Everything that Rises Must Converge:
New Dimensions in Web Publishing

by Laura Fillmore
President, Open Book Systems (OBS)

Paraclete Press
October 29, 1996


Paraclete Press participants:

Brother Christopher, Paige Cleverly, Bob Edmonson,
Rachel Lussier, Lilian Miao, Dough Velie

  1. Understanding the Web as a new medium for publishing
    • Internet: What It Is Not
      • Not a phone company
      • Not a hardware or software company
      • Not a country
      • Not a library, or a sandbox to play in
      • The old analogies don't hold; the Web represents a path towards a new form of recorded communication
    • Internet: What It Is
      • A distributed system of internetworked computers
      • An interoperable, nonproprietary system
      • A largely unregulated, global communications system
      • A multimedia, recorded, and basically infinite environment
      • An information space increasing exponentially in size and complexity
      • Updateable constantly by site "authors" and users
      • Getting cheaper and more ubiquitous all the time
        • Web-ready TVs in 1997
        • Internet services being provided by phone companies, ISPs, utility companies such as General Electric (Check for prices of major ISPs)
        • Inexpensive video cameras make "online publishing" as easy as home video
      • The global marketplace is just beginning to open its doors: OBS Store sales increasing. According to "Wall Street Journal", Online retailers sold $ 350 million in 1995; Forrester Research predicts that computer product sales alone will grow to $ 2.1 billion by 2000, followed by travel (predicted to be at $ 1.5 billion by 2000.
      • Publishing becomes more than productions and abstract representations. Online publishing presents paths to direct and immediate experience on a mass scale.

  2. Three Goals for a Christian Web publisher
    • Market existing products and services (supplementing the solid business of the past)
    • Awaken people to the spiritual quest and fulfill their need for spiritual support, while offering a haven for practicing Christians (expanding present duties)
    • R&D -- discovering through practice the power of internetworked computers for spiritual development (building the future)

  3. Practical Solutions for Managing Media in Transition

    Problem: Building on to your existing publishing business: How to make it more than retrofitting static representations of existing products (books and CDs)
    Solutions: Bring the site to life through:
    • link editing: for example, possibly the sample chapter on eternal life from A Reader's Companion to Crossing the Threshold of Hope could be link edited to contextualize it onto the Web (see for example Nelson Mandela's "Long Walk to Freedom." http://www.obs.com/obs/english/books/Mandela/Welcome.html
    • offering people the capability to comment and participate in the recorded environment, creating a permanent recorded extension of books such as "Reader's Companion" or "Echoes of Eternity".

    Problem: How to integrate terrestrial marketing with the Web efforts?
    Solution: Synergize, set reasonable strategies and goals, and monitor the site. Example: Gordon and Breach AIDS site.

    Problem: Generating interest and traffic at the site.
    Solution: Use the multimedia capabilities of the Web to complement existing products. Example: sound files for music publications, as in The Monastery of Christ in the Desert. Rather than *telling* about existing products, you can *show* users new ways to apply and understand the content of those products.

    Problem: How to enrich and customize your site by matching the spiritual needs of your readers to your publications?
    Solution: Create a database of publications, where site visitors fill out a questionnaire and they are "prescribed" certain Paraclete books or publications. Here is an example of the use of a questionnaire at a Bed & Breakfast site.

    Problem: Organizing and presenting all the separate products and services.
    Solution: Integrate the different publishing programs using the web medium: text, music, video. Good example is fractal art:as it applies the words graphically; visiting an online monstery gives users a sense of what spiritual life online might be like.

    Problem: People don't tend to read online; strategies for turning the abstract representational acts of reading and viewing into the direct acts of witnessing and experiencing.
    Solution: Explore interactive ways to offer online opportunities for practicing christianity: See this agreement for an example.

    Problem: Applying papyrocentric design concepts to a living medium can be boring. For example, small and compact type will make you go blind!
    Solution: Design online is not primarily an issue of rendering print: Effective online design allows a new kind of publishing to emerge, as we see at http://www.christdesert.org/. Such design has more to do with structuring users' experience than retrofitting type and pictures to the online environment.

    Problem: Producing a "book" that never ends: building the perpetually moving publishing machine online
    Solution: Publish the web back to the web, through the "lens" of existing Paraclete publications and services. For example, "Medjugorje the Message, now a static .gif and blurb presentation, could become richer by letting others from the web into the book by linking to http://www.catholic-internet.org/cain/medjmore.htm; Set a mood for the site with music, such as Gregorian Chants. Edit the Web: Example: Ten Commandments

  4. Demos of Possible Interactive Functionalities
    • Quizzes and tests as a vehicle for publication: "What is the right Christian respose to ________(event of the day)?"
    • See for an example of applying and customizing a Christian publication : Christianity STOP
    • Control your site with "The Postman": Postman allows you to directly edit individual web pages online, and immediately re-post the modified file on the site. Control over posted content thus returns back into the hands of your editorial staff, without the necessity to consult a system administrator to execute changes.
    • Satisfy your users with immediate credit card clearance: Your customers may appreciate the convenience of immediately paying online for purchased products by using their credit cards.
    • Immediate feedback: Monitor your online community using Qstats. With QStats, you can run granulated hit reports on selected parts of your site whenever needed. You can granualte reports down to a single page or .gif-file. For our demo, use "d3" as ID, and "town" as password (2 times) to access the statistics of the Schooner-Adventure site.
    • Maintain contact with your users through new technology such as Internet Phone (basic version to download for free), Chat sessions, and CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software (version 2.1, starting at $ 96 for Mac and Windows)

  5. The Best Net Starts at Home
    • Getting connected: dial-up modem connection versus leased line connection. Initially, control your site from in-house by dial-up modem; when demand for faster connectivity is needed, switch to a designated Internet connection via T1.
    • Intranet applications for publishers: Your biggest resource is your people
    • Involve the entire team in the site, from Acquisitions through Sales
    • Train your people in HTML, SGML and Java - the Web offers the necessary resources for free

        Online sources for HTML-Hypertext Mark-Up Language and Web Page Design:

      • Web-Tools
      • Introduction to HTML
      • HTML Primer
      • Web page design
      • XTension by Astrobyte: Quark - HTML converter for Macintosh
      • e-gate: exports QuarkXpress text to HTML or structured ASCII, and converts the images into JPEG or GIF files.

        Online sources on SGML:

      • Getting started with SGML: White paper, explaining the general concept behind SGML
      • SGML/HTML Resource Center
      • Introduction to Standard Generalized Markup Language - SGML
      • SGML Open - non-profit, international consortium of suppliers whose products and services support SGML
      • Techexplorer, a sophisticated hypermedia browser, to display SGML-based, graphical structures in HTML.
      • Upcoming SGML conference in Boston: Nov. 18 - 21, 1996 at Sheraton Boston Hotel and Towers

        Online sources for Java Scripting:

      • Java Headquarters at SunSite
      • Java Programming for the Internet

        Recommended readings on web publishing

      • David Flanagan: "Java in a Nutshell", (O'Reilly & Assoc.): good pocket reference for the technically advanced
      • Laura Lemay & Charles L. Perkins: "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days", (Sams.net Publ.): good introduction for non-programmers and technical laymen
      • Laura Lemay: "Teach Yourself HTML in 21 Days", (Sams.net Publ.): HTML-book from the same series
      • Lynda Weinmann: "Designing Web Graphics", (New Rider): how to design fast-loading and space-efficient web graphics. As a rule of thumb: thumbnail images should be under 10K, gif/jpg for normal pages under 30K and gif/jpg under 100K (unless noted) on pages which are linked to for a more detailed image.
      • Ed Krol: "Whole Internet User Guide and Catalog", (O'Reilly & Assoc.): general readings
      • Tracy LaQuey: "The Internet Companion, A Beginners' Guide to Global Networking", (Addison-Wesley): general reading
      • Kevin Kelly: "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" (Addison-Wesley Trade)
      • Katie Hafner/Matthew Lyon: "Where Wizards Stay up Late", (Simon & Schuster): about the origins of the Internet

    • Apply for unique domain name, for example chant.com
    • From concept to posting: Web publishing step by step
    • Security of the site: Structure publishing server for both Internet and Intranet access. The illustration of the triangle is a good example, where the bottom two-thirds of the triangle is secure and "behind the scenes", used for development work by your editorial staff internally, and the top-third of the triangle is "published" for the public to see.
    • Rights and privileges:Only authorized people within the publishing company have the rights to access the "private", behind-the-scenes parts fo the server, according to the rights and privileges given to them.
    • Methods for Integrating the reader into the site: Offering user forums using NetForum Software
    • Reaching out to New Web Audiences
      • Schools
      • Homes
      • Businesses
      • International/multilingual

  6. Possible Future Projects:

    • Gregorian Chants: Chanting the offices every three hours, in different time zones.
    • Putting Restless Heart up
    • Reader's Companion as basis for a multireligious approach to news of the day. License a news feed to go into the site and publish portions of the book in response to that.
    • Enable authors to directly submit manuscripts to the site: the online manuscript submission allows authors to dircetly submit their works to your editors who revise incoming submissions and suggest changes. Involving authors in the editorial process serves as attractive author-magnet on your site. Entering Gordon and Breach's online manuscript submission system, you will find specific guidelines of how to submit papers. Each of the journals featured at "Priority Communications" manages its own space for manuscript submission.
    Discover tomorrow's pastures new by publishing on today's Web.

      Copyright © 1996–2024 by Laura Fillmore; written permission required to reprint.
      laura@obs.com