Read the original interview in Italian here

Our journey into the world of digital publishing continues with an interview with Michela Di Stefano, founder of Studio 361° based in Brescia. Thanks to her long working experience, which began in the early nineties, various projects for various Italian companies and her work as a teacher, we are able to obtain a broader vision of the digital publishing sector. Michela Di Stefano’s captivating testimony will make us better know this “blue ocean”.

ELR: Michela Di Stefano, in 2007 you founded Studio 361°, a network of communication specialists, where you work as a teacher. Can you tell us how your passion for digital publishing came about?

Michela Di Stefano: I started training in 1992 as a computer technician in a company that sold the first Apple computers to typography and advertising agencies. I saw the first models of Mac computers and the first versions of the software still in black and white! Then I had other professional experiences: web designer, large format printing and gadgets, until I decided to set up my own business in 2004 with the recognition by Adobe of the title of Adobe Guru. The decision to create the Studio 361° network in 2007 came naturally, given the need to cover various needs and requests from customers and not being able to meet them personally.

The discovery of digital publishing came in 2011 when the print market began to be truly inflated and a market in which it was increasingly difficult to make the quality of service prevail over the lowest price. When I bought my first iPad, I was presented with a real mirage: an absolutely new, stimulating and unexplored market in which we could express our expertise, our values and in which it was not possible to improvise as it requires real technical preparation to be able to distribute on the stores and to be able to stay up to date on the continuous changes and updates in this sector. I can say that we fell in love with this market and even today we still get great satisfaction from the projects we realize, many more than those we collect for the realization of traditional publishing projects. Surely here in Italy it is still an unknown market, but we are confident in the not too distant future to see our commitment to making this “blue ocean” known in our country grow.

ELR: You work in companies, communication agencies, typographies and training institutes. How is digital publishing technology used in these areas?

Michela Di Stefano: I teach at Hdemia Santa Giulia in Brescia (Accademia; in Italian /h/ is pronounced ‘acca’), in 3 of my courses I taught the use of digital publishing: in the course of Multimedia Design within the path of museum education, I taught how to create interactive e-books to set up exhibitions and raise awareness of museums. Following my course, some students have created e-books for exhibition catalogues: Viandanti dell’anima (Wayfarers of the Soul), Kòsmos. Daniele Salvalai, Gabriella Benedini. I tempi del cielo (The times of the sky). These students found work thanks to their ability to create interactive e-books and it was a very important goal.

During the Graphic Design course, I taught how to make interactive e-books to present a project to a customer, I myself use interactive ePubs to make important meetings and present projects to my customers.

During my two years of specialization I taught how to make Apps using InDesign together with Twixl Publisher and Paperlit. In both cases the students created a magazine in paper format and then in digital format. You can see some examples on this page.

In companies there is still very little knowledge of this market, everyone knows the word App, but the ideas on the implementation and real usefulness of this tool is very low. As for e-books, the situation is even worse, not even advertising agencies and creatives are aware of the potential and characteristics of this product. In most cases the concept of e-book is combined with a readable novel about a black and white e-reader like the Kindle or a PDF to browse on a computer… It may sound incredible, but we’ve had more feedback about digital publishing from people who are not about communication, but about culture. We have already created 3 monographs for the Martino Dolci Foundation of Brescia, which has understood how the creation of e-books with the monographs of painters from Brescia, can bring young people closer to the world of art and can introduce them to these artists, something that the paper monographs made up to 3 years ago, could not have done.

ELR: In 2017 you started to organize the “BreakfastPro”, a series of monthly meetings for communication, marketing and publishing professionals. What have been the most significant results of the “Breakfast 4.0” so far?

Michela Di Stefano: The interest aroused by these very short meetings and outside the traditional time slots was very high. We had a request to participate of more than 50% of the capacity of the room that we had available and we had to activate a “standing list” to allow a higher number of registrations. Then some last-minute absentees allowed everyone to sit down and always have the room with a high participation. We can be very satisfied because the hours from 8.00 to 9.30 and the winter months (the first meeting was in September 2017 and the last in December 2017) were not auspicious. Given the interest and success, we decided to propose them again for 2018.

Probably the formula “breakfast + training” has been successful because it allows in a limited time to discover only one topic and be able to focus on that unlike the other events that we organize more challenging both in terms of organization and participation of users. Obviously, these are very different meetings, in fact the annual event of Digital Publishing Explorers is already scheduled for 2019 and will take place in Brescia. Like every edition, the day will be full of meetings and information, a completely different cut from BreakfastPro, created to offer essential tools to professionals who want to keep up to date and up to date with technology to offer and find new business strategies.

ELR: How are your training courses structured? What are the basic notions that participants need to have?

Michela Di Stefano: All our courses are “personalized” in the sense that, before leaving, there is a telephone conversation with the applicant. Only in this way is it possible to create a tailor-made training course for those who request it. Whether you are a freelance professional or a corporate team, before training you need to know the level of participants, what are the objectives to be achieved and how much time is available to do so. On the basis of these elements we formulate an ad hoc program each time. On the website there are lists of the functions of each package, but the course is much more, we also release links to tutorials, video tutorials and other important material that you can not deepen during the live lesson.

ELR: Do you think there is an awareness and a strong will, in your working environment, for the development of new technologies that will facilitate the transition from print to digital publishing?

Michela Di Stefano: Unfortunately, the use and usefulness of new technologies that allow you to migrate or simply distribute traditional printing projects in digital format are still unknown and seen with distrust. In Italy the word e-book is used to indicate a PDF and an App to indicate a game or something very complex when it is not so. Since 2011 we have been working to make this market known to the world of creatives and all those working in the communication sector, today (in 2018) we begin to see the first results of what we have sown, but the road still very long …

ELR: A short web research on electronic books shows 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?

Michela Di Stefano: In my opinion, as for the Web, initially implemented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was a researcher at CERN, based on his ideas and a colleague of his, Robert Cailliau. Tim Berners published on August 6, 1991 the first website in the world, at CERN, but years passed before this technology took off in Italy, even today there are companies that do not have a website and consider it useless for their business!!! Worse still there are companies that have an inefficient one and not suitable to be displayed on new mobile devices.

In the same way, digital publishing came with Amazon’s first reading tools and then evolved in an incredible way, but it is still largely unknown. Both the interactive ePub format and the editorial applications can be used to distribute editorial information quickly and cheaply, but are seen as too complex and expensive investments due to the lack of culture on the subject. Some companies have gone ahead without the guidance of professional structures like ours in these markets and have achieved great frustration and very little results due to a lack of knowledge of the tools and rules that underlie the digital publishing market.

This market is certainly effective, but in continuous evolution. It is a market managed by precise rules that the distribution Stores dictate to all those who wish to distribute on these channels. As a result of this, companies are not able to manage this important step independently, but they think that they can somehow arrange themselves in a way to say the least “homemade”, while professionals who have been working in this field for some time, could be of great help to save money and time and accompany them to the most effective result for them.

To return to the initial question, even a PDF (born in 1991 with the Camelot project of Adobe) can be considered an example of digital publishing, but it is not an e-book. When we talk about e-books we are talking about .ePub or .mobi format or other formats of reading usable on specific devices that can also perform additional operations such as:

• Enlarging/reducing the reading character
• Changing the Reading Font
• Possibility to put notes and bookmarks
• Text search
• Hyperlinks
• Interactive functions for interactive ePub formats:
• Animations
• Audio and video
• Photographic galleries

etc. etc. etc.

In the light of the above, I can safely say that the history of digital publishing is still being written.

ELR: How has the digital publishing market developed in the last 20 years in Italy? Which European country is at the forefront in this sector?

Michela Di Stefano: In part I answered this question in my previous answers because in Italy the digital publishing market is very unripe and largely unknown. If we think that traditional paper publishing is in crisis in itself, books that have been converted to digital have resulted in a market of 3% of the traditional publishing market, a very derisory figure. That’s the point. The term “digital publishing” does not refer to the conversion of paper books into a digital version, but it is much more. The term Publishing already indicates more broadly the process of producing and distributing literature, music or information and the activity of making this information available to the public on various media. As you can imagine, Digital Publishing allows you to broaden this concept and embrace a number of very diverse sectors that are:

• photography
• video
• web
• social network
• paper
• eBook and apps

All together they allow us to distribute content on new digital devices, so the concept of digital publishing is much broader than we usually think.

ELR: From the point of view of the aesthetics of the medium, what are the differences between the way of conceiving the layout of an e-book and the way of printing?

Michela Di Stefano: If we talk about a fixed layout e-book, the layout can be very similar to that of the paper format, however, we must remember that these contents must be usable on screens of different sizes and therefore it is important to study the layout of the page in order to be readable on the largest number of devices. To do this, you need to use fonts suitable for reading on the display (for example avoiding fonts with very strong graces), set the font size to at least 20 pt for viewing on tablets from 7″ upwards, while for smartphones you need to think of a different layout and dedicated. If you ignore these parameters, you force the user to do “pinch and zoom” to be able to read the content and this is really uncomfortable and counterproductive for the reader.

ELR: What do you think are the fundamental aesthetic criteria for the layout of an e-book in EPUB format?

Michela Di Stefano: A part of the answer has already been given in the previous one, I would add that the criteria of legibility prevail over the criteria of aesthetics. If the e-book is not readable, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the layout is. The challenge in this historical moment is to find a format that can be used on the largest number of devices without having to create different layouts, also because, unlike editorial applications, an e-book does not have the ability to recognize the reading device when it is downloaded from the stores, a function that is, instead, active for apps that are able to recognize if the device is a smartphone or a tablet and allow you to create “rendition” ad hoc for each type of support.

ELR: How important is it to know the programming languages to work in the digital publishing sector? What advice would you give to those who want to start learning to program?

Michela Di Stefano: Having knowledge of html programming allows you to go deeper into the creation of an ePub and allows you to get around some obstacles. Being able to put your hands on the html code of an e-book means having “almost absolute” control of how it will be displayed on the device. My advice is to know this programming language to be able to use it in case of need.