Read the original interview in Italian here
In this interview Antonio Tombolini, founder of the StreetLib publishing house, tells us how his passion for books and reading gave rise to an interest in digital publishing. A world to discover, as his words reveal. An industrial sector that is firmly tied to the tradition of printing and that only slowly manages to create its own market that requires solid strategies and very broad views, but that also allows you to have your head “in the clouds”.
ELR: Antonio Tombolini, in 2006 you founded the publishing house Simplicimus Book Farm that since 2016 is called StreetLib. How did your interest in digital publishing begin?
Antonio Tombolini: Simply from my passion for books and reading, which led me at the time to ask myself if the book should not have to deal, sooner or later, with the transition to digital that music was already facing.
ELR: In 2014 you founded another publishing house, Antonio Tombolini Editore (ATE), a digital first publishing house that like StreetLib also publishes paper books. You advertise workshops on ATE’s website. How are the workshops structured? What are the prerogatives to participate in your training courses?
Antonio Tombolini: The experience of the ATE workshops was preliminary to the creation (which we are working on in these months) of an offer of specialized training on the book in all its aspects, which will take the form of a real “Permanent School of the Book” by 2018, with a great variety of courses and training courses, both in the area of technical skills, in that of content and economic-managerial skills. We are convinced that the transition to digital and to the web also involves the book industry in an adjustment of skills and we intend to offer the best tools to acquire them.
ELR: Do you think there is an awareness and a strong will in the publishing sector for the development of new technologies that will facilitate the transition from print to digital publishing?
Antonio Tombolini: No, or at least not adequately in the current protagonists of publishing. Yes, on the other hand, and increasingly, among authors, especially the youngest, and readers.
ELR: How did you personally experience the transition from print to digital from 2006 to the present day?
Antonio Tombolini: It was and still is a path of progressive discoveries, which will still be long, because we are still at the first steps of an evolution of which we have only seen a small part. What I have learned in the meantime is that in these phases of radical changes in the paradigms of an entire sector, the less judicious and the less suitable to identify and cultivate the new are precisely those who in theory would be in the position of greatest advantage, or those who already work in the sector. And the bigger they are, the worse they are.
ELR: From a brief research on the web on electronic books it appears that the history of digital publishing began around the year 1993 when two Italians, Franco Crugnola and his wife Isabella Rigamonti, created the first electronic book and when the poet Zahur Klemath Zapata published ” Murder as One of the Fine Arts” by Thomas de Quincey in DBF (digital book format). When do you think the history of digital books began and what are some of the highlights of the history of digital publishing?
Antonio Tombolini: It is always difficult, and after all not even too useful, to chase the primacy of this or that in the advent of a phenomenon. The book has actually been written and produced digitally for many years, for decades, I would say since the advent of the ancestors of computers, at the end of the 70s of the last century, when not yet computers began to circulate, but the electronic writing machines, of which Olivetti was a forerunner: since then the book is written mainly in digital, elaborated, formatted, corrected, etc.. always in digital, through appropriate software programs. The turning point in my opinion lies in the advent of the first reading devices with e-ink screen, which we started to sell, first in the world, and not only in Europe, just at the end of 2006: it is only with these screens that reading electronically a book becomes an experience finally comparable to the comfort of the reading experience on paper.
ELR: In the StreetLib Stores you can buy or download free e-books in PDF, EPUB and Kindle formats as well as paper books in many languages – from Zulu to Bokmal. What are the most popular formats and literary genres? How has the market for different formats developed?
Antonio Tombolini: As for formats, the market has been focusing on Kindle for the Amazon world and on EPUB for everything else, with a residual importance of PDF for free distribution and manuals.
As for literary genres, instead, the lion’s share is certainly made by fiction, for now, even if non-fiction is already showing signs of growth, and will grow much more than fiction in the coming years, as digital reading software improves.
ELR: On the websites Simplicissimus.it and StreetLib.com it is possible to distribute e-books through the respective platforms STEALTH and PUBLISH. Where does the need to create digital platforms arise? What are the advantages over existing online services?
Antonio Tombolini: Platforms like ours allow even small publishers and self-publishers to reach with their book all the shelves of all e-book stores in the world, from the largest and most global to the smallest and most local. And all with one click, without having to negotiate with a growing number of stores, and without having to manage separately each of them, also from the administrative and accounting point of view, which as you can imagine is particularly complex.
On the other hand, we allow the biggest and most global players, such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, to offer for sale titles (we currently distribute almost 250,000 titles, and we buy about 500 new titles per week) from small publishers and self-publishers that they would never be able to reach and manage.
ELR: From an aesthetic point of view of the medium, how does the way of conceiving the layout of an e-book enriched with interactive and multimedia effects change compared to a paper book?
Antonio Tombolini: This is actually a very delicate field and on which there is much to experiment. The reading software is not all aligned and inserting too many “effects” would risk making the book work on one platform and not on another. Not only that: these “effects” must be measured with great caution, because the step from a “well done interactive e-book” to a “badly done videogame” is very short.
ELR: How are interactive and multimedia works saved and archived?
Antonio Tombolini: The files of the works reside in our servers “on the clouds”, with replicas in various areas of the world, so that in case of connection interruptions in an area, for example in the U.S. servers, European or Asian servers can come into operation.
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?
Antonio Tombolini: Those who want to devote themselves to the profession of pager today can’t help but study the EPUB format, which is essential, but that is also, after all, a sort of specialized “dialect” for HTML books.
Those who instead write books don’t need it at all. We ourselves offer a free online application, StreetLib Write through which you can write your own book or import your existing book in Word format and the like, to automatically get an EPUB, Kindle and PDF format validated and ready for distribution.