Read the original interview in Italian here

In the #ELRPUB series could not miss the publishing house PubCoder, one of the first Italian digital publishing houses based in Turin, of which there is a brief mention in another interview with Daniela Calisi. Paolo Albert, one of the co-founders of the software company, answers to ELR’s questions this time. He tells us how the project started in 2010 developed and how the digital publishing sector evolved. In a rather sober style, Albert also explains the advantages of the technologies applied by PubCoder and what could be the future developments of the sector.

ELR: Paolo Albert, in 2013 you founded together with Paolo Giovine, Angelo Scicolone and Enrico Gazzano the software company PubCoder, one of the few publishing houses in Italy active in the field of digital publishing. Can you tell us when your interest in digital publishing began and how the group of PubCoder founders was formed?

Paolo Albert: With Paolo Giovine we are old friends, in 2010 our experience as a father and the advent of the first iPad inspired us in the same way: we immediately saw enormous potential in the field of interactive books for children.

At the beginning we thought of developing ad hoc products directly, then we began to think about a tool that would reduce costs and be easy to use; even without writing code.

The idea was to give those who were not programmers the opportunity to develop an interactive project in all its phases: from the draft to the publication.

We looked for a developer and came across Angelo Scicolone with whom we worked on the first version of the software. In 2013 our start up is officially born.

ELR: In the page of Case Studies you can download and read some works that were created with PubCoder. The authors of the books, it reads at the top of the page, “publish books in different formats and in different languages on the most important online bookstores”. What are the formats and literary genres that have so far been created with PubCoder?

Paolo Albert: PubCoder was mainly created to create e-books for children, but the same features are useful for any content with complex interactivity, for example: graphic novels, school books with the possibility to implement any exercises, books designed specifically for dyslexic readers whose usability is fully customizable, catalogues with interactions for a user experience far better than static pdfs and animated products for digital storytelling of brands.

The software has been used by small and large international children’s publishers, from MacMillan to Giunti, from Bonnier to De Agostini; creative agencies have used it to tell stories of their customers; many self-publishers have used it to publish their stories. On this page you will find a list of the products that have been made with PubCoder.

ELR: On the site you can also create a Shelf, or an ecosystem for the distribution of books created with PubCoder. What are the advantages of a Shelf and what was the need to create a new online platform rather than using the existing ones?

Paolo Albert: PubCoder users almost always need to publish the same content on different platforms, this means knowing all the formats and the many rules of the stores. So, we wondered if it would not be useful to create an environment where you can publish and distribute your content created with PubCoder.

This is how Shelf was born, an app library totally customizable by the customer, from the graphic template to the navigation structure, which allows direct sales on the App Store and Google Play Store.

ELR: PubCoder also offers training courses. How are the courses structured and to whom are they addressed?

Paolo Albert: We have been organizing training courses for a long time, today with an increasingly large and international audience we address directly to schools where graphics and design are taught and to partners who have added PubCoder to their tools.

ELR: PubCoder projects can be exported in fixed format (fixed layout EPUB3). What is the reason for this choice and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this format?

Paolo Albert: The fixed format allows the creative to have control of the content pixel by pixel. For example, a ball bouncing from point A to point B will have to have specific coordinates every time the proportions of the project change. This means that the content is always cut ad hoc for the landing device, an “additional” job at the beginning, but that allows you to have a precise result at the end.

ELR: In your article published on medium.com you explain the difference between Desktop Publishing (DTP) and web-based software by mentioning the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence technology to combine these two modes of publication. Taking your cue from this intuition, how do you think digital publishing technology will develop?

Paolo Albert: If we think that the hype of the moment are audiobooks, there are very promising developments related to the application of new AI tools to this type of product, I think for example of Amazon Alexa and Amazon Echo. The challenge for publishers, once again, is to be able to seize opportunities without necessarily experiencing them as a threat.

ELR: In 1997 Project Gutenberg, which started in 1971, reached the number 1000 of books published with the e-book #1000 “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri. How have the market and the way of selling and distributing electronic books developed in the 20 years from 1997-2017?

Paolo Albert: Amazon was the first engine of e-book development. The downside is that the Seattle-based company sees the book as purely commercial. It is said that one of the strategies for the success of its e-commerce platform was precisely the book, used as a real Trojan horse (the target “reader”, you know, is high spend). On the other hand, this pure commercial interest is also the cross of the e-book, in the sense that there is little propensity to innovate the format, if it is not supported or justified by purely commercial reasons. Amazon, still today, is the undisputed master of the market, and any discussion of growth and future can only pass through their clutches.

ELR: How has the market for electronic books in EPUB format developed instead?

Paolo Albert: The EPUB format is a standard that has had its fortune thanks to the spread of readers. With the advent of the third version of the standard (EPUB3, in fact), we saw the opportunity to evolve the format towards new frontiers of reading: not only text novels, but also children’s books in fixed-layout, the introduction of interactivity, the possibility of publishing real “magazines”. However, the new format has struggled to spread. As mentioned, the market leader is Amazon that uses another format, and therefore the EPUB is discarded by content producers because the perceived relationship cost/opportunity to work that format is too high.

ELR: How are interactive and multimedia works like PubCoder’s e-books saved and archived?

Paolo Albert: PubCoder is an authoring software and allows you to export a file that is totally in the hands of its author. There are actually metadata fields to help distributors (especially of e-books), but it’s not basically a problem we’ve ever directly dealt with.

ELR: How important is it to know the programming languages to create e-books in EPUB format? What advice would you give to those who want to start learning to program?

Paolo Albert: HTML is fundamental because it is the basis for the formatting of text and other content (image, video), for the semantic “tagging” of content that allows you to make the e-book accessible, etc… The EPUB format itself is a format that defines a standard way of packaging contents of pages/paragraphs that are built in HTML format. So, no doubt: go to the W3C website without wasting any more time!