A very nice post (not surprisingly) by Kassia Krozser on Publishing Perspectives: How about a little back to the basics? points out what every publisher should know but is able to get amazingly wrong.

The article is well worth a read, I’d just like to stress a few points.
First of all, the shift from the quality itself of the object/content, to the quality of the reading experience:

I have no interest in improving the print experience. I’m looking to improve the reading experience, which to me going forward means getting digital books right.

This kind of requires a shift in perspective: in a book you don’t really need to work on the reading experience, it’s been more or less the same for the last centuries. But now it’s open sea, and it will be interesting to look at all the experiments that will be made in the near future. Should I name my favourite insight on this subject, it would be this:

Consider the Medium: It’s digital, not print. Endless “pages” of breathless quotes about previous books are annoying and pointless. I’ve already bought the book; I want to start reading. Dump page number — they make no sense and highlight the lack of thought going into the digital edition. There are more logical ways to create these references.

Finally, and this will be a (the?) crucial point in the next few years:

It won’t come as a surprise to see that most of the basics noted below relate to production and workflow.

A well laid-out workflow is paramount. But this does not simply means to get the contect out in as many devices as possible with as less work as possible: it means rethinking the content itself (back on this, soon).