Book Analysis the XML Way

Author Dan McCreary’s new book “Making Sense of NoSQL” is due out soon – and not only have we had advances of book chapters, but we have seen an advance analysis of the book. Using XML to deconstruct a book is something that is incredibly easy to do with XQuery.

“We ran the reports as a quality check,”  McCreary told me. “I wanted consistency across chapters — and across captions, and so. “Being able to run a query across a book is phenomenally valuable to do. I can do a query in 5 minutes, that Manning [his publisher] has never done on its books.”

When I pressed him on whether the company saw the same value, he admitted that only those who roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty do. McCreary, who is also an author of XQuery wikibooks was surprised that so many book publishers are still unaware of the power of XQuery and Typeswitch-style transforms. Book publishers like Sony, McGraw-Hill, Wiley and Cengage Learning are among those who have been pushing envelopes and building single source publishing solutions — but for many others, lack of expertise and awareness has them struggling. Smaller publishers should look at Direct Digital — the hosted publishing solution powered by MarkLogic which offers turnkey publishing solutions for pennies of what a traditional book can be printed.