Technical Book Review: Universalcode
These days I am reading the German book Universalcode - “Journalismus im digitalen Zeitalter” (journalism in a digital age). On 580 pages it contains articles by many journalists, working for some of the major German publications.
All in all it is a pretty interesting read. Especially for me, as I am dealing with online articles at work daily, so learning more about the creative process that goes into them is quite exciting.
While I don’t qualify to comment on the content on the book, I am a technologist, and therefore have a couple of ideas about how the digital edition of the book - which I bought - could be improved.
Do not use bol.de for ebooks
Unrelated to the actual technical book review, and therefore separate: Do not use bol.de for ebooks.
First of all, buying the book at bol.de and getting it to run on my iPad was a rather painful experience. The format of the ebook was .acsm, a digital rights management format by Adobe. To make that work on the iPad, I need a new reader - I chose Bluefire Reader - that can handle that format. My conclusion for the next buy: Don’t use bol.de for ebooks, checkout the iBooks bookstore first!
Question: Does anybody have the ebook from iBooks? I am wondering if my review below would actually look different, had I not bought the book from bol.de.
Technical Book Review
Now to the technical review of the digital version of this book:
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The formatting of the book is rather minimal. Really just paragraphs, section titles, and bullet points. From time to time some italics, even bold or underlined text isn’t used much.
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The book contains no graphics whatsoever. Meaning neither any data visualization (like charts etc) or any other sort of imagery.
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I read three articles so far and have already spotted a handful of errors of various sorts. Definitely more than I would usually expect in a book, after proofreading and quality control.
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The book rarely uses direct links to websites or similar. Additional multimedia material does not seem to be available either. The book’s website abzv-universalcode.de has some content but the relation between website and book isn’t quite clear.
Summary
The digital version of this book costs about 20 EUR. Almost too much, when what I am getting is more like a PDF with a list of articles.
My recommendation: Practice what you preach! Take the digital version of this book, and make it an example of great digital publishing!
I just saw that there is a crowdfunding initiative with the working title Universalcode 2 - a potential success of this book. Maybe some of these hints here are helpful for that as well.