The general acceptance of the revolutionary spirit was brought home to me about a year ago in a conversation with the director of a university press. She proudly boasted that her organization now published e-books — specifically, Kindle editions with Amazon — and that she was working to get her books onto the other digital platforms. I made no comment, as there is a lot more to digital publishing than the Kindle, but she then went on. She had in her budget money to build a complete digital workflow. Now all books would be produced in XML and the various specific formats (ePub, Mobi, PDF, etc.) would be generated at the end of the process, as market circumstances required, with print simply as one output among many. This is getting interesting. But she didn’t stop there. The move to XML, she said, was part of her strategy to maintain as flexible a program as possible so that her press could pounce on new opportunities as they appeared, as (she said) they inevitably would. So even here the head of a small academic publisher, whose revenue derived almost entirely from print and whose organization sits in the slow-moving environment of a bureaucratic research university, was endorsing the recommendations of technologists: flexibility, ongoing disruption, experimentation, and probing for new opportunities. What does the trickster have to offer her now?
