
way. (Not all our books have 275 URLs, and some have none, so what if
we say 20 on average? Hypothetical 5000 book backlist at 20 URLs per
book = 100,000 slowly decaying URLs.)

And this is a problem for print books as well as for the ebooks of
course, but I think we're more content to let the URLs in print books
function essentially as decoration--as signs that there is scholarship
underlying their claims. And we also assume that a very motivated
reader who types out an entire URL from a print book to try to get to
a source document will also have some basic web literacy around using
Google to search for an alternative.

The URLs in ebooks, however, we transform into hyperlinks, which
imply that the information is just a click away, and when it isn't,
it doesn't just seem like the link is broken. It seems like your
ebook is broken.

The hyperlinks in ebooks can also be checked in automated fashion,
and then we get this:

So this is the scale at which we're dealing with this problem right
now -- our backlist has a hundred thousand slowly decaying URLs,
little time bombs embedded in our backlist -- and the retailer
response is to send me an individual email every time they notice
one. Fortunately, they don't seem to be looking very hard right now.

And then, the interesting part: what do we do to fix this? There are
a few options, but they all have some authorial implications:

  * If the site's just been reorganized, find the new correct URL.
  * If the URL is just meant to point to general further information,
    find a new site that contains that information.
  * Remove the URL altogether. We'll do this if a citation given is
    complete enough that the reader can probably find the print
    version of the material cited, even though the online version
    seems to be gone.
  * Leave the URL, but remove the hyperlink. This looks like a
    mistake in the ebook to me, but sometimes you just don't have any
    good options. This seems to satisfy retailer complaints (or at
    least evade their automated link checking).

Solutions and approaches

In conclusion, backlist ebooks are hard. What do you do?

Develop a process

In my group, we've developed a process to periodically review our
backlist ebooks. We have two production reports, one for new ebooks,
and one we call "updates," and the updates have schedules and
deadlines just like the new frontlist ebooks do. So every week we
dredge up and work on at least a few of these older books. There are
a few ways books get on the update list:

  * A retailer alerts us to a problem (it shows up on the Amazon
    rework list)
  * A new edition is coming out in print (the paperback is about to
    come out, with a new cover and some corrections)
  * The ebook is scheduled to be promoted
  * News or events lead to new interest in a particular book (the
    Pope mentions it in a speech)
  * We're working through a list of bestselling ebooks
  * We're working through a set of related books (reissuing an entire
    series)

This isn't a systematic approach, in the sense that some of our
backlist titles never make it on to the list and other titles cycle
on to it over and over again (for example, a holiday title that is
promoted every year). We're working on finding and addressing the
oldest of the old in our backlist, but we're also comfortable that
the titles that are selling the most and getting the most attention
are getting re-reviewed the most frequently.

Take small bites

It might be ideal for us to update 1600 ebooks every year. We don't
have the capacity to do that. But if we just threw up our hands and
didn't do any, we wouldn't have updated 950 last year. We don't fully
proofread all of our ebooks, but most backlist we reissue get an hour
or two of review. Do what you can, and do it regularly.

Improve your tools

There are technological and workflow tools that can make this process
easier, like scripts to search for common errors. One of my group's
projects last year was to replace our primary ebook making tool,
reducing the time it took to build an ebook from three minutes to
thirty seconds. That's not a lot of time in a 40-hour week, but it
substantially lowered the barriers to getting a lot of ebooks
rebuilt. My advice to you is to make it easy to update an ebook,
because it's something you'll want to be doing frequently.

Make it easy to make an update

Along the lines of making it easy to update an ebook, as you design
your frontlist processes, I think a big piece of your brain should be
devoted to thinking about how much you're going to want to redo (and
redo and redo) those processes as you maintain the ebooks. In my
group's standard process, we generate the ebook file and then
optionally break it open to add customizations. And every time we do
that, I want to be thinking about whether the value of the manual
customization is worth the cost of having to maintain it ...
potentially forever.

Keep good notes

There's a record-keeping piece, where we're trying to keep good notes
about the decisions we make for each ebook, so when we come back to
remake each of them in two or five or twenty years, we know why that
book had custom CSS, and what the rights are for the embedded fonts,
and what kinds of workarounds we employed that will no longer be
needed because we'll be living in the perfect standards-compliant
future. And what I've seen in my group is that the need to do this
record-keeping suddenly begins to seem very important when you
inherit someone else's ebook to work on that doesn't have that
critical information attached.

Accept that it's hard

But I think there's also a part of this work that's just hard.
Maintaining backlist ebooks requires smart human beings to
continually engage with the kinds of problems we've just discussed
and to make case-by-case calls on what needs to be done to keep them
available and representing your company the way you want them to. And
I think that's a process that shouldn't just be delegated to a lone
digital production intern or your ebook outsourcing vendor, but
actually requires everyone at your company who cares about the
content of your products to get involved.

What I hope I've expressed is that I find these issues interesting as
well as challenging -- that figuring out how to tackle these kind of
novel problems, at scale and yet while respecting the different needs
of each individual title, is what makes what we do intellectually
engaging and rewarding work.

Ask for help

That's why I'm here today. Convincing people to notice this backlist
work, to acknowledge that it's important work, and to be thoughtful
about how your ebooks will gracefully become a part of your backlist
is now an important part of making your frontlist books and ebooks.
If you can get the rest of your company to care about this stuff --
the content of their ebooks -- you'll also be getting them involved in
the digital future of their words and ideas. And that makes the kind
of work we do make a lot more sense and be a lot more meaningful.

Sketch by the inimitable @epubpupil.

Teresa Elsey is a digital managing editor at Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt. Opinions are her own. She tweets at @teresaelsey.

 
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