How Books Are Made

Would you believe that the entire ebook marketplace – including Kindle, iBooks, and thousands of ebook stores – depends on the volunteer work of about a dozen people?

There are millions of ebooks for sale online, and thousands more every day. How could any human bookseller check that they even work, and that they don’t contain malicious code? The ebook marketplace can only exist because there are rules for how an ebook is made, and an official, automatic way to check that it follows them.

The people who create those rules, called standards, are volunteers. Dave Cramer is one of them. He’s been contributing to web and ebook standards, making books, and designing software that makes books, for over thirty years, mostly at Hachette USA. He talks to Arthur about creating standards, how ebooks are made, using CSS for print layout, and the ongoing push and pull between digital-first and InDesign-based publishing.

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What is How Books Are Made?

A podcast about the art and science of making books. Arthur Attwell speaks to book-making leaders about design, production, marketing, distribution, and technology. These are conversations for book lovers and publishing decision makers, whether you’re crafting books at a big company or a boutique publisher.

Arthur Attwell:

Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Attwell.

Arthur Attwell:

It's been a long time now since ebooks became a big part of publishing. Even though print books are still where most of the money is, if you consider the size of Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, and thousands of smaller ebook stores, it's a pretty big marketplace. And what if I told you that that entire marketplace depends at its core on the volunteer work of about a dozen people? See, the ebook marketplace is unlike anything humans have created before. You have thousands and thousands of publishers creating what are just tiny pieces of software incredibly cheaply and uploading millions of them for sale.

Arthur Attwell:

And there is no way a human ebook seller could possibly check each one to see if it even opens, if it's readable at all, or at worst, if it contains nefarious code that could do real harm to an unsuspecting customer. The ebook marketplace can exist only because there are rules for how an ebook is made and an official automatic way to check that it follows them. Thankfully, the people who create those rules or standards absolutely love books and everything about them. I mean, you'd have to because they're volunteers, and they need to know not just how to make ebooks, but how any kind of book is made and everything that goes into it, from typography to pictures to indexes and more. To me, these people are MacGyver level cool.

Arthur Attwell:

So to be honest, I was a little starstruck speaking to Dave Cramer, whose work in ebook standards and book production I've admired for years. Dave Cramer has been making books and software that makes books for over thirty years, almost half of those at the big five publisher, Hachette USA. I'm sure he's volunteered more evenings to developing standards for the web than most rational people. And in 2017, he was awarded a Book Industry Study Group Award for his work advancing the publishing industry. Recently, he's been spearheading a new system for Hachette USA that manages literally millions of the little pieces that go into their books.

Arthur Attwell:

Dave, thank you for joining me today, especially because I believe you would rather be out skiing than doing almost anything else. And in fact, I think it was skiing that got you into making books?

Dave Cramer:

Yes. It was actually. My career is entirely and literally accidental that 32 years ago I took a bad fall country skiing in the Sierra Nevada, and I recuperated at my father's house in Southern Vermont, and he was an early adopter of the Macintosh computer. And so I started playing around with one of those computers. And when I was well enough to go home, I took his old Mac Plus that had an 80 megabyte external hard drive and 4 MB of memory, which was sort of the top of the line machine.

Arthur Attwell:

It was.

Dave Cramer:

And I used that to self publish a jazz discography. I started out by putting all the information in FileMaker Pro, but then I decided books should have running headers, so I ended up with, like, 'pagemakerone.something' and had to figure out how to use that. And those were the skills that got me an entry level publishing job in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1999 when I answered a help wanted ad in the newspaper.

Arthur Attwell:

I love it. I wanted to kick off with something that you spent an enormous amount of time and energy on, but most people don't even know is the reason the internet works at all, which is web standards. You devoted so much time to developing web and ebook standards. To someone who's never seen a standards document, what are standards and why does that matter?

Dave Cramer:

Well, to sort of make anything happen in the world, you have to agree on some fundamental principles. Like, if I go to a hardware store and buy a bolt and a nut, I want the nut to be able to screw on the bolt. That means that someone had to decide what those threads are like, you know, how wide the bolt is, what are the pitches of the thread, how deep are the grooves. Once you know that, then everybody who's working on them can make things that work together. And I think the same idea happens on the web.

Dave Cramer:

A bunch of people got together, and it's like, 'okay. You're gonna have a web browser, and I'm gonna make a website.' And so they need to understand each other, so we have to agree what is the language we're going to use to describe the web. That language is HTML, but we have to agree, you know, 'oh, I think we need a tag to mark a paragraph or a heading, but what are we gonna call that?' It's not something that happens naturally, so people have to be in a room and argue about it, and they have to come to some sort of consensus.

Dave Cramer:

'Oh, let's use h for headings, and the most important one, we'll call "h1"'. You know, 'let's use p for paragraph' because all the people who started this were English speakers, so got to sort of impose their version of the world on the rest of us. So there are lots of layers of complexity around standards.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely. It also makes me wonder who's in the room when they gather around the table having that conversation. Who are the kinds of people that you sit and discuss these things with?

Dave Cramer:

That's been an interesting aspect of my career because the web evolved out of evolved - it started at CERN and Tim Berners-Lee - and it was sort of, scientists wanted to communicate with each other. Then we sort of had this Internet boom. And then what became really important was the people who make the browsers. And so when I got into this space around probably 2012, 2013, almost everybody involved in the standards process worked for Google or Apple or Microsoft or Mozilla. So it was the browser vendors themselves, and more precisely, the engineers who worked on the browsers, who were the people in the room talking about how things should go.

Dave Cramer:

And these people are unbelievably smart. I felt like I was always the stupidest person in the room when I was at these meetings, but I also had perspectives they didn't. I was not a software engineer. I came from the publishing industry, so I knew stuff about books and typography and design that they hadn't had as much exposure to. So I feel I was able to contribute some of the things I picked up in my accidental career and provide some perspective and some value in this process.

Arthur Attwell:

Have those groups got bigger and more international over the years, or do the browser vendors still dominate those conversations?

Dave Cramer:

I think they have, and the web standards themselves are all under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C - sort of a big standards organization. And I know they're very conscious of the web as a universal thing. One of their foundational principles is 'the web is for everyone'. And so they've made great progress, and you can now use almost any of the world's languages on the web. You can get really nice typography in Japanese or Mongolian or Tamil or something like that.

Dave Cramer:

So there's been a lot of effort in those directions, but also in trying to bring in a wider group of people to actually work on things.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Dave Cramer:

That's a huge challenge because we're volunteers, but our employers have to let us spend time working on this. And there's historically been a lot of international travel to go to these meetings, and it takes a lot of resources to make things happen. And so I think that's kind of an ongoing issue of how to broaden the base of participation and how to find ways to have more people contribute who, don't spend their days writing C++.

Arthur Attwell:

Are there particular standards projects that you're especially proud of being part of?

Dave Cramer:

I feel like I was just astoundingly lucky to be able to spend quite a few years in the CSS working group, which I found to be a remarkable group of people. Super smart, but they were also super welcoming, and they really, really cared about the web and about making it as good as possible. I don't think my contributions were huge, but, I tried to bring drop caps to the web, and Apple ended up doing a really simple implementation, you know, tried to, help work on the print CSS standards that we're probably gonna maybe talk about a little bit.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to talk a bit about that. And for those who don't know the terminology, CSS is, of course, the design language of the web. It's the language we use to describe how big a font size is and what color it is and what font it's in and where it sits on the web page and so on.

Arthur Attwell:

It gets astoundingly complicated. I spend a lot of time buried in CSS, which I love. It's an incredible undertaking to develop a standard that lets everybody describe design in a common way. And one of the big challenges there is that we're not only laying out web pages, but we also want to be able to layout book pages with CSS. And you mentioned paged media CSS, CSS for the printed page.

Arthur Attwell:

How did the CSS working group approach that given that it's difficult to prioritize time on print when clearly screens are where everybody's spending the vast amount of their time?

Dave Cramer:

I think it's kind of interesting that the people who created CSS - it was sort of co-invented by Hakon Lee, who worked for Opera, and Bert Bos, who was working for the W3C - but they were always interested in books. The idea of HTML and CSS is that this is sort of a very adaptable language that could work in almost any situation, and we've seen that. You can probably lay out billboards and tiny phone screens and giant monitors, but also print. And it turns out that it's really common that people want to print something they found on their browser. You just wanna print a newspaper article for your grandmother or something like that.

Arthur Attwell:

Yep.

Dave Cramer:

And so print has always been a part of it, and it was something that people were thinking about, but it was mostly happening on a pretty simple level. I think book typography is an art and a craft that has developed over the past 500 years. And so there's a lot of refinement in how to make text beautiful and, more importantly, easy to read so that it sort of disappears and you become immersed in the story or whatever you learn. So there's a lot of subtlety there.

Dave Cramer:

I feel like part of my mission was to try to at least make people aware of some of those subtleties and see, could we adapt the existing machinery of HTML and CSS to serve these other uses?

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely. And perhaps, hopefully, at some stage, we'll have consistent drop caps across the web [LAUGHS].

Dave Cramer:

It's not impossible [LAUGHS].

Arthur Attwell:

Talking about drop caps on screens, I also wanted to talk about ebooks, where I have tried often to create drop caps for screens, and specifically EPUB, the file format probably most commonly produced. And you've, of course, spent an enormous amount of time on the EPUB specification itself.

Arthur Attwell:

There's one particular part of that puzzle that I find interesting, which is turning the standard that you develop into a kind of machine that can check EPUBs to see whether they have followed the standards. And the world of EPUB has this piece of software called EPUBCheck. And I know you've also been, to some extent, involved in the oversight of EPUBCheck there, or at least are one of its great champions. Can you describe a little bit about the EPUB standard and particularly how EPUBCheck relates to it and what it enables across publishing?

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. So what we now call EPUB, was first released somewhere around 1999. I think in the late nineties, digital technology had progressed enough that, 'oh, we can make sort of a portable screen with a battery that will last long enough so maybe people could read a book or something?' So a bunch of people started to become interested in the idea of a digital book, and some of those people got together. Books are published by so many different organizations, and so you want everybody doing the same thing so that your device can display books from publishers in the US and England and France and South Africa and everywhere.

Dave Cramer:

You need a standard. You need people to agree on how to prepare a book so that it will work on all these devices. And so a group of people came together to do that. They decided, 'well, this HTML thing looks pretty cool. That will be the foundation. This is how we make the content. We also need to layer on a little bit more information.' A book is a very sequential thing, chapter 1 and then chapter 2 and then chapter 3. So they needed to figure out a way to list: here's all the files we need for the book; here's what order they go in; here's some metadata so you can organize your books by the author's name, or the title, or the subject. So they come up with this standard.

Dave Cramer:

It was the Open eBook Forum, so it was called OEB, and that's what evolved into EPUB over the course of a few years. Once it started getting popular, which probably was around 2007 when the iPhone came out and all those things, and then we have the Kindle and stuff like that. I don't fully remember the history of how EPUBCheck got started, but the standard says, 'to do an ebook, you have to do all these things: it has to be a zip file; at the top level of the zip, there has to be this file that displays all the metadata,' all that sort of meta information about the book.

Dave Cramer:

But how do you know you did it right? It's a complicated spec. And at this point, there's millions of ebooks around, and you're processing 100 000 of these things at a time. And so you need some sort of automated way to say, 'oh, this follows the rules or this didn't.' It sort of works hand in hand with the standard. You have the standard that says 'this is how it should be,' but then you have the little checking gadget, a little script that runs through it and says, 'oh, did you do all these things?' And that was EPUBCheck, and it turned out to be sort of the foundation of the industry. It made the standard real. A standard is an abstract thing. It's words on paper, words on screens. But a validation tool means that, say I'm an online ebook retailer. I sell books to people. If I have this validator, then I'm confident when I make a reading system, I make a gadget to read the books, I can say, 'I know what I'm gonna get, and so my engineers can make something that's working. And I can also tell the publishers, use EPUB, and I'm gonna check all the files you send to me to make sure they're okay before I sell them to other people.' And so you're sort of ensuring some basic level of quality and interoperability. And so this little tool becomes the foundation of this billion dollar industry.

Arthur Attwell:

And that's kind of an extraordinary thing. You've spoken before about how amazing it is that publishing has figured out a way to sell digital products for actual money as ebooks without resorting to selling advertising. And that is an incredible achievement. And could it have happened without EPUBCheck?

Dave Cramer:

No. I don't think so. I'm not sure how we got to that place. I think it happened early enough before the web was entirely driven by advertising for sort of the current monopolies we see and the consolidation of power in the industry. So I think we sort of snuck in before all that happened, and partly because there's been such a long history of book publishing, and people are used to buying books or borrowing books.

Dave Cramer:

All these things are honestly, terrifically important to the library market as well as any commercial market. I think the fact that EPUBCheck exists, that there was a standard that was good enough. There were competing ebook standards along with EPUB in the early 2000s. There was a Palm format. There was Moby Pocket, this French company that ended up being bought by Amazon and became the heart of the Kindle. We used to make six different files for each ebook we published, which was not fun and a lot of work. And, yeah, it was a mess. And I think Hachette was the first company that says, when EPUB came out in 2007, 'Okay. We are only going to send one kind of file to everybody.' And so I think we helped create that situation where EPUB became the universal standard.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. For a while, it really wasn't definite. It wasn't for sure that EPUB would be the universal standard. I remember in somewhere around 2007, 2008, I had a Google alert, I got a little notification from Google every time the word EPUB popped up on the Internet, and I would only get four or five alerts a day.

Arthur Attwell:

And now you just couldn't run that alert. Talking about creating six separate files for every release, I wanted to talk a little bit about what it takes to make an ebook. I mean, you and I have been making print books and ebooks for many years. For someone who has never made an ebook before, how would you describe the key differences between converting a print file to an ebook, for instance, from InDesign, versus creating an ebook in a digital first system, where an ebook is output alongside a print book? What are the big differences there?

Dave Cramer:

It's funny because I think the vast majority of ebooks out there are sort of afterthoughts, you know, that the publishers focus 100 percent on print and then take whatever files were used to make the print book and send them to some vendor in India or Vietnam or Indonesia and give them a trivial sum of money and say, 'turn this into an ebook, and we don't care how good it is.' I think, historically, that's been the way that the industry has worked. And I think especially in the early days of ebooks, the quality was atrocious because of that process and because nobody cared. I had always been trying to do things differently right from the start. I had something of a visionary boss at Hachette, Phil Maddens. She's also worked in various kinds of standards a lot, and he got us into XML really early. This sort of cousin of the HTML we use on the web, except you can sort of customize the language for whatever content you're trying to describe. So we saved XML for all our books. So we had the content of the book in this sort of universal format that we could then do anything with. And so we could write tools that took that XML and turned it into really clean ebooks because the starting format focused on the content and not the presentation.

Dave Cramer:

InDesign is something that's entirely focused on what it looks like on the page. The central concept of InDesign is the spread, and that's not something that exists in an ebook. That's not something that authors think about either. They write chapters and paragraphs. And so if we have a digital format that also speaks that language, that's chapters and paragraphs and headings, then we can sort of capture as much of the author's intent as we can. And that makes all this downstream processing that much more efficient and accurate.

Arthur Attwell:

Over time at Hachette, that early XML experimentation and systems building, am I right, became a production tool called 'Dante', which could produce print books and ebooks at the same time?

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. I mentioned some of the advantages of having this XML format that you had the content of the book described in this content-centric way rather than designed towards the particular print presentation. And so we said, 'what if we use that idea not only to make ebooks, but to make print books too?' We're sort of centering the author's words and then saying, 'okay, let them write this way, and then we'll turn it into different presentational formats based on the needs of those formats.' And so this is also treating digital as the equal of print. You know, they're sort of siblings rather than the print being the parent, and then everything else drives from there.

Dave Cramer:

This turned out to be an incredibly useful idea in the kind of publishing we do because, I work for this trade publisher. I describe it as the kind of books you buy in bookstores. It's commercial fiction and nonfiction. But we might create six editions of the same content. There'll be a hardcover book, a trade paperback, a large print edition, a mass market edition, an international edition, so on and so forth. So we have the same content with different design, but that's exactly what the web was designed to do with HTML and CSS. HTML is the content. CSS is the design. So use one HTML source and then have a different style sheet for the ebook, a different style sheet for the hardcover, a different style sheet for the large print edition.

Dave Cramer:

This is how HTML was designed to work. This was the promise of all those XML workflows that were famous in the early part of the twenty-first century. This was single source publishing. This was the separation of content and design, and we made it work really beautifully in print publishing. We got the quality of output we needed. We could work really fast. Our ebooks were beautiful because we really didn't have to do anything to make the ebooks. If the content was already in HTML, it was super simple to make a really high quality ebook.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely.

Dave Cramer:

It was a brilliant system.

Arthur Attwell:

Was the workflow essentially that, the manuscript comes in from the copyeditor, it's ready to be laid out in a traditional InDesign based system that would go off to a typesetter, who would lay it out page by page in InDesign. In your system, presumably someone is turning that into HTML instead. And then with some style sheets in place to define what the print book and ebook would look like, they can presumably run a script or something like that, and they get out a PDF if they want the print edition, or they get out an EPUB if they want the EPUB edition from the HTML. Is that sort of how the workflow would look? So there's no InDesign involved in the interior of the book at all?

Dave Cramer:

There's no InDesign. I describe it: we had an Adobe free workflow.

Arthur Attwell:

Right. For those who don't know InDesign, it's the software used to lay up probably 99% of the print books in the world at the moment. Maybe we'll talk a bit more about that in a little while.

Dave Cramer:

I think also, I've talked a little bit about the 500 year history of the art and craft of print typesetting. And so we have very high standards for what our books look like. And so a fully automated process was not gonna work for us. And so even when we were using HTML and CSS, we had a lot of automation in this process, but we never wanted to eliminate the human eye from that process because only a skilled human is going to understand all the subtleties of, like, hyphenating words in English, which depends. You can't do that in an automated way. You need to know the meaning of the word too, is it REcord or reCORD? They're spelled the same, but they hyphenate differently based on context.

Dave Cramer:

There's a lot of trade-offs in typesetting. You don't wanna have one line of text on the last page of the chapter. Books are printed in complicated ways, meaning that the number of pages in the book has to be a multiple of sixteen, basically.

Dave Cramer:

And so you have to take into account a lot of stuff, and we wanted humans to do what they do best and make judgements and apply their decades of skill to this process. We didn't want it to be a push button process, but we did want the computer to do all the boring stuff and keep track of page numbers and do all that kind of stuff.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Dave Cramer:

So I think we sort of achieved the perfect balance in this system that we had enough control that we could get the quality we want while taking advantage of all the efficiency of computers.

Arthur Attwell:

For sure. And that ran for many years. Recently, though, Hachette USA made a decision to wind down the Dante system for producing books. In a talk you did with Brian O'Leary with the book industry study group called 'Wiring for Change', which is a great talk, recommended. I will put the link in the show notes. You said that even though your digital first system was fast and effective, it was a management decision to standardize book production across all the groups in Hachette USA. And that meant going back to InDesign, which must make you sad, to me, also as someone who has built a digital first publishing system, it feels like a step backwards. I know once we lost a lovely publishing client because they felt that their rights sales were just easier if they could say to someone, 'here's an InDesign file', as opposed to saying to someone, 'let me explain what a repository is.'

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. In there for sure.

Arthur Attwell:

Do you think despite what you and I know of InDesign's shortcomings, that its position as a de facto standard is hard to shift?

Dave Cramer:

I don't think I wanna use this word 'standard' to describe InDesign. I think the more appropriate term is monopoly. It has achieved a dominant position in the market because there are no alternatives. That's different from a bunch of people coming together to agree to do things in a certain way. This was not consensus. This was sort of market power.

Dave Cramer:

But I can see why these decisions are made. For one thing, our Dante system was not appropriate for all kinds of books. It was really good for simpler books, for narrative books like fiction and narrative nonfiction. But some books are so highly designed that you really need pixel by pixel control over where everything is on the page.

Dave Cramer:

You know, a four-colour art book that has every page created by a designer. Every page is different. There's no sort of common patterns that we can take advantage of with using HTML or something. There was stuff that was just too complicated for our system to do. And so there is a cost in having two different tools depending on what you're outputting.

Dave Cramer:

Yep.

Dave Cramer:

There's sort of a pretty specialized body of knowledge to be able to do print typesetting in CSS, and so it's not a skill set that's easily found when you're hiring. And so there were some considerations about staffing and training. Sort of everybody in the graphic design space is familiar with InDesign and can sort of make it work on some level. So there were business arguments for making the change that was made, but I think we also lost a lot of efficiency. And I think the single source HTML typesetting was also saving us a lot of money on production costs.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely. Perhaps a pendulum as we see the cost rise in different areas of the business and they get noticed. I know that some people are focusing on improving or extending InDesign, and recently there have been some steps forward with InDesign's EPUB export and its accessibility. Although, they are baby steps, they are at least steps.

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. Friends of mine have been heavily involved in those efforts to help make the EPUB output from InDesign more accessible, which is glorious work and more power to them. Thank you, Laura Brady.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely.

Arthur Attwell:

Another person who should, at some stage, get a BISG industry contribution award. Also, there are companies, I know Ken Jones at Circular Flow has done a lot of work on InDesign plug-ins that can also improve accessibility and other aspects of InDesign's efficiency. There are also some competitors. Affinity is certainly starting to nibble at InDesign's market share. Do you have a sense of whether InDesign is dislodgible, whether that monopoly can be shifted, or are we gonna live with InDesign until digital first systems are of a different kind?

Dave Cramer:

Well, things seem like they will stay the same forever until they suddenly change. I started in this industry in 1999, and Quark was utterly dominant. I spent many, many years working with Quark 3.32r5, which was a beautiful piece of software and was really good at what it did. And then all of a sudden, Quark systematically alienated every one of their customers, and there was this upstart Adobe product, InDesign 1.0, which was terrible, but Adobe was better at some of the business aspects of this. And then the product started improving rapidly. And all of a sudden, nobody used Quark anymore.

Arthur Attwell:

It did feel sudden.

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. There was this sudden switch, something that was universal. All of a sudden, it's like, you know, nobody younger than a certain age has even heard of Quark -

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Dave Cramer:

- so change is definitely possible. Companies should try to care for their users. This is my advice to Adobe.

Arthur Attwell:

The person listening to us now is probably making decisions in a smaller organization than Hachette USA, and therefore has had fewer opportunities perhaps than you have to learn from the breadth and complexity of the systems you've seen. If you were to take things you've learned about making and organizing books at scale at a place like Hachette, are there key principles that you would apply in a smaller operation That you could say to someone, *these* are things that you would care about in growing your publishing work.

Dave Cramer:

I think we've touched on some of that throughout the conversation, you know, this idea of standards. It's like try to follow the standards. EPUB is universal. And so if you wanna sell EPUBs, think about tools that are going to create clean, accessible EPUBs. Take EPUBChecks seriously.

Dave Cramer:

And, also, there's sort of an extension of that called 'Ace'. That's an accessibility checker. It doesn't just check the foundations that it follows the standard, but it also checks against best practices for accessibility. And that's becoming more and more important as the EU accessibility requirements come into effect next year. And so I think everybody who wants to sell books in Europe needs to know about this stuff.

Dave Cramer:

I think there really is a tremendous amount of material online now about how to do these things well. You know, I think you've mentioned BISG, the W3C. You can actually read standards. We try to make them so they make sense. You sort of have to dive in, but I highly recommend actually reading stuff at the source.

Dave Cramer:

And if there's something you don't understand, there's lots of people out there on social media, and the people working on it are really happy to talk about this stuff. There really is a huge community of people who are passionate about this stuff and want to help. So I just say, you know, read and learn and be curious and reach out to people.

Arthur Attwell:

It's a wonderfully friendly community of people, those of us who are, I suppose, sitting at the intersection of wanting to make beautiful books that everybody can read and also just love the background plumbing of how these things work and are happy to talk about the detail.

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. And the other thing, I think, one of the ways the web got started is that some of it is transparent. You can view source in a web page, and you can sort of teach yourself HTML by just looking and seeing how people did it. And I think there's still enough sort of open EPUBs out there that you can download them, and if you're willing to sort of dive in and learn a few little technical things.

Dave Cramer:

So I can see, 'oh, this EPUB is actually a zip file. I can unzip it and see what's inside and go poking around.' You can learn a lot that way. And I think even having some basic knowledge of how things work under the hood makes it much easier to have conversations with vendors and tool creators and things like that. Having information is gonna help you make decisions when people are trying to sell you things that you maybe don't need.

Arthur Attwell:

The world is not gonna get any less overwhelmed by people selling technological solutions to things.

Dave Cramer:

Right.

Arthur Attwell:

And the more you empower yourself, the better off.

Dave Cramer:

Yeah. Exactly.

Arthur Attwell:

Dave, it's been an absolute pleasure. We've only been able to scratch the surface of many of the things you're working on, but it's been wonderful to talk about these things. And thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Dave Cramer:

Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking to you too. This is fun.

Arthur Attwell:

This episode was edited by Helen le Roux and researched by Emma Sacco. How books are made is supported by Electric Book Works where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com.