Publishing a book has always been a costly and laborious enterprise, a situation that has not changed since Gutenberg’s time. Someone, either a printer or, in most cases today, a publishing house, must front the money to finance the project, with little assurance of breaking a profit even after an often lengthy period of selling the book. Often a university, association, or institute will subsidize the up-front costs of publishing a book, and occasionally, even the author himself. The publisher must keep the books in its inventory over a long period of time, and bookstores must also stock and keep books on their shelves. A searchable catalog must be kept current that provides information about availability, costs, and how to procure the book. A special book-ordering system must be maintained between publisher and bookseller.

Many in the publishing industry will point to the fact that it’s a finely tuned system that has worked for centuries now, but there’s no denying its tediously cumbersome nature. In itself it would seem to be a rational and efficient system, but as soon as one steps back to gain a perspective over the entire process of making a book available for others to read, one realizes how primitive

Alone the rather mechanical process of typesetting and printing a book is fraught with difficulties. These problems are inherent in the radically differing needs of the author on the one hand, and the printer on the other. As any author knows, the creative process requires intense personal concentration and effort, and getting to a finished manuscript unpredictable. The printer, on the other hand, must work in as rationally systematic a manner as possible to make the printing of the text a profitable enterprise. The more time and effort that is expended in creating a text, the less the likelihood that his costs will be recovered.

For the writer it is critical that one’s ideas are printed exactly as he or she has intended, while the printer the highest priority is to typeset the text and get it printed as quickly as possible. As with any income-generating enterprise, time is money. The result can often lead to a collision of competing priorities, a veritable train wreck with frazzled nerves and hurt feelings. The “Advertisement” at the top of this Web page is a poignant example of the tensions that have now existed for centuries between the author and printer or publisher.

If one believes that such dramatic conflicts between the author’s and the printer/publisher’s priorities are a product of the distant past, one only needs to consider such similar “advertisements”, or reader’s alerts, as the warning published in Timothy Lenoir’s The Strategy of Life, published as a paperback in 1989:

The role and function of the publisher has changed significantly over the past five centuries, an ongoing process that has bestowed the publisher with ever more responsibilities and control over whether and how a book is distributed. The publisher, as a critical player in the creation and distribution of a book,

From Brockhaus:

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, deutscher Anthropologe, Zoologe, * 1752, † 1840; lehrte in Göttingen als Erster vergleichende ..

March 16, 2008

Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias

By NOAM COHEN

IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.

A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print.

It was only last month, however, that the publisher of Germany’s foremost multivolume encyclopedia, Brockhaus, took similar action, announcing that in April it would be putting online, free, all 300,000 of its articles, vetted by scholars over 200 years of print editions.  At the same time, the publishing house said it couldn’t promise that it would ever produce another print edition, something it has done regularly since the encyclopedia appeared in Leipzig in 1808.

“I remember in my own childhood in the 1940s, early ’50s, I and my parents would sit around the table and look at the encyclopedia together,” said Larry Hickman, director of a center at Southern Illinois University devoted to the education pioneer John Dewey. “In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the World Book encyclopedia was regarded as authoritative,” he recalled, laughing as he agreed, “That’s why you would copy it for your book report.”

Britannica says it updates an article every 20 minutes.

In essence, the Internet is justifying the hubris of early compilers like Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, said Edward O. Wilson, the expert on insects at Harvard who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and serves as honorary chairman. “There were so few species to deal with, only in the thousands,” he said. “He and his disciples thought they could do the rest of the flora and fauna of the world. Boy, were they wrong.”

In the intervening centuries, Professor Wilson said, science was taken over by specialists. But by allowing specialists to pool their knowledge on a Web site, he said, the Encyclopedia of Life will be able to come close to the dream of a compendium of all the known species in the world.

“Once we get all the information in one place, think of the impact this will have — available to anybody, anywhere, anytime,” he said.

Mr. Aguilar-Cauz of Britannica is counting on that sort of nostalgic allure to keep at least some encyclopedias on bookshelves and not just hard drives. He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs — “What you need people to understand,” he said, “is that it is a luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy.”

For the past several years, a number of publishers have experimented in various ways in making both licensed and unlicensed content available on the Web. The models they have used have largely been taken from the world of printed publicatons, for example in their use of the ‘book’ and the ‘journal article’ as the prmary units that are commoditized as works.

Subject: _Morning Becomes Electric: Post-Modern Scholarly Information Access, Organization, and Navigation_

From: Gerry Mckiernan <gerrymck@iastate.edu>

Friends/

Nearly a Decade Ago I Speculated About The Future of Scholarly "Information Access, Organization, and Navigation"

Well It's The Future and It's About Time That The Predictions Happened  [:-)] ...

The Section on  Navigation Can be Viewed As ***Sensory Navigation***, The Thread of My [Other] Recent Postings.

/Gerry

_Abstract_

Scholars are facing unprecedented Information Overload in their attempts to identify potentially relevant information sources. Electronic networks have not only expedited traditional forms of publishing but created new formal and informal opportunities for communication. Conventional methods of information management are reaching the limits of their effectiveness. To enhance access to information in the coming decades, systems that fully utilize the digital nature of a growing number of scholarly resources must be implemented.

_Table of Contents_

Scholarly Communication

Scholarly publishing

E-Communication

_Indexing and Abstracting Services_

Biology

Engineering

Geology

Mathematics

Medicine

_Citation Indexing and Indexes_

Access

E-Journals

E-Articles

_Transformational Communication_

Intelligent Software Agents

Information Overload

Custom-Configured Institutional E-Journals

Just-in-Time Electronic Collections

_Organization_

Conventional

Automated

Navigation

Information Visualization

Auditory Browsing

Haptic Interaction

Virtual Environments

_"In The Beginning ... "_

References

Full Text and Links Available At

[ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/06/morning-becomes-electric-post-modern.html ]

OR

[ http://tinyurl.com/6f6e74 ]

Comments Are Most Welcome On The Posting.

Enjoy!

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan

Associate Professor

Science and Technology Librarian

Iowa State University Library

Ames IA 50011

gerrymck@iastate.edu

Susan Abrams:

"About six months later the phone rang, and it was Janzen, and he said, 'Were you serious about wanting to do something in tropical biology?' and I said, 'Yeah,' and he said, 'Well, I have this book.' I just was ecstatic. Originally he had planned to have it published in Spanish, and the Spanish-language publisher had finked out because it was so big. 'The manuscript weighs 50 pounds,' he said. 'If I give you a ticket, can you go to Costa Rica over the weekend and pick it up?' I didn't even have a passport, so he said, 'OK, I'll get the manuscript flown up here and xeroxed.' Eight-thirty Tuesday morning, this guy gets off the elevator carrying these two huge stacks of paper tied up with clothesline, wearing like a janitor's khaki shirt and a big key ring. It's Daniel Janzen. Probably the world's foremost tropical biologist."

She says she spent 20 hours a week for the next two years on the thing. "Janzen was doing the review of all the editing and the proofing, and it was very difficult to get it back and forth, because the mails weren't trustworthy. I'd have to call him in Costa Rica and let him know when somebody was bringing something down, and the only way to do it was by National Park Service radio. So I'd call the radio office in San Jose and ask to be patched through, and then every time you speak you have to say 'cambio,' which is 'over,' so that they would flip the switch so that he could talk." When the 816-page book was finally finished, the press did an initial print run of 500 hardback and 3,500 paperback copies--fairly standard for a scholarly book presumed to have limited general appeal. "We had to reprint in six months," says Abrams. "Nobody believed it. But I did."

A recurring point of contention at the press has been Abrams's insistence that science books have unique design needs. They can't be designed, she says, to look like something in literary criticism--lush, elaborate, artsy. Science books can have hundreds of tables, figures, charts, graphs, photographs, legends, and equations, so their interior design needs to be clean and accessible. In 23 years at Chicago, Abrams doesn't feel she's gotten that point across.

Sylvia Hecimovich, head of production at the press, believes that Abrams's intentions have always been good. "I always felt that Susan cared more about the entire process," she says. "Many editors just care about their piece of the pie. I saw her not so much interfering as wanting to learn. My experience with Susan was, when I thought she was overstepping her bounds, I could always say that to her, and most of the time she was very open to that." Kasper adds that "you tended to forgive Susan a lot because she was so passionate about what she did and she often did things that were so good."