Digital Production and Workflow Management

1.2 Introduction

In this chapter, we will consider how technology impacts the tools that publishers use to edit, design, produce and ultimately distribute content in both print and electronic formats. We will begin by thinking about the changes that have come about since personal computers, desktop publishing, the internet and web technologies entered our lives. Then we will present an overview of current trends to see how digital publishing workflow and production methods are used within the industry. In later chapters, we will explore these production processes in more detail.  Change brings both opportunities and threats, so we will also need to consider the issues publishers face when forced to adapt and change their traditional ways of working. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

This chapter does not aim to explore the history of publishing or information technology in any great depth. However, the significant changes that have taken place in terms of publishing production and workflow can be traced back to the rise of personal computing, desktop publishing, digital printing, the world wide web and through the 1970s, 80s and 90s and into the twenty-first century. Over the past few decades, there has been a proliferation of mobile device technology and the market for digital products has matured to a greater or lesser extent globally.

The technology shift started with analogue and manual information management being supplemented and replaced with electronic, digital information management. As a result, established publishers were required to acquire and evolve new technological solutions and maintain the skills to operate them effectively. Adopting new technology was not a one-off transaction, once the digital conveyor belt started, publishers had to keep continuously upgrading their systems, processes and employee skills. In some ways, these publishing businesses are analogue institutions trying to keep pace in a digital world. Advances continue to appear across the board (content creation, editing, file storage, workflow, typesetting, print production, e-production, distribution and logistics) bringing with them a range of opportunities and threats, solving problems and creating new ones.

1.3 ‘Hype Cycle’ of Emerging Technology

Often a technology trigger provides the impetus for change. When new hardware is launched it acts as a driver for new software innovation. For example, the iPad (hardware) arrived on the scene in 2010 and there was an explosion of apps (software) developed for its iOS operating system. One of the challenges publishers face is how to keep up with technological advances and acquire the skills to publish content in new and emerging digital formats when hardware and software are constantly evolving. For small and large publishers alike it can be difficult to decide where they should focus their efforts and limited resources, often resulting in a “wait and see” strategy preventing them from gaining a competitive edge over tech-savvy start-ups.

In 1995, Jackie Fenn devised the Gartner Hype Cycle as a method of plotting the progress of emerging technologies by visibility and maturity. Watch the short video explaining the Hype Cycle and how it can be interpreted by businesses. Pay particular attention to the ways the Hype Cycle can be used as a means of tracking and predicting the uptake of technology.

(Hosted directly by Gartner on YT) Mastering the Hype Cycle Book

1.4 Darnton’s Communication Circuit

Darnton's (1982) communication circuit describes the way messages are communicated in a cycle within the traditional publishing model. From the author as creator, content is passed through many intermediaries such as publishers, printer, distributor, retailer and finally to the general public (which includes authors). Each intermediary in the circuit has a specialist function to perform either adding value to the product in the case of publisher and printer; providing logistical services making the product easily accessible in the case of distributors and retailers. When one of the actors in this circuit is cut out of the loop, it is called disintermediation. This word will appear frequently throughout publishing studies because some of the greatest opportunities and threats to the publishing industry arise when disintermediation occurs.

1.5 Publishing Innovations: Content Creation

  man·u·script 
  /ˈmanyəˌskript/  
  Noun
  1. A book, document, or piece of music written by hand rather than typed or printed.
  2. An author's text that has not yet been published: "We are preparing the final manuscript".
  Etymology (Latin), manus - hand, scriptum – to write

Much of the terminology and methodology used in publishing today is inherited from an era of analogue technology. Take, for example, the author manuscript; as the word implies this sort of document would typically have been written by hand. Some authors may still choose to write by hand out of a personal or creative preference, but the modern publisher will certainly need the 'manuscript' to be typed up into a digital format so that it can be more easily shared, edited, proofread, typeset and stored.

A wide range of content creation tools exists today. Most people are familiar with word processing software such as Microsoft Word for PCs or Pages for Macs. There is also a range of open-source word processing software such as Open Office and Libre Office which are platform agnostic and can be used to write documents and share them across various platforms.

One of the immediately obvious advantages that digital word processing has over analogue word processing is the editing functions such as copy, cut, and paste. This might seem trivial but the time saved through this one simple programming feature is immeasurable. Most people use a fraction of the functionality that word processors have to offer. In addition to basic text editing, many word processors have advanced features that allow:

• Spelling and grammar checking reduces the opportunity for human error and oversight
• Searchable text facilitating indexing and creation of glossaries
• Automation of house style via find and replace function
• Restyling and repurposing of content, either in its entirety or in smaller chunks for custom publishing
• Commenting on and tracking of changes made to versions of a document
• Adding metadata about the document, its author and its purpose
• Automation of table of contents from styled headings
• Speech recognition and read-aloud functions.

Another interesting observation to make is the convergence of website publishing technology and word processing in the form of Content Management Systems (CMS). These are the filing cabinets of the internet, they provide storage and structure to the text and images that make up web pages. As web technology has evolved, user-friendly CMS, such as the WordPress blogging platform, allow content to be written and edited directly within the filing cabinet. The benefits of this prescribed, centralised structuring of content have meant that CMS systems are now widely used throughout the publishing and other information industries. As with most software, content management systems come in various flavours. They can vary in the amount of control the business or user has over the design and structure of the CMS from "off-the-shelf” to custom-built systems. Educake.co.uk is an example of a digital publishing start-up that uses a custom-built content management system to innovate within the exam revision guide publishing sector. The norm with revision guides, both in print and digital form, is to set multiple choice questions aligned to a particular syllabus for a particular subject.

1.6 Publishing Innovation: Design & Layout

An oversimplified description of print publishing versus web design would be to say that:

• Publishers and typesetters are skilled at designing static content for the printed page. They use computers and digital composition tools to lay out the content on the pages using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors such as InDesign and QuarkXPress. They often let the content, text and images, determine the structure. Page size, typeface and other variables are altered on the screen so that the text can be arranged to avoid poor design on the page.
• Web developers are skilled at designing dynamic content where the page size and typeface can be changed by the user. They use content management systems to input content within a predefined structure using HTML (hypertext markup language). Often basic text editors are used meaning pages must be previewed to check what they look like separately. New design templates or 'skins' can be overlaid on top of the content's structure using CSS (cascading style sheets) to give any webpage a new 'look and feel'.

In reality, these two methodologies have always overlapped. In publishing, much automation of print page layout is achieved through tagging of content, XML (Extensible Markup Language) and DTDs (Document Type Definitions). Equally, web pages are often handcrafted using WYSIWYG editors like WordPress, to achieve a specific design. 

As web technology has matured, the demand for digital content has increased rapidly, along with expectations that digital content should be available immediately, making the printed page out-of-date before the ink has even dried. These pressures have encouraged a convergence of web and print design technology, fulfilling publishers’ needs to design content for both web and print simultaneously. Thus, the mantra COPE “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” was coined.

Publishers have various options available to them when considering the technical resources needed for the design stage of the production process. They may decide to outsource some of the graphic design, typesetting, ebook conversion, web development to companies specialising in those areas or they may retain those functions in-house. It is even possible for publishers to outsource the entire prepress workflow to a production services company and have them manage the project from proofreading the manuscript through to delivery of print-ready pdf and parallel digital formats. In the case of other publishers, they may choose to custom build their own content management and publishing systems.

We have also seen consumer-orientated design tools appear on the scene due to the popularity of self-publishing by independent authors and the general public. As many of these content creators are unskilled in design and layout, the tools developed to help them create books must be intuitive to use and easy to learn. The technology does the work so that the user doesn't have to.

Make Our Book is a book design and production tool for schools. Underneath it, of course, is a CMS. It was developed and launched in 2014, by the independent publisher and software designer Emma Barnes, the founder of Snowbooks and Consonance. The web-based tool allows text and images created by students to be entered into the Make Our Book template. Once it has been arranged as a book, a pdf is generated and the students can then proofread their work and make edits until they are ready to send their final book to print.

1.7 Publishing Innovation: Printing

There are two predominant types of printing used for books:

One of the most important factors that determine which type of printing to use is the print run, meaning the number of copies you need to print. But there are other considerations like price and quality. For example, the need for colour illustrations, paper type, and page dimensions and how quickly you require the books.

Litho printing begins with the production of plates from which the pages are printed. The initial production and set-up of plates are expensive and labour intensive, but once it is ready, thousands of copies of a book can quickly be manufactured. The front-loaded costs of litho printing mean you benefit from economies of scale. The more you print the cheaper the unit cost per book.

Digital printing is quicker and cheaper to set up; the pages are printed off directly from the pdf files without the need to create expensive plates. Digital printers will boast that you can print one or one million copies on their machines but there is a crossover point where it becomes more economical to use litho.

In the early days of POD technology, this crossover point was around 400 units: under 400 units and it would be cheaper to print digitally and above 400 it would be cheaper to print using litho, but now the crossover point sits at around 1500 and can in some instances be as high as 5000 units. Some of the most significant changes in publishing have been the result of advancements in digital printing and print-on-demand technology. They allow short print runs of titles to be published economically. Books that would otherwise go out of print because they weren't selling in sufficient quantities can now remain available to readers as print-on-demand titles. The next activity will investigate in more detail how print-on-demand technology is being used to innovate.

Other opportunities to innovate have come from the automation of workflow in printing, using XML standards like the Job Definition Format (JDF) which as you will see in a later chapter has been developed to increase efficiency, not through enhancing physical machinery, but by re-engineering the workflow itself.

As well as being concerned with innovations relating to productivity, in the twenty-first century, the printing industry has become increasingly aware of the environmental impact of its activities such as:

• Working conditions, exposure to harmful chemicals
• Use of finite natural resources
• Air and water pollution
• Waste

This awareness can be seen in the development and uptake of vegetable-based inks, waterless litho, and the recycling of waste paper, packaging and inks.

1.8 Publishing Innovation: Distribution

If we compare the requirements of physical distribution to those of digital distribution we can see that:

• Physical distribution is about warehousing and logistics; the movement of a physical product from place to place. Content is supplied with its container.
• Digital distribution is about data storage and transmission; the sending of data from device to device via communications networks. Content is supplied to its container.

As with all other areas of the supply chain, the impact of technology on both physical and digital distribution has been dramatic. The infrastructure required to operate these two types of distribution business could not be more different. So what changes have we seen in the supply and access of published materials?

• Customers no longer need to be in the same place as a book in order to purchase it. They can browse and shop at online bookstores for their print or digital reading material. For some areas of publishing, such as newspapers, this has thrown the entire business into uncertainty.
• Ownership has been swapped for access. When a Kindle owner buys an ebook, they are licensing the right to view, not own, the content. Similarly when a library subscribes to a journal in print then they can keep all the physical copies, if they subscribe to an electronic journal, their access typically ends when they cancel the subscription.
• Bricks and mortar retailers and libraries can now offer print-on-demand services such as the Espresso Book Machine. POD combined with innovative authoring and content management tools like Pressbooks can disintermediate traditional actors in the supply chain. This is particularly significant for open access to academic and scholarly content.
• Bookshops have struggled to find their value proposition when it comes to ebooks. Some set up partnerships with eReader device manufacturers, such as Kobo, Nook, Kindle where the bookshop sells the device hardware and the partner provides the digital infrastructure. However, some of these partnerships were abandoned.
• Large bookshop chains (e.g. Borders) have moved to a centralised distribution hub to consolidate ordering and benefit from economies of scale in purchasing.
• Library loaning systems use Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags, to hold all the book's data allowing patrons to check books out via self-service machines and libraries to track the usage of books.
• Library catalogues and collections have been digitised in large scale projects such as Google Book Scan. Making it easier to search for and access millions of public domain work. While these digital objects become more accessible, the collections that only exist in print fade from view.
• Distributors have had to expand their reach as sales channels for physical and digital products have expanded; Bookshops, libraries, supermarkets, garden centres, ebook stores, audiobook stores, affiliate websites. Whereas previously they might only have sent large orders to a couple of thousand key retailers, now they would be sending small orders to hundreds of thousands of customers.
• Warehouses use barcode scanning technology and robotics to automate the picking and packing of book orders. Speeding up delivery to customers and the processing of unsold stock that is returned.
• Printers can print on demand and dispatch books directly to the end customer. Speeding up delivery times by cutting out the intermediary warehouse, distributor and retailer. This also benefits publishers who can reduce their physical stock holdings by storing titles as print-on-demand.
• With digital print technology becoming more and more affordable, global publishers can opt to print local to their customers, in small print runs, reducing the shipping times and also the carbon emissions from haulage.

1.9 RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

Where digital distribution really has the upper hand is in the automation of content delivery. One of the best examples of this can be seen in RSS feeds. The initials RSS are commonly said to stand for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a webpage that has been tagged in a certain way using XML, in order to push the content automatically to anyone who wants to subscribe to it. This means that once you have found a blog or a news site that you like, you don't have to keep visiting those pages to check if a new article has been published, you can just sign up to the RSS feed and have it delivered to you automatically. RSS changes the dynamic of web content from pull communications (readers go online and pull out the information they want) to push communications (readers subscribe to a feed and the information is pushed to them). It isn't only used for text-based web content, RSS is the technology behind podcasts and custom video channels too.

Skills builder 2: Examine RSS with Feedly - Set up a personalised news aggregation account with Feedly. Here is how to do it:

Visit www.feedly.com website and sign-up for a free account.  Next, go hunting for blogs and websites that will keep you up to date with publishing news. Once you have added some news feeds, you can use the Feedly reader to suggest similar content. You will notice that you can change the page design and layout to display the articles and images in various ways. 

Think about the opportunities for leveraging digital distribution (e.g. RSS feeds) for content delivery – how might publishers maximise potential? Are there any pitfalls to this model? This is a reflective exercise.

1.10 Creative Disruption

In his book, Creative Disruption Simon Waldman (2010) discusses the notion that in the digital era traditional industries are disrupted by new technology. Creative competitors use their technology advantage to offer either a brand new product or new services (like Apple's iPad & App Store) or the same service radically reinvented (like Amazon's online bookshop). When this creative disruption happens traditional businesses (like publishers) need to fundamentally change the way they operate or they will struggle to remain relevant.

Waldman learnt these lessons first hand as the Digital Strategist at Guardian Media Group and advises that companies do three things to adapt: 1) transform the core business, 2) fund the transformation by finding large adjacencies and 3) find these adjacencies through innovation at the edges of the core business. The publishing industry has already seen many changes thanks to digital technology and will undoubtedly see many more.

1.11 Opportunities for growth

In this chapter, you have seen that technology and digital innovations can sometimes threaten traditional ways of working but also provide opportunities for growth by:

• Supplying new ways to create, manufacture and distribute content
• Lowering costs through efficiencies and disintermediation
• Offering more sophisticated services alongside products
• Facilitating direct relationships with customers
• Diversifying sales channels, lessening reliance on one type of customer or supplier
• Broadening reach into new markets and territories.

The examples of technologies given in this chapter are by no means the only ones relevant to publishers. There are many more that could have been mentioned, and others that we will explore in later chapters.

Managing Change: In terms of responding to disruption, one of the biggest challenges for senior managers is not so much the "why", but the "how" to change their business. Markets can be on a clear downward trend, but still generate crucial revenue for the business, thus the required action for long term survival can feel counterintuitive. Namely, shifting the focus (and resources) away from a profitable part of the business towards something new and different. It is essential that the staff within the business are all pulling in the same direction. For this reason, there needs to be a clear vision of where the business needs to be, and the steps required to get there.

1.12 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have explored and evaluated how technology is changing the world of publishing. We have also: 

• compared digital and analogue technologies and identified innovative technologies
• examined current digital publishing practices and assessed the issues publishers face
• identified opportunities for growth and predicted opportunities.

References 

Carden, M.T., 2008. E-Books are not books, in: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories. [online] pp. 9–12. Available at: [Accessed on 14 April 2021]

Darnton, R., 1982. What is the history of books? Daedalus, 111, pp65–83.

Flood, A., 2009. Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London. Guardian.co.uk, [online] 24 Apr 2009. Available at: [Accessed on 19 April 2021]

Gartner, 2012. Gartner 2012 Hype Cycle Special Report [video online] Available at: [Accessed on 19 April 2021]

Hall, F., 2013. The business of digital publishing: an introduction to the digital book and journal industries. Abingdon : Routledge. Ch.1. Available at: [Accessed on 19 April 2021]

Jones, P., 2008. Publishers rally for Sony launch. The Bookseller 4 Aug 2008.

Johnson, M.J. 2019 What is a Book? Redefining the Book in the Digitally Social Age. [ejournal] Pub Res Q, 35(1), pp.68–78. Available at: [Accessed on 14 April 2021]

Kovač, M., Phillips, A., van der Weel, A. and Wischenbart, R., 2019. What is a Book? [ejournal] Pub Res Q, 35(3), pp.313-326. Available at: [Accessed on 14 April 2021]

Ladent, M., 2013. Educake a new digital publishing startup [online]. publishing.brookes.ac.uk. Available at: [Accessed on 19 April 2021]

O'Leary, B., 2011. Context Not Container. In: Maguire, H. and O'Leary, B. eds. 2012 Book: a futurist’s manifesto: essays from the bleeding edge of publishing. [ebook] Ch.1. Available at: [Accessed on 19 April 2021]

Rowberry, S. P. (2017) ‘Ebookness’, [ejournal] Convergence, 23(3), pp. 289–305. Available at: [Accessed on 14 April 2021]

Waldman, S., 2010. Creative disruption: what you need to do to shake up your business in a digital world. Harlow, New York : Financial Times Prentice Hall.

Further Reading

Bennett, L., 2010. PA Guide to Going Digital, London : Publishers Association.

Carmody, T,. 2010. A Bookfuturist Manifesto, The Atlantic [online] 11 August. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology /archive/2010/08/a-bookfuturist-manifesto/61231/

Fiore, Q. and McLuhan, M., 1967. The Medium is the Message/Massage. London : Penguin. Fatemi, F., 2021. 'The Rise Of Substack—And What’s Behind It' [online] Forbes.com, 20 January [Accessed on 16 March 2021]

Skills Builder 1 - Sample Answer:

• Qualities possessed by analogue and digital media
• Analogue Digital
• Static Dynamic
• Often read-only (whiteboard, blackboard, Etch A Sketch™, notes in a book)
• Rewritable / editable
• Slow to replicate/duplicate 
• Easily duplicated
• Tangible – Fixed in time and space. Can only be in one place at any one time, cannot share the same space as another object
• Intangible – can seemingly share the same space as another object, be simultaneously located in two places at once
• Can be read/interpreted without interface 
• Requires a user interface to read/interpret

2.1 Chapter Aims

• To consider the function of workflow within a publishing context
• To introduce various tasks carried out by production staff
• To evaluate and apply a methodical approach to file management and version control

2.2 Introduction

In this chapter, you will consider ‘workflow’ which describes how content such as book manuscripts, journals and magazines, are passed through a number of processes to create a particular end product. That end product might be a paperback book, a pop-up book, an ebook, a website, an iPad app or all of the above. It is not a case of 'one-size fits all', depending on the content you are given, and the required end product you might select a different workflow. It is therefore essential that you also learn about the various file formats, devices and platforms along with the international standards that publishers use to maintain production quality. Throughout this chapter, we will see how the production department interacts with other functions including editorial. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

2.3 Digital Workflow

As the word implies, ‘workflow’ relates to a constant stream of everyday tasks undertaken by a number of people, in sequence, in order to get the final published product out the door. In very general terms, it involves receiving inputs, completing tasks and outputting to the next stage of the process. As publishing is primarily a content-based industry a significant portion of production workflow revolves around the structuring, editing and display of text and images, almost always in digital form. Although the content will differ from book to book, the individual tasks should be repeatable and the time required to carry them out should be predictable. The standard nature of these tasks should enable the project to keep to a planned schedule.

Publishing a single title can often require input from a large number of people with a diverse range of skills; author, editor, picture researcher, graphic designer, software developer, production editor. Workflow provides a structure and framework for coordinating all these individual efforts as efficiently as possible. Large sums of money are invested upfront in each print run, therefore an important part of the production workflow is quality assurance, minimising the risk of a faulty or unsaleable product by catching errors before the content is sent to print.

2.4 How is Workflow Different from Project Management?

In most businesses where it is necessary to build or create things, a project will identify: 

• what needs to be created
• to what standards (the quality)
• who will perform the creation
• by when
• and how much the creation will cost

Projects should have a distinct beginning, middle and end. Planning and overseeing the creative process is what project management is all about rather than the actual creation (which is usually left to specialist teams). Project management is about the bigger picture, keeping to time and budget. Workflow is a series of processes and procedures that you might like to think of as “business-as-usual”. Essentially these are repeated tasks performed by employees as part of their everyday work within a fixed timescale. If these repeated tasks are well organised the project as a whole runs to schedule. You might like to think of workflow as equivalent to making a packed lunch every day before leaving for work and project management as equivalent to hosting a large dinner party.

Skills Builder 1: Workflow and People

Think about your typical workflow tasks within the business within which you currently work – how do these feed in to projects?  What kind of relationship skills are important to your role?

The people involved in the project can be drawn from the business, suppliers or outside consultants. They can be working on the project part-time, full-time, or on a fixed-term contract. They may all come from one organisation or department, in which case they will share a common understanding of the ethos, aims, and values of the organisation; or they may come from many different organisations, in which case values and ways of working may need to be harmonised.

2.5 Workflow Planning & Analysis

When publishing multiple titles, there are often times when the workflow for one publication overlaps with another. Therefore it can be both useful and prudent to go through a planning exercise regularly in production roles. This can help you visualise the scope of your workload, keep track of deadlines and identify potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Maintaining an accurate tracking document that provides information on the next deadline or task required for each publication in one place will help with this.

Tasks, deliverables and dependencies: What becomes clear when you begin to analyse workflow is that some inputs, processing and outputs are dependent on others. For example, the front cover, spine and back cover of a book is printed on one single piece of card that is then wrapped around the book block. In order to calculate the exact width of a book's spine, you must first know the number of pages and thickness of the paper being used. This means that although the cover design can be started, the final book jacket cannot be delivered until those other decisions have been made.

Usually, a publication is working to a particular deadline for delivery of the product. Therefore, starting at the endpoint, a Production Editor can work backwards to create a list of all the tasks and dependencies in their workflow along with who is responsible for them, and when they need to be delivered by.

Below in Figure 1 is a simplified task list for a poetry anthology where the editing, proofreading and typesetting are done in-house, while the cover design, printing and shipping are outsourced. It includes the typical stages in production workflow between receipt of manuscript and delivery of the final product to the warehouse.

Here we have introduced you to the fundamentals of workflow, input → process → output, and how they can be dependent on each other. In the chapter on briefing, scheduling and estimating we will consider how a list like this can be converted into a schedule.

Figure 2: Swim lane diagram for a manuscript moving through the production process.

2.6 Production in Practice

So, now let’s consider a real-life example of working in a busy production department. In this section, you are encouraged to listen to a short podcast about the realities of working in a busy production department. We will then go on to explore a production case-study from the point of view of a Production Editor for academic books.

Listen (25 minutes): In this short podcast recorded by the SYP Oxford, Amy Wong, Production Controller at Bloomsbury discusses the realities of working in a busy production department. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1009048/6355018-what-actually-happens-in-production-with-amywong
How does this compare to any production teams you have worked in/alongside?

Case Study: Production Editor, Academic Books

"My first task each morning is to work through the tens of emails that have come in overnight. Some are straightforward confirmations (schedule approvals for example), that I can file away. Others take more work: the author that needs additional time to complete her index – will that derail the overall production schedule?; a query from our typesetter – “we're coding the XML for your book on bioethics, but how do you want those box features to be tagged, there's nothing in the DTD?” (I might leave that for the copy-editor to resolve, so long as it's clear when the book goes for typesetting we'll be OK). Some of these queries I need to refer on to our production manager for a more detailed discussion later on – I might also need to go back to the book's editor to check what they want.

For the next three hours, I knuckle down to collate proof corrections for the latest book in the Teacher Guides series. This is a contributed volume, so I have corrections in a variety of formats: a list of changes from the series editor marked hardcopy proofs from the volume editor, and marked PDFs from the individual authors. I settle on transferring everything to a single marked PDF – I'm quite quick at using Adobe's commenting tools now, and this is the most efficient way of getting the collated proofs back to our supplier in India. I'll be checking the corrected proofs next week.

After lunch I call that author about her index – I managed to convince her that if she takes just two extra days then we'll be able to deliver the printed books in time for the International Geophysics Conference in San Francisco – I'll just have to save two days further down the workflow.

I then have a number of estimates to request from the printer – the various editors will need this information back in time to review the costs for their monthly editorial meeting in 3 days’ time. There are always a few last-minute requests but the best to get the bulk of them out to the printer today.

Next on the agenda, is the handover for one of my titles. It contains a lot of notes for the copy editor and it's going to be a big job to make all of the changes we want – we will have to ask our typesetter to work more quickly to make up the time.

In this first example, the Production Editor has to knuckle down and collate proof corrections from the authors, series editor, and volume editor (see Figure 4). This introduces a possible margin for error, as the production editor might accidentally omit some corrections before sending to the typesetter. It is also quite a laborious process as everyone has to suggest corrections, and then afterwards check they have been implemented in the next set of proofs.  They also highlight the ways the project schedule and costs are controlled by encouraging an author to deliver an index quickly and obtaining print estimates in advance of editorial review meetings.   

2.8 File Management

Publishing, by its nature, is the sum of batch processing. Publications are made up of small parts (cover, chapters, images, paragraphs, sentences) that can be worked on independently by many people (author, editor, proofreader, typesetter, graphic designer). Publications are added to and changed incrementally. However, the aim is to output a single discrete object, be it a book, a journal, or a magazine. Managing the versions as changes are made requires a methodical approach. Books are commonly referred to by their title, but if you take the first J.K. Rowling novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – over 10 editions of this one title have been published in English, alone. There are paperback, hardback, leather bound, children's, illustrated, ebook, adult, signature, anniversary, and original editions (to name but a few). How should production manage all those editions and make sure the correct files are sent to the printers, or used as the basis for a new adaptation? Let's take a look at some of the ways publishers standardise their file management.

In the world of word-processed documents, an author might write their carefully crafted manuscript in MS Word. When complete, they send their text document to their publisher by email, perhaps accompanied by some image files. Nothing binds these various files together electronically and there is nothing to prevent them from being separated from each other. Their editor opens the email and duly saves them according to some kind of filing convention on their local PC. These files are then sent forwards and backwards between proofreader, copy editor, production editor, typesetter and author. Files are duplicated because of the various people involved, which means that multiple document versions are created and saved on multiple PCs as the workflow progresses. A final pdf is approved by the author and editor and then sent to the printers. The first proofs arrive back and the book is full of mistakes. What went wrong? The 'wrong' pdf file was sent to the printer; it was not the most recent file containing the latest, corrected version of the text.

A similar problem can arise when working with XML files (we will explore XML in much more detail in the following chapter). A publisher outsources the XML creation for a title to an external supplier. At a late stage in the production process, the author notices some factual errors – time is short and so the XML is fixed in-house rather than sending it back to the supplier for amendment. Two years later the publisher, working with the same supplier, is in the process of incorporating updates for the new edition. At the proof stage, the author notices that the factual errors have crept back into the text. What went wrong? The supplier has updated their own local version of the XML, rather than the version which the publisher fixed in-house. You are, no doubt, familiar with using files and folders on your computer to save your electronic documents. But are these files and folders structured in such a way that you always know where to find your documents? Could someone else navigate through them easily?  One solution to this is to use a centralised CMS or shared file-storage system which we shall consider in the following sections.

2.9 Unique Identifiers

Choosing a title for the book itself is not often a job for production; the author and editor will have decided long before a project reaches your desk. However, there is nothing to say that a book title has to be unique (just try putting “Love Poems” into Amazon's book search bar). So how do publishers make sure their products can be ordered and sold globally without ambiguity? As you know by now, they use a range of unique identifiers.

For each type of publication there is an industry standard code used to identify it. 

• For books, this is the International Standard Book Number (ISBN). In 2007, the industry moved form 10 digit ISBNs to 13 digital, by adding the prefix 978. 

• For journals, magazines, newspapers and other serial publications this is the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN); An 8 digit code.

In the UK, these identifiers are administered by Nielsen UK ISBN Agency and the British Library respectively. There is no legal requirement to assign an ISBN to a book, as demonstrated by Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing business which uses the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN).

An ISBN is often assigned to a book as soon as the work is commissioned or acquired by the publisher so that information about the product can be tracked throughout the editorial and production process (and later on its marketing and sales data).

For instance, each separate version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone will have been given its own ISBN (despite the title being the same for each book). In textbook publishing, it is common to bring out second and third editions of a book.

Each newly updated edition is considered a different book and requires a new ISBN. In contrast, a title that has sold out and is reprinted does not require a new ISBN. When producing ebooks, each digital format should also be assigned different ISBNs to each other, and any print editions.

A cautionary note, an ISBN is merely a 13-digit number, it contains no clues as to the book's titles or contents. Care must be taken to make sure the correct ISBN is used for each book project and that no ISBN is used twice (this happens more often than one would imagine).

2.10 Version Control

Quite possibly the worst mistake a production editor can make is to send the wrong version of a book to print. There have been some very high-profile examples of this happening. Notably, in 2010, Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. 80,000 copies of the book had to be pulped after the penultimate version, containing hundreds of uncorrected errors, made its way into UK shops. This error cost the publisher, Harper Collins, in the region of £100,000.

You would expect this kind of error to be picked up at the proofing stage, but it is clearly possible for mistakes to happen especially when digital (soft) proofs are used. There are a number of word processing tools that can be used to track and accept changes or even compare versions of text documents. However, once you reach pdf stage the options become more limited. This is because pdfs are not designed to be easily editable. 

Fundamentally, the issue is not whether the content has been proofed, but whether the correct document can be identified by the production editor, typesetter or printer (all of whom might have outdated versions on file). One way of minimising the risk of old versions accidentally creeping back into circulation is to archive them separately, in a different folder to the file being worked on. 

There are some cloud storage services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Github that not only allow you to access files remotely over the web from any device, but they also include version tracking or branching, should you need to revert back to an earlier version of a document.

2.11 Workflow Challenges

Workflows are general - issues may crop up on particular titles which do not fit into a publisher's standard workflows. For example, needing to rewrite content at proof stage (due to developments which mean that legal or medical content has become out of date) or a greater than normal number of proof stages due to complex content which must be repeatedly checked by the author. Production editors need to adapt their approach to each title.

Workflows may be designed by project managers who do not personally deal with day-to-day production - production editors will need to provide feedback to ensure all important tasks are dealt with, and time is not wasted on unnecessary steps. Too much reliance on workflow and checklist documents can mean that production editors fail to spot unusual errors, because they are not listed as an item to check on their documents.

However well-designed your workflow is, you are dependent on many different people completing work on time and correctly in order to keep to a publication schedule, and in reality, this is often not the case. For example, if an author spends twice as much time checking proofs as you have scheduled, you may need to negotiate with the printer to turn around a book in a shorter time than usual. All documentation needs to be up-to-date and stored in one place to ensure that different people within the same organisation are all following the same workflow. Once in-house and external staff become used to following one workflow, it can be a challenge to get them to change to a different process.

Skills Builder 3: In the table on the following page are some issues you may encounter while following the workflow above. For each, consider how you will resolve them, and how they could have been prevented in the first place. See Sample Answer. 

2.11 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have considered how ‘workflow’ describes how content such as book manuscripts, journals and magazines, are passed through a number of processes to create a particular end product. We have also:

• examined digital workflow in terms of inputs outputs and processes (using flow diagrams)
• recognised different platforms and affiliated devices commonly used by publishers
• identified file formats and standards commonly used by publishers
• explored the management of content and assets in a methodical way
• learned to identify possible production issues and explore ways to mitigate their impact.

References

Bullock, A., 2012. Book production. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Charlotte & Wong, A., 2020 'What really happens in production? With Amy Wong' [podcast] The SYP Podcast. Available at: [Accessed on 09 April 2021]

Hall, F., 2013. The business of digital publishing: an introduction to the digital book and journal industries. Routledge: Abingdon. pp26-30

Sharp, A., 2009 Workflow modelling: tools for process improvement and application development 2 Ed. Artech House: Boston Ch.8 (pp216-231)

Shelford, T., 2002 Real Web Project Management: Case Studies and Best Practices from the Trenches, Ch.8 (pp94-100) Available via Oxford Brookes University Library website [Accessed on 19 April 2019]

Skills Builder 2 - Sample Answer:

The first example involves a production editor going through two rounds of corrections firstly from the editor and then secondly from the author. Meaning the total process involves twice the waiting time as each person makes their corrections.

The second example looks quicker as the waiting time is reduced by the author and editor making corrections simultaneously. It also looks like less work for the Production Editor as they can make the correction from the editor and author at the same time, rather than having two rounds of corrections to re-typeset. However, the author and Editor might be duplicating effort by identifying the same corrections, and if their instructions contradict each other then the Production Editor will have to spend time checking whose corrections to apply.

One possible alternative solution would be to pass the typeset manuscript first to the author, who would pass their corrections to the editor. The editor could then check and approve the author's changes as well as add any of their own. Only after both Author and Editor have made their changes are the corrections passed to production.

3.1 Chapter Aims 

• To understand how markup of text aids the publishing process
• To compare text markup standards such as html, html5, and xml
• To assess the advantages and disadvantages of xml workflows
• To explore how metadata is used in publishing and the metadata standards in common use
• To understand semantic markup to structure a text document
• To equip you with some basic HTML, CSS and an understanding of XML
• To summarise the benefits of using the ONIX metadata standard

3.2 Introduction 

In this chapter, we will drill down into the detail of what an XML workflow actually means and how markup and metadata are used to describe the structure and semantic meaning of content. In this chapter, the primary markup language for the web, HTML, is compared to the flexible and powerful XML markup language. You will investigate why XML is fundamental to some publishing workflows and the advantages of using it. Metadata and the differing standards will be studied.

The purpose of this unit is not to teach you markup languages in-depth, but it will give you a basic understanding of how they are used and why they are important to publishing. As with all languages, there is a basic vocabulary and grammar to learn before you can make sense of them. A couple of disclaimers before we begin:

• Examples of HTML and XML code can look baffling.
• Explanations of markup languages require some technical vocabulary that can seem like jargon.

Please do not be put off by either of these aspects of the chapter. Like learning a foreign language, you have to start somewhere. Some people find it easier to learn when the theory is explained before the practical application, and vice versa. Therefore, you may find it beneficial to read through this particular chapter more than once.

This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

3.3 What is Markup?

At a fundamental level, all electronic documents are a combination of content (text and images) and markup. If you removed all the markup from a document you would be left with one long string of text. Therefore, markup provides rules and a system of annotation to define:

• structural data – the generic repeating elements within a text (title, heading, paragraph, numbered/bulleted list, header, footer, pagination) and their hierarchy.
• formatting data – the appearance (font size, weight, colour) and positioning of text (line length, indents, spacing)
• semantic data – the contextual meaning of the text (Doe, John  = “author surname”, “author first name”)

The term markup originates from the pre-digital era of analogue publishing. At this time, a paper manuscript would be annotated by hand (marked up) in the margins and on the text itself, in order give instructions for the typesetters. Markup was a way to add a descriptive and instructional annotation to the original document content without altering that content in any way. It was a necessary process in the publishing workflow then, and is just as crucial today. All modern word processing, typesetting and printing still require these instructions to be added. Digital content can be marked up (or tagged) in a way that is either visible or invisible to the reader of the document depending on the software they are using and the settings they have selected.

3.4 Markup Taxonomies

The previous section outlined that there can be different types of markup to indicate the structure, formatting and meaning of text.  These can be explicitly or implicitly used in writing and content creation. In 1987, Coombs et al, put forward the following list of markup taxonomies, arguing that all writing contains markup.  An important consideration during the content creation and production workflow, is who is responsible for the necessary markup and how can markup be completed efficiently and in a methodical or standardised way:

• Punctuational – added during the translation of speech into written phrases. Usually syntactic symbols such as question marks, commas, apostrophes and full stops;
• Presentational and procedural – either individual or grouped instructions about the appearance of the text and images such as font size and weight along with the positioning of content such as margin width and page;
• Descriptive – labelling of text to include semantic meaning. e.g. “Kazuo Ishiguro” could be marked up with: <author>, <man>, <Japanese>, <proper noun>.  Also, the labelling of illustrations, images and charts with ‘alt text’ (alternative text) to allow screen-reading software to read-aloud a meaningful description of visual data;
• Referential – linking to internal data (e.g. caption, heading, appendix, expanded alt text description, index, bibliography); or linking to external data (e.g. images/tables/charts/video content held in dynamic databases, cited sources).

Skills Builder 1: Markup – who does what?
Look again through the bullet points above and note down who you think is responsible for the necessary markup during the content creation and production workflow. (See Sample Answer).

In the next sections of this chapter, we will explore the differences between the types of markup so that you can better understand their purpose and function.  This is just for context, do not worry too much about the specific examples and rather focus on understanding that markup can serve a range of purposes.

3.5 Presentational and Procedural Markup

When using a WYSIWYG word processor these two types of markup can be difficult to distinguish as they are often applied simultaneously. However, to put it very simply:

• Presentational markup instructs the programme how an individual instance of text should appear.  
  > make word bold.
• Procedural markup instructs the programme how text should appear via a string of commands which must be processed.  
  > skip a line > centre the word > make word bold > skip another line.

As you can see from the example above, the procedural markup contains a string of presentational commands. In textbooks about web languages, a distinction between these two types of markup is rarely made. Procedural markup is commonly used as a shorthand to mean both.

Early word processors and page layout software incorporated presentational markup to improve the display of the text on the page. Each manufacturer of the text processing software had its own proprietary way of adding the markup, and this markup was usually designed to be hidden from the authors and editors of the document. The binary code could only be read by computers with the correct software installed. This made it hard to reuse content marked up using one type of word processing software with another. Publishers either had to undertake costly conversions of the proprietary markup codes to another or retype or re-proofread the entire work.

To resolve the issue of interoperability, some non-proprietary standards emerged:

• RTF or Rich Text Format allowed one to save the content and the formatting in word-processed documents and transferring them between different text-processing software.
• HTML became the standard markup language for displaying text on websites and most ebook formats are also derived from HTML.

ASCII text is plain text with no tagging of any kind. ASCII is the standard way of computer representing textual characters. Most software today represents characters using Unicode, a standard that extended ASCII to include all characters from all languages.

e.g. “Come here, Mr Watson. I need you.”

RTF or Rich Text Format is a standard that allows formatting of text to be kept with content. It is not a markup language typed in by people, but added by software such as word processors. 

e.g. \f2010\fs22 {b\fs48\ldblquote Come here, Mr Watson. I need you!\rdblquote \par

The great thing about procedural markup languages is that they allow users to easily manipulate the display of the text, so that it can be laid out with various fonts, sizes, leading and so on. The drawback of this WYSIWYG markup is that all you get is the display.

3.6 Descriptive Markup

Descriptive markup languages consider the characteristics of the text first. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) are both descriptive markup languages. We will look at each in more detail later in the chapter but first let's consider the fundamental differences between procedural markup, HTML, and XML using the following quote:

“The fundamental genius of the family of markup languages that originated with SGML and its predecessors and that has now evolved into XML is that they had the wisdom to separate structure and meaning from appearance”
William Kasdorf, 2003, The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing, page 71

Procedural markup is concerned with the display of the text so you would tag:

• the quoted section to be displayed in Times New Roman, in a particular size using <font>...</font>.
• a line break to be inserted after the quote using <br />
• the author name, date, book title and page reference to be displayed in Arial, again using <font>...</font>
• the book title to be italicised using <i>...</i>

<font face="Times New Roman" size="3">“The fundamental genius of the family of markup languages that originated with SGML and its predecessors and that has now evolved into XML is that they had the wisdom to separate structure and meaning from appearance”</font><br />

<font face="Helvetica" size="3">William Kasdorf, 2003, <i>The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing, </i> page 71</font>

Let's now tag this same text with HTML (which is a descriptive markup language with predefined rules for describing the structure of text. Using HTML you would tag:

• the quoted section as one paragraph using <p>...</p> giving it the class name “quote”
• the author name, date, book title and page reference as a second paragraph giving it the class name “ref”
• the book title using <span>...</span> giving it the class name “book title”

<p class="quote">“The fundamental genius of the family of markup languages that originated with SGML and its predecessors and that has now evolved into XML is that they had the wisdom to separate structure and meaning from appearance”</p>

<p class="ref"> William Kasdorf, 2003, <span class="booktitle"> The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing</span>, page 71</p>

You can see how HTML allows each chunk or block of text to be described as a paragraph. Each paragraph is described in more detail using the class attribute. There is also the option of describing text inside paragraphs using inline tags such as span. In this instance, we want the span text to be labelled as a book title, so that later we can display it in italics (you'll see how this is achieved later in the chapter).

Now we will look at XML. It is also a descriptive markup language, but unlike HTML the tags are not predefined. Instead, all tags are customisable, meaning you can markup the text up using whatever labels you like. In this example, I have chosen to tag:

• the quoted section as 'quote'
• the author's name as 'author'
• the title of the book as 'booktitle'
• the publication date as 'pubdate'
• the page reference as 'pageref'

<quote>“The fundamental genius of the family of markup languages that originated with SGML and its predecessors and that has now evolved into XML is that they had the wisdom to separate structure and meaning from appearance”</quote> <author>William Kasdorf</author> 

<pubdate> 2003</pubdate>, <booktitle> The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing</booktitle>, <pageref>, page 71</pageref>

Because everything has been marked up with custom tags, XML requires you make a list of all the tag names you have used (or intend to use) and put them in a DTD (Document Type Definition) file. This is simply the key used by software to interpret your custom-built XML file. The DTD for this example would need to declare the: quote, author, booktitle, pubdate, and pageref elements.

3.7 Understanding and Using HTML

HTML is a tagging scheme for the display of content on the web. It was invented in 1995 and has evolved over the years from SGML origins to its extended form, XHTML and is now controlled by the W3C. The latest version at the time of writing is HTML 5.0. Watch this screencast of some HTML being created by Chris Jennings, Senior Lecturer of Digital Publishing at Oxford Brookes University.

Skills builder 2: Short Watch: Chris Jennings Screencast - Basic stuff you should know about HTML and CSS
https://www.publisha.org/screencasts/htmlandcssbasics/

As you saw in the video, HTML tags are always written between angle brackets, they come in pairs with an opening and closing tag. You also saw that there are certain qualities built into HTML that describe the text elements; essentially saying “this bit of text is a heading”, or “this bit of text is a normal paragraph”. This very basic example of HTML encloses the words that are headings and plain paragraphs within opening and closing tags. Everything within the angled brackets (coloured blue) is markup ‘code’ (not programming code), the rest is the content to be displayed.

<body>

<h1>Heading 1</h1>

<h2>Heading 2</h2>

<h3>Heading 3</h3>

<h4>Heading 4</h4>

<p>Some basic paragraph text with an <em>emphasis</em> on one word</p>

</body>

Web browsers read these tags and interpret them in order to display the content, (the material between the tags). HTML allows images and objects, such a video and audio, to be embedded as well as text. Scripts such as Javascript can be used to add interactivity. As you saw in the video, when HTML code is viewed in a web browser it automatically displays the different headings in a font size relative to their position in the hierarchy; basic paragraph text is smaller than the headings.

The basic formatting of headings and paragraphs seen above is intrinsic to HTML. However, as Chris explained in the video, the way the text is displayed can be modified by using the style definitions for the HTML elements. This styling language is known as Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This can be inserted into the HTML file between the <style> tags but, more commonly, it is held in a separate CSS file which the HTML document links to.

Although HTML was initially a presentational markup scheme, the use of cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of web pages is encouraged by W3C (http://www.w3.org) the organisation who maintain the HTML and CSS standard.

HTML elements can be thought of as either parent-child relationships or sibling-sibling relationships. In this example, the body element is parent to both the heading and paragraph elements. This makes heading and paragraph siblings with each other.

3.8 Shifting from Print to Digital

Once the structure of the text has been marked up, it is time to think about how to display it. The important question to ask yourself when adapting a text from print to digital format is – which of the typographic features need to be retained, and which can be replaced or omitted? Design and layout aspects that have a cost implication in printed products, like white space and coloured inks, are inexpensive (or even free) to use within digital products. 

There are also accessibility considerations when digitising print editions such as the addition of alt text descriptions to images. Some images are purely decorative but others convey meaning. Note that in some geographic regions accessibility legislation exists to ensure accessibility standards are met in electronic publications.

3.9 Understanding and Using CSS

This is where the magic happens. Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) you can play around with various combinations of typeface, position, spacing and colour without changing the structure of the actual content.

• You can apply multiple CSS stylesheets to one HTML document by simply changing a few lines of code. The result being that the same content can have many different visual designs. Visit CSSZenGarden.com to see this in practice.
• You can also apply a single CSS to multiple HTML documents. Meaning, you can quickly give content from disparate sources the same look and feel.

Cascading Style Sheets are named so because they are a list of instructions that web browsers read and apply to the HTML content in cascading order. The basic logic is: be x unless a subsequent rule instructs you to be y.

Make everything sky blue;

...unless it is a cloud, then make it white;

...unless it is a rain cloud, then make it grey;

...unless it is a storm cloud, then make it dark grey;

...unless it is a bird, then make it black;

...unless it is a robin then make it brown;

... unless it is a robin red breast, then make it brown and red;

Each style rule contains selectors and declarations. The selectors in style rules must exactly match the HTML elements (e.g. body, h1, h2, h3, h3, h4, and p). Every declaration begins and ends with a curly bracket and contains one or more property and its value (Castro, 2013). The colon separates the property from its value. The semicolon allows multiple property and value pairs to be listed.

3.10 Adding class names for semantic detail

3.12 How do publishers use XML?

Metadata: It isn't only the content itself that benefits from XML. Information about the content, also known as, the metadata, is also repetitious. For example, every book has a publication date, ISBN, price, author (or equivalent), cover image, description, format etc...This repeating data is peculiar to the publishing industry and needs to be shared between publishers and their distribution channels on a daily basis. This is the information that is often used to order books from the warehouse, as well as populating websites and bookshop EPOS (Electronic point of sale) systems with product data. XML is the obvious choice of format for communicating this data as it allows suppliers using various different stock ordering systems to extract the required information in an automated way. But XML is infinitely customisable; what if every publisher used slightly different tags to describe their product data? This would mean each publisher sending slightly different XML files to their suppliers with the result that communication would be uncertain and inefficient. Thus, the ONIX standard was created by Editeur in XML specifically for book data (both print and digital formats). The organisation created a group of XML tags to define the common (and uncommon) metadata that are relevant to books.

Print Orders - Job Definition Format (JDF): Another area of the publishing process where XML is used to streamline and automate workflow is at the point a print order is placed. The Job Definition Format is an industry-standard for doing this and can be created within the Adobe software and embedded in the pdf files themselves, or sent as a separate XML file. The purpose of the JDF is to encode in a machine-readable format all the information required for the job to be completed. The JDF is likely to include much of the information that goes into a print estimate request namely: print volume; trim size; paper stock; the number of pages; binding type; inks; and the cover file specification. In a best-case scenario, it allows the print files to be transferred from publisher to printer and the entire job to be processed, printed and bound without any (or at least very little) human intervention. This standard was developed and is maintained by CIP4.

Connected Data: Once enough data is marked up semantically in a standardised way, it can be linked together to form an ontology. In information science, an ontology is where the properties and interrelationships between sets of data are mapped out so thoroughly that they are considered to be a formal representation of knowledge. This concept is not particularly easy to grasp as pure theory. It leads to philosophical questions like: What is knowledge? How might knowledge be represented? Think of all the places, people, music and films mentioned in books. What if all of these places, people, music and film were tagged semantically in XML. The internet contains lots of semantic data and metadata about these things. Places have specific coordinates allowing them to be located on maps; people have photographs and biographies of themselves on Wikipedia; music appears as MP3 files, album art and YouTube videos; films have trailers, artwork, and IMDB listings. If all these disparate data sets were linked together you can begin to see how a representation of knowledge could come into being.

3.13 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, you have explored how content is enhanced using markup languages and how the resulting structured text can speed up later stages of the production process. Once the structure and semantic meaning of text has been defined, the content can then be processed to achieve the look and feel a publisher wants. It then becomes simpler to make global changes to the appearance of these elements destined for whatever format (book, ebook, webpage database).

Furthermore, adding standardised XML metadata to documents allows the information held within them to be read and understood by computers. This data can then be semantically linked to other data building a more complex ontology of information. It is important to keep these principles in mind as you cover the next chapter, which focuses on typography and page design for both the printed page and digital formats. Best practice is to always consider structure before appearance.

References  

Castro, E., Hyslop, B., 2013. HTML and CSS visual quickstart guide. Peachpit Press :Berkeley, CA.

Clark, Giles, and Angus Phillips, 2008, Inside Book Publishing, Routledge.

Coombs, J. H., Renear, A.H., DeRose, S., (1987) Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing, Communications of the ACM. Vol.30, Issue 11, pp933-947. Available at: [Accessed 30 April 2021]

Editeur 2009. [ONIX Book Standard] Overview, Editeur [online] Available at: < [Accessed 30 April 2021]

Europeana. 2010 Linked Open Data [video] Vimeo.com Available at: [Accessed 30 April 2021]

Hall, F., 2012. The Business of Digital Publishing [ebook] Routledge Available at: < [Accessed 9 April 2021]

Jennings, C., 2018. 'The Basics of HTML and CSS' [video] The Digital Publishing Hub. Available at: <https://www.publisha.org/screencasts/htmlandcssbasics/> [Accessed 9 April 2021]

Jennings, C., 2016. 'Create XML from InDesign' [video] The Digital Publishing Hub. Available at: < [Accessed 12 April 2021]

Kasdorf, William, 2003. Markup: XML and Related Technologies, in The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing, editor Kardorf, William, Columbia University Press

Maivald, J. J., 2008 A Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML. Peachpit: Berkeley

Simonson, M., 2008. The Lost Art of Type Spec'ing [Blog] 27 September, Marksimonson.com. Available at: < [Accessed 30 April 2021]

Further Reading

Goldstein, Ingrid, 2010, Why Publishers Need Agile Content: XML, Semantics and RDF [online] Publishing Perspectives, 10 November. Available at: < http://publishingperspectives.com/2010/11/why-publishers-need-agile-content/ >  [Accessed 30 April 2021]

Hargrave, J., 2014, ‘Paperless Mark-Up: Editing Educational Texts in a Digital Environment’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 30(2), pp. 212–222. doi: 10.1007/s12109-014-9360-9. Available at: [Accessed 23 April 2021]

Hyvönen, E., 2020, October. " Sampo" Model and Semantic Portals for Digital Humanities on the Semantic Web. [ejournal] DHN (pp. 373-378).  Available at: [Accessed 13 April 2021]

Mäkelä, E., Hypén, K. and Hyvönen, E., 2011, October. BookSampo—lessons learned in creating a semantic portal for fiction literature. [ejournal] International Semantic Web Conference (pp. 173-188). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Available at: [Accessed 13 April 2021]

Skills Builder 1 – Sample Answer

Punctuational and referential markup are generally the concern of the author and editor of a text during the content creation stage of workflow, but should be checked by others during copy-editing and proof-reading stages. The author and editor might also be best placed to create the alt text descriptions of images due to their familiarity with the content.  Whereas, the production editor, typesetter or web editor might be better placed to add descriptive labelling across multiple works (series, lists, journals).

Authorship

his chapter was originally written by Helena Markou, Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University as part of the MA Publishing (via distance learning).
It was edited and adapted for the IPA by Genevieve Cain.
© 2022 Oxford Brookes University

Contents

4.1 Chapter Aims
4.2 Introduction
4.3 Typesetting & Typography
4.4 Typefaces & Fonts
4.5 Composition Tools
4.6 Images
4.7 Colour
4.8 Page Layout
4.9 Chapter Summary

4.1 Chapter Aims

• To explore the basics of fonts, images and colour 
• To explain the principles of page layout, design, and composition tools
• To understand Postscript and Portable Document Format

4.2 Introduction

In this chapter, you will build on the previous chapters to consider the processes of design and composition of text and pages. This includes the layout of a page, treatment of images, use of colour, selection of typefaces and tools used to achieve this. We will approach the topic from the perspective of a production editor. However, the responsibilities of this role overlap with other functions such as typesetting, graphic design and editorial. Almost all book design happens using digital composition tools, such as InDesign or QuarkXPress and more often than not content is destined for both print and screen. This chapter is not designed as a user manual for any particular composition software, but we will explore some of the software features available to assist typography and typesetting.  This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

4.3 Typesetting & Typography 

Producing a beautiful and functional book is a balancing act between two things:

• Typesetting - using tools to arrange text within the available space.
• Typography - the art of making text look attractive.

In the early days of the printing press, these two things were quite distinct; typography required creative skills to envisage what the text should look like and where on the page it should be placed. Whereas typesetting was the manual craft of arranging the type, in the necessary order, quickly and accurately. Today, these two aspects of book production have blurred into one due to desktop publishing software like Microsoft Word and composition tools like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. However, we can still use these terms to make an important distinction between the decisions relating to: design - Does this font have the gravitas needed for this work of literary fiction? Or production - Does this font size use up more pages than we can afford to print?

Ebook Typography: Most ebook formats can be categorised as either flowable or fixed layout. The typography of each can be controlled by the publisher to a greater or lesser extent. You will be covering ebook formats in greater depth in a later chapter, so for now let's look at the basics of typography for each in turn:

1. Flowable: Using this format, text flows to fit the screen size of the device being used. As you can see from the screenshots below (Figure 1), the page layout of an ebook is controlled by the user (not the publisher) who can change the typeface and type size being displayed. On some, but not all devices, the designer can specify the font used for headings and can embed a preferred font alongside the other options, but they cannot guarantee they will be used.

Initially, only Latin typefaces reading left-to-right and horizontally top-to-bottom were universally supported by ebook devices, therefore non-Latin scripts such as Chinese and Japanese kanji (read right-to-left and vertically top-to-bottom and) and Arabic scripts (read right-to-left) were not supported by all devices. The ePub3 format does now support these scripts but bilingual text (mixing scripts and text direction) can still be problematic. Another constraint of flowable ebook typography is that it is not possible to have multiple columns of text built into the ebook. Some devices can be rotated to landscape in order to display the text as a double page spread (two pages side-by-side). It should be noted that this is a feature of the device, not the ebook.

Figure 1: Flowable layout of e-book, as controlled by user.

2. Fixed layout: With this format, much like a pdf, the page size is fixed (Figure 2). The user cannot alter the typeface or type size, meaning they may need to zoom in to make text readable on small-screened devices. The designer can achieve the same typographical arrangement as in print; embedding fonts, using columns and setting margins to display type as intended.

Figure 2. Example of a fixed layout format.

If you have access to a dedicated ebook reader, tablet or smartphone you may want to investigate which variables you are able to change yourself within the ebook reader. NB. The iPad allows for much more control over the typography in flowable ebooks.

If you keep in mind the idea of typography as a work of art, then it follows logically that the typographical arrangement of a book would be protected by copyright laws. As a UK example, according to the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988: “Copyright in the typographical arrangement of a published edition expires 25 years from the end of the year in which the edition was first published. Published editions do not have to be original, but they will not be new copyright works if the typographical arrangement has been copied from existing published editions.”

Skills Builder 1: Reflect on fixable and fixed ebook formats.

Which type of ebook, flowable or fixed, would you use for the following publications? Explain your choice:
1. Crime novel
2. Poetry anthology
3. Children’s picture book
See Sample Answer.

4.4 Typefaces & Fonts

The difference between a typeface and a font is quite easy to miss as the two words are commonly used interchangeably. However, there is a distinction;

• A typeface is a group of characters and symbols with a consistent design.
• A font is the tool (digital or analogue) used to display the typeface.

This distinction can be easier to grasp by thinking about fonts as files you download to your computer and typefaces as the style of the characters that appear on your screen. So you would be correct in saying “I love the typeface they have used on that book cover, I wonder where I can download and purchase the font?”

Copyright applies to typefaces like all other works of graphic design. In the digital form the font is considered software, so even if the font is free to download its use will be subject to an End User License Agreement which will determine how it can be used.

4.4.1 Type Families

There are many ways of classifying typefaces according to the features of their design and grouping them into families. What you need to think about when selecting a typeface is whether the design characteristics are suitable for communicating the intended message. 

Block

Roman

Gothic 

Script

 Monospaced

In some situations, for example book covers, marketing point of sale items, you will want the type to jump out and grab attention. In other situations, such as novels you want the reading experience to be effortless and the typeface itself goes unnoticed. 

Within each typeface it is possible to have variations:

• Upper Case / Lower Case
• Regular / Roman / Book
• Italic / Oblique
• Bold / Light
• Condensed
• Small Caps

4.4.2 Controlling and displaying typefaces in web and digital

In order for a typeface to display on a computer screen when you use desktop publishing software or visit a website you often need to have the font installed on your computer. There are clever ways of embedding fonts into webpages so they always appear as intended, but most web content is not given this much forethought. One of the functions of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is to make the text appear as the designer intended. Therefore font families are used to specify the desired typeface, or if that is not possible, one that looks similar because it comes from the same generic font family.

h1 {font-family: Helvetica,Calibri,sans-serif;} = Display all level 1 headings as: Helvetica, or if that isn't available Calibri, or if neither is available any sans-serif font.

This first example of CSS is logical because Helvetica and Calibri both sit under the larger umbrella of the sans serif font family. However, a common mistake made by the CSS novice is to intermingle fonts from different font families.

h2 {font-family:“Times New Roman”,“Lucida Handwriting”, sans-serif;}

The second example is incorrect as it is instructing the browser to display Times New Roman (which is a serif typeface), or Lucida Handwriting (which is a cursive typeface), or any sans-serif typeface if either of those are unavailable.

4.4.3 PostScript, TrueType and OpenType Fonts

As previously mentioned, fonts are the tools used to express a typeface in digital form. Fonts are software. The codes describe the lines and curves of each character using mathematics so that recognisable characters appear on our computer screen. In other words, a font is a particular implementation of a typeface. Fonts use different coding systems (formats), these have their own history of development, appropriate purposes, advantages and limitations. Here are the main formats:

• PostScript fonts were developed in 1984, by Adobe, alongside the PostScript page description language that made printing from computer screens possible. PostScript fonts allow type to be displayed on computer screens and be printed out as high resolution, scalable, graphics. They use geometry to describe the lines and curves of each character and do not distort when resized, making them well suited for high-quality printing. There are two parts to a PostScript font file, both must be installed on the user's device for the typeface to be displayed and printed correctly.
• TrueType fonts were jointly developed by Apple and Microsoft, in the late 1980s, to avoid an over-reliance on Adobe PostScript. Windows and Apple operating systems come with embedded software to interpret TrueType fonts and convert them into type on screen. Unlike PostScript the TrueType font file to be installed comes in one part. There are some TrueType fonts common to both Windows and Apple devices, such as Arial and Times New Roman, and these are best to use when sending documents between Mac and PC users.
• OpenType fonts are based on TrueType and were developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe to standardise fonts and allow files to be shared easily between platforms. Their coding systems permits a wider range of characters, up to 65,000, to be stored meaning variations (bold / oblique / condensed) of a typeface can be included in the one file as well as non-latin typefaces such as Chinese and Japanese kanji. Not all OpenType fonts make full use of the thousands of characters.

Why do you need to care about fonts? Although most computers come with standard fonts installed, people can also add or remove fonts from their devices. If the font is missing from the recipient's computer then (as you've seen) a generic replacement typeface will be automatically selected. To avoid problems with missing fonts pdfs (portable document format) are commonly used. This way the font can be embedded in the pdf document itself to ensure the correct typeface displays on any device.

4.5 Composition Tools

You will notice throughout this chapter that typography and typesetting for print are usually achieved by industry professionals using dedicated composition tools such as InDesign and QuarkExpress. These are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors that production departments use to create print ready files in-house. Alternatively, publishers might outsource these tasks to an external typesetter or freelance designer. But, what is a print ready file? Let's take a moment to explore this question and the underlying technology.

4.5.1 PostScript

PostScript is a Page Description Language (PDL) developed by Adobe in 1985 and used to translate high-resolution vector images (of pages) into data that printers can understand. It enables the true representation of fonts on a page. The key point here is that fonts and vector graphics are described (on screen) using mathematics and geometry, while printers use mechanical processes to disperse ink or toner, row after row, onto a page. How do you tell the printer to put the ink in the right place?

Figure 3. Example of an early dot matrix print.

As the name suggests, early dot matrix printers were mechanically limited to evenly spaced dots, thus incapable of accurately reproducing vector graphics (Figure 3). Along came Xerox and the laser jet printer. Like modern photocopiers, laser jets uses static electricity to attract toner to any part of the page. PostScript is the language that tells the printer where to distribute toner using the vector graphics. In theory, you don't even need a word processor, you could type the PostScript code, send it to the printer, and it would produce an image based on your instructions. With the advent of PostScript, and laser printers, a huge variety of fonts could be printed, hence the boom in desktop publishing in the 1980s.

4.5.2 Portable Document Format (PDF)

Developed by Adobe using PostScript, the portable document format, is exactly what you would expect. It is portable, allowing print ready documents to be sent from one computer device to another without any changes happening. One way of imagining a pdf is like printing to the screen. When you click the print button on a computer, you get a static printout on paper, un-editable and laid out exactly as it was on your screen. In the same way, when you export or save to the pdf format you get a digital printout of your page that can then be sent to someone else to print.

4.5.3 Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

So far we have looked at ways of creating printed type from digital fonts. These days it is common to also want to convert printed content into a computer readable digital format. Many publishers have made (or are making) their backlist and out-of-print titles accessible again through digitisation projects. These are often titles that sell in small quantities each year where the business case for holding stock in the warehouse is not clear. Once these books have been digitised they can be added to a print-on-demand catalogue or republished as ebooks with minimal extra cost.

OCR is a type of software that has been developed to recognise letters and other characters from scanned images (or old pdfs) and convert it back into searchable text. The software has advanced a lot over recent years but it still struggles to accurately identify content in tables, superscript and subscript characters, mathematical equations and non-linear typography.

Libraries are using this technology to allow access to works from their archives and special collections. One of the highest profile examples of this is Google's Book Scan project which caused great controversy by scanning work still in copyright as well as those books in the public domain. A criticism of the Google Book Scanning method using OCR is that it has a high error rate: 3% of characters are incorrectly identified by the software. 3% sounds low, but that equates to three typos per line of text. What would you think if the paragraph you have just read contained 15 typos? The same OCR technology is used in the note-taking application Keep designed by Google. Amongst other features Google Keep allows users to take a picture of a document using a smartphone camera and convert it to editable text. In this instance, OCR is used to 'grab text' from the uploaded image. 

What if the source content is old, damaged, faded or handwritten? There are, of course, some other options besides OCR transcription. When accuracy is critical to a digitisation project then the content can be reproduced using a hybrid of human and computer power. Two or three typists rekey the material with the aim of generating multiple versions of the same text. Comparison software can then be used to identify any disparity between the versions. It is unlikely that three typists would independently make the same errors, so an editor can quickly check the discrepancies against the original to create an error-free master version.

The Smithsonian Museum, for example, is using a variation of this approach to transcribe items in their collections. With millions of pages in need of digitisation, they have developed an online tool which crowdsources transcription services from the general public. The Smithsonian's custom-built website presents high-resolution scans of an artefact page-by-page. Each individual page requires multiple transcriptions from members of the public before finally being checked by a reviewer. The website tracks the progress and displays how much of each artefact has been transcribed, reviewed, and left to complete. Instructions are given to guide the transcription, explaining the specific mark-up to be used to indicate line breaks, page breaks, and additional marks on the page and so on.

4.6 Images

For many sectors of the publishing industry, the written word is merely a supporting actor and images are the stars of the show. If you removed the illustrations from a children's picture book or the photographs from an edition of Vogue you would not be left with much to fill the pages. However, even if the publication you are working on contains just one image there are a number of implications for the rest of the production workflow. For example:

In what format will the image be supplied? As original artwork, photographic negatives, scans, digital files, etc...? Other considerations include:

• Is the resolution (pixels per inch) high enough for accurate printing?
• Can the size of the image be changed, i.e., is the image scalable?
• Is the image in colour or black and white, or line drawings or half-tones?
• Where will it need to be placed in the flow of the text? Integrated, full page, or as a plate section?
• What paper will need to be used?
• How much will the image add to print costs?
• Will the number of images impact on the production schedule?
• Are there any copyright issues?

Images and Copyright Permissions: This last point is very important when undertaking a digital conversion project or when selling the rights to a work. Artwork (like text) can only be reproduced with the agreement of the designer or illustrator and explicit permission must be obtained for the exact format (print book, periodical, ebook, website) and territory of reproduction. Academic publishers have been working across print and digital formats for decades so contracts are likely to include print and digital rights to illustrations.

However in the world of trade and consumer publishing, if the print edition is relatively old - for the sake of argument let's say "old" is any time before 2007 (when the ebook market took off)- then permission to digitally reproduce images might not have been included in the original contract. Tracking down licence holders and clearing permissions retrospectively is a time consuming process, it can take months (or longer) and ultimately the cost of securing permissions needs to be balanced with the potential revenues of the project.

In summary, some projects are destined for print, digital, or both simultaneously, and the role of the production department is to ensure the images are fit for purpose, can be reproduced cost effectively and will be reusable in the future. Print and digital technology advance at a rapid pace, meaning that the goal posts are constantly moving.

Image resolution: One of the first questions you will have to answer is what type of image you are working with, and whether it has a high enough resolution for print. The minimum resolution for printed material is 300 dpi (dots per inch). Computer screens display pixels, therefore, 300 dpi equates to 300 ppi (pixels per inch). When low-resolution images are scaled up the individual pixels begin to become visible and the image quality is compromised. See figure 4 below.

Figure 4: Example of pixilation when scaling up a digital photograph.

If you scan the photograph at 300 dpi, and enlarge it to twice the size of the original photo, the poster you print out will have a resolution of 150 dpi (because the same number of dots are being used to fill twice the space). If you scan the photograph at 600 dpi, and enlarge it to twice the size, the poster you print out will be 300 dpi (because twice the dots are being used to fill twice the space). If you decided you wanted the poster to be four times bigger than your original photograph, you would need to quadruple the scanning resolution to 1200 dpi to achieve a 300 dpi print resolution.

It certainly helps to have a basic knowledge of photo manipulation and graphic design software. However, it is common for specialist Graphic Designers to be contracted for this type of work, and in this scenario, the Production Editor's role is to ensure the work has been carried out by the supplier to the correct specifications given in the design brief. Book publishing has developed a number of cost-effective solutions, such as co-editions and plate sections, to address problems of print economics. A nice side effect of born digital publishing, always intended for the screen, is that images and colour can be used in digital without dramatically increasing costs (as would be the case with printed formats). It also allows images to be anchored in the flow of body text rather than aggregating them all in a plate section, out of context. The most important factor here is that a publisher starts with the highest quality image possible using the best illustration or scanning technology available at that point in time.

Images for web & digital: In contrast to print, images intended for the web or digital devices need to be saved at a lower resolution so that they are accessible to people using low bandwidth internet connections as high-resolution images can cripple loading time of webpages. In regards to ebooks, some platforms specify a maximum file size per ebook uploaded to their databases. For example, Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform will not accept files over 50MB and claim the average ebook file is 2MB. The optimum resolution for ebook images was 72 ppi until the recent launch of the new iPad retina display, which is capable of displaying a higher resolution of 150 ppi. This evolution highlights the need to think about future technological requirements as well as current best practice. One could argue that there is a limit to how much further technology can advance, high definition screens will soon reach a point where the image displayed is more detailed than our eyes are capable of perceiving. The most important factor here is that a publisher starts with the highest quality image possible using the best illustration or scanning technology available at that point in time.

4.7 Colour

It is important that what you see on the computer screen in prepress, is translated accurately to the proofs and the final printed page. Production editors must evaluate how much variance is acceptable on a title by title basis and allow time for proofing accordingly. There are some types of publishing where minor colour variance is tolerable, and others where it is not. For example, a medical reference book might include images to help make a diagnosis based on skin colour. Here much of the value of the book is in the accuracy of its image colour. For this reason, some kind of colour management and quality assurance must be included in the workflow. It is also important that a production editor has good knowledge of the limitations of the printing equipment being used and the range of colours that can be reproduced.

4.8 Page Layout

Many great typographers have independently come to the same conclusions about the way text and images should be arranged on the page for optimum readability and impact. Essentially, these models prescribe that the page be divided into a grid based on set ratios. The grid is then used to determine the region of the page that is taken up by text. Mitchell refers to these as text panels but in InDesign they are called text frames and in QuarkXPress text boxes. Outside the text panels are margins; the margin that folds into the spine is known as the gutter, the top is the header, and bottom footer.

Once the text panels have been established, the type size, line height and word spacing can be altered in order to achieve an optimal line length for readability. You should always aim for 9-11 words or 66-72 characters (including spaces). If a line is too short, or too long, the eye finds it difficult to correctly locate the next row of text, making it easy to miss outlines or get stuck reading the same line twice. Now that you know this simple rule about optimal line length, you will probably become acutely aware that it is often broken. When you come across an example, try to think about why? Was line length determined by other design features? Was readability not even considered? Is the reader in control of the type size and line length?

Master pages: After a page layout has been decided upon, a master page can be created in InDesign (or equivalent composition tool) to apply the layout to every page. The master page can also be used to automatically insert repeating or sequential page elements such as the running heads (denoting the chapter name or book title along the top of the page) and pagination page numbers). Setting up master pages at the beginning of any design project is a worthwhile investment. It will ensure consistency, avoid human error and save a lot of time in the long run.

For some further information, you may wish to read Secret Law of Page Harmony by Alexander Ross Charchar to explore the rich history of page design and layout grids

Hierarchy & Headings: Chapter 3 has already introduced you to the concept of marking up text to provide structure. Once the hierarchy of book parts, chapter headings, sub-headings and body text has been identified, typography can be applied to make these elements distinct. If you pick almost any novel off the bookshelf you will find the structure is fairly simple and follows a similar structure to any other novel. 

Textbooks and other works of non-fiction are by nature more granular and often required more levels of headings and sub-headings to break up a large topic into manageable chunks. Typography is used to provide consistency throughout the book. The aim is to make the headings subtly stand out from the body text while indicating their position in the hierarchy.  It is important to note that, when typesetting a document using composition tools the headings shouldn't be applied manually by selecting the text and making it bigger and bold. Instead, the best practice is to select the text and mark it up as “heading 1”, then separately set all the “heading 1” text to be big and bold. This way you can easily make universal changes across the document.

4.9 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have broadly covered the theory behind the design and production of materials for both page and screen. You should now be able to: 

• Identify differences between typeface families 
• Be able to assess the suitability of typefaces, images and colours intended for the printed page and screen
• Identify the typographic elements of the printed page and screen
• Apply design theory to page layout

But we have only scratched the surface, some of these topics, such as printing and ebook design, will be explored in greater depth in the later chapters dedicated to each. As you have seen, the role of the production editor is crucial within publishing, it is the point where words are given style and structure, and also the last chance for mistakes to be caught. When you contemplate all of the people and energy involved in writing and editing a publication, much of that work is invisible to the end reader, but mistakes are not. Books are judged by their appearance. It is the responsibility of a production editor to assure the highest quality product.

References 

Adobe (2020) About Adobe pdf, Adobe.com [online] Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Ambrose, G., Harris, P., 2008. The production manual a graphic design handbook. [ebook] Available via the Oxford Brookes University library website [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Bann, D., 2006. The all new print production handbook. Mies : RotoVision SA.

Black, A., Stiff, P., Waller, R., (1992) Designing Business Documents, Monotype Typography Ltd

Bullock, A., 2012. Book production. Abingdon : Routledge.

Charchar, A.R., 2010. Secret law of page harmony, Retinart [Blog] 13 July 2010. Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 [legislation] Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Davis, R., and Flood, A., 2010. Jonathan Franzen's book Freedem suffers UK recall, Guardian.co.uk [online] 1 Oct. Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Fount, 2019. Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Jennings, C., 2012 eBook Typography, PagetoScreen [ebook] Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

JISC, 2014 Font: Basic guide to Licensing, JISC Digital Media [Online] Available at: [Last accessed 7 August 2013] Archived

Identifont, (2019) Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

ISSN UK Centre (2019) [online] Available at: <[Accessed 16 April 2021]

Lehni, J., 2011. Typeface as Programme, Typotheque.com. Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Lupton, E., (2004) Thinking with type: A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students. Princeton Architectural Press: New York

Nielsen UK ISBN Agency (2019) [online] Available at: [Accessed 16 April 2021]

Mitchell, M., 2005. Book typography: a designer's manual. Marlborough, Wiltshire : Libanus Press.

Further Reading

KPD Publishing (2020) Arabic Beta [online] https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GUQT4C8J6RR6V8TY [Accessed 19 April 2021]

Creative Publishing Solutions Limited (2010) Guide to typeface licensing. [pdf] Available at: [Accessed 19 April 2021]

Monotype (2019) Font Licensing 101: The basics of proper font usage. Monotype.com [online] Available at: [Accessed 19 April 2021]

Skills Builder 1 - Sample Answer:

A crime novel would be fine as a flowable ebook as it is mainly text and unlikely to have complicated typography.

Some poetry anthologies would work as a flowable ebook if the poems were simple lines of verse. However, some poems demand complex positioning of text and must be displayed in a particular way. These would need to be published as fixed layout ebooks.

Children's picture books are often more illustration than text and it is likely that the fixed layout ebook would work best.

5.1 Chapter Aims

• To explore the range of available printing methods and their use
• To consider the printing processes and raw materials
• To assess the method most appropriate to the needs of the product

5.2 Introduction

In this chapter, we consider how content is transformed into the tangible objects on our bookshelves.  Despite digital innovation and the rapid growth of ebook sales, print still accounts for around 53% (as of 2020) of UK publishing revenue (if journals and rights revenue are included) and 80% of the revenue of the book publishing market (PA, 2019).  Paper products fill our homes, workplaces, and educational institutions, so it is safe to say that the analogue book is still alive and kicking and likely to be so for the foreseeable future. Let’s look now at the physical process of printing and the factors that publishers must consider. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

5.3 Printing Technologies

Although printing is known to have begun in China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) using carved wooden blocks, the use of movable type on a press is attributed to Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. Since then, the technologies for printing and typesetting have evolved dramatically, from the mid-nineteenth century use of hot metal and ink, through filmsetting in the early 1970s, to computer typesetting, and the current use of non-impact methods such as laser and inkjet printing.

Recapping what was mentioned in chapter 1, most book printing today is done using one of two methods:

• Offset Lithography
• Digital (Inkjet or Laser)

Many magazines are produced using a method called gravure, but this is increasingly being replaced by digital methods.

The environmental issues relating to printing are covered in more detail at the end of this chapter however, you should not infer from this that they are a mere afterthought. Paper manufacture, printing and book distribution have a significant impact on the environment. This is due to the amount of water, energy, chemicals, shipping and waste involved in the process. All book production has a detrimental effect on the environment. While choices can be made at each step in the production process to minimise this effect, that first decision to either publish, or not publish a title, is the most important one. Once you have made that decision, as we shall see, you can still have a big influence on what the product looks like and how much there is of it, and in so doing reduce its impact on the environment.

5.4 How Does Litho Differ From Digital?

Clearly, there are mechanical differences between these two printing methods, but as a publisher what you really care about is which one is best suited to the product in terms of cost, quality and speed of delivery. Generally, digital printing methods are better suited to short print runs, or print-on-demand orders. Talking to the supplier and asking for their advice is a good place to start. If possible, get to know your printer. Many printing companies welcome visits from their clients and want to develop a supportive relationship with their publishers. It makes good business sense, for them, and for you.

Skills builder 1: Differences between litho and digital printing

Research further the differences between litho and digital printing by visiting some printers' websites and summarise your findings in a table like the one below. 

5.5 Deciding on Design, Colour and Paper

When deciding how to make a printed product, paper, colour and page design should not be considered in isolation as they all have an effect on the other. So, how best to decide these things?

Design

It seems logical to start with the content itself, right? Editorial factors such as:

• How long is the manuscript?
• How many images or illustrations are essential to the integrity of the product?

The content will have some influence on the final shape of the book, but to let it determine the production values is not advisable.

Far more important factors to consider are:

• Who is going to use this product - toddlers, tourists, lawyers?
• How will the product be used - in the bath, while hiking, to comply with regulations?
• How much will they be willing to pay - £1.99, £19.99, £1999?

It is the target-market that should determine the number of copies to print, and the price that it will be sold at. In many companies, the marketing team will specify these aspects of a title. They will consider a range of factors that collectively can be referred to as the production values:

• the use of colour
• the choice of paper and binding
• the extent (number of pages)
• the format (paperback or hardback)
• the dimensions (size) of the book

What is critical is that the production values fit with the budget you have been given, as opposed to the RRP being determined by the cost of manufacture. The production department must take all of these requirements into consideration when designing the product.

For example, if you are publishing a book entitled Maps of Ancient Rome, it will certainly need to include some maps. These can either be integrated with the text or separated onto individual pages or plate sections. But how will these maps be reproduced?

Your options include:

• black and white line drawings (monochrome)
• halftones (monochrome - shades of grey to black)
• spot colour (two colours - black + one other)
• plate sections (monochrome or 4-colour)
• 4-colour 4/1 (full colour on one side of paper, monochrome on the other)
• 4-colour 4/4 (full colour on both sides of the paper)

Although the market increasingly expects books to be colour throughout, it is possible to reduce your printing costs by printing on one side of the sheet in colour and the other in monochrome (4/1 pronounced four back one). However, this compromise can have a negative effect on the overall look and feel of the book.

5.6 Colour

These days, we use computer software programs to design our layouts and colours destined for print. In order to ensure accurate representation of the colour it is important to be working within a CMYK colour space (CMY – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow – K for ‘Key colour’ black). Furthermore, if a file is designed in the RGB colour space, the colours may not print as expected. For example, you would work within the CMYK colour space for PDFs destined for print.

Litho printing, for example, offers a more consistent and precise colour match than digital print and often uses both CMYK and Pantone colour in order to achieve the depth and accuracy of colour needed – in litho printing each of the metal plates is created for each image and each colour. So, you can imagine how adding a fifth plate carrying a Pantone PMS colour, such as silver, to existing CMYK will give you an additional spot colour. Alternatively, you could reduce the number of plates to just the key (usually black) plus a spot colour to highlight certain page elements.

As you can see from the image below (Figure 1) (where the CMYK layers have been separated), 4 colour printing relies on your eye to do all the work of interpreting yellow and cyan dots as green, or magenta and yellow dots as orange.

Figure 1: Example of separated CMYK layers in a photograph.

You might like to investigate this yourself by looking at other coloured images under a magnifying lens. 

The layers contain lines of dots positioned at slightly different angles, so that when they are superimposed they don't completely mask each other (as shown in Figure 2 below). The concentration of lines, which can either be coarse or fine, forms the basic unit of measure for this type of printing; lines per inch (lpi). 

Figure 2: Examples of layers containing lines of dots positioned at different angles.

This may seem like a statement of the obvious, but always keep in mind that image detail is lost during printing. If you are ever in a situation where you are converting out-of-print backlist titles to print-on-demand, you will need to look carefully at your source material. How will you scan and process the images contained in a text if the original illustrations (or the printing plates) are no longer available? Photo editing software is increasingly sophisticated and can improve the appearance of scanned images to a certain degree, but you may have to live with some loss of quality.

Two Colour Printing: The use of just two-colours in lithographic printing requires only two plates to be created (per section) and offers designers the opportunity to add colour at a lower fixed-cost than 4/4 (full-colour printing).

5.7 Paper & Ink

"The product determines the quality of the paper, as much as the paper determines the quality of the product. The publisher's skill lies in being able to match the paper to the product.” -- Bullock, cited in Clark and Phillips, 2019.

Paper choice is one of the biggest production decisions to make. It influences the general look and feel of the book as well as its:

• Bulk (thickness)
• Appearance of colours
• Readability of text
• Durability of the paper
• Cost of production
• Weight

The cost of production and weight will be covered in more detail in the unit on briefing and estimating. In this section, we will consider the importance of the other factors in turn.

Paper bulk: It is a common misconception that thick or bulky or paper equates to heavy paper; as explained in the reading, bulk is the result of air between the fibres that make up the paper.

Take for example the two novels by Stephen King in Figure 3 below. IT (albeit slightly dog eared) and The Green Mile are roughly the same thickness. What would you guess their extent to be? If you guessed the same, you would be wrong. IT, at 1020 pages, is over twice as long as The Green Mile, at 462 pages.

Figure 3: It and ‘The Green Mile’ by Stephen King – paper bulk comparison.

Skills builder 2: Stephen King has a substantial backlist of bestsellers; IT sells in fairly high volumes, approximately 40,000 units/year in the UK whereas The Green Mile sells in lower volumes, about 10,000 units/year (Nielsen BookScan 2020). These are still considered very strong sales for backlist titles, first published in 1986 and 1996 respectively. What could be the rationale for choosing a paper with lower bulk for one book and not the other? Consider this from the bookseller, publisher and reader perspectives. See Sample Answer.

It is common for trade paperbacks to be printed on bulkier paper than academic or professional titles. This can be seen if you compare the spine width of Lynette Owen's title (436 pages) to The Green Mile (462 pages) in the image above. The extents are approximately the same, yet the academic book is notably thinner.

Paper Colour: The brightness of colours printed onto the page is highly dependent on the paper choice. If the book you are printing contains colour images then you will need to consider the effect of the paper colour on your images. The example below (Figure 4) is from The Spinner's Book of Yarn Design. See how the various shades of pinky white, creams and bright white have been reproduced. This subtlety is only possible with bright white coated paper.

Figure 4: Brightness of colour and choice of paper – ‘The Spinner's Book of Yarn Design’.

You would be advised to use a bright white paper for colour printing as any other shade will interfere with the colour values. This might be particularly important for a project where accurate representation of colours is critical. For example, a colour guide to reading cell sections for biology researchers.

Ink: Litho, laser and inkjet printing all have different ways of transferring the image to the substrate. And each one of these has its own characteristics. Litho uses mineral or vegetable based inks to reproduce images; Laser printing uses toner which is "cooked" onto the page and inkjet uses water based inks. If you are after strong colours and your budget and time allow it, then litho would be the first choice. However, if you are short of time, don't have the budget, or only have a small printrun then digital is your most likely option. Pragmatically, you don't always have much choice over which ink is used. You have to accept the quality that comes from the printing methods used by your chosen supplier.

Paper absorbency: When images are integrated with the text they are printed on the same paper, as is the case with magazines or newspapers. Here, there is no choice but to accept the qualities of the paper available and its suitability for colour printing. Newsprint is more absorbent than coated art paper, therefore the halftone screens used to print newspapers are much coarser, 85 lpi (lines per inch) than those used to print fine art books - 300 lpi. This means the dots of ink are applied in lines that are wide apart to allow for the ink to be absorbed and spread into the paper. Ultimately, this results in a lower quality reproduction of images.

Readability of text: In contrast, if the book you are printing is a novel without colour images, then a true or cream white paper reduces the contrast between the text and the page, making it easier on the eye. Opacity can also affect readability: where the text on the reverse of the page is visible through the paper it can confuse the eye. This can be eliminated by backing up the text so the lines on both sides of the page align exactly.

Figure 5: Opacity and the effect on readability – ‘IT’ by Stephen King.

Durability of the product: A number of variables affect the durability of printed products:

• Qualities of substrate - acidity and fibre length
• Storage environment - exposure to oxygen, humidity, and ultraviolet (UV) light.

We probably all have books on our shelves that have yellowed around the edges. This is the effect of UV light oxidising the lignin in the paper. Lignin is the chemical that gives wood and paper its strength. Prolonged exposure to light will cause paper derived from acidic wood pulp to yellow and within a few decades fall apart. Papers which are neither acid nor alkaline; have a neutral pH of 7, have a significantly longer life expectancy, exceeding 1000 years! Other rag fibres such as cotton, linen and silk can be used to produce stronger papers with a lower percentage of lignin, neutral pH, and longer fibre lengths than wood pulp. There is an environmental argument to say that all book production uses up valuable natural resources (water, wood, fuel) and therefore there is a responsibility to make the products as durable as possible. However, in reality, newspapers, magazines and trade fiction have relatively short shelf-lives and do not require the highest grades of paper.

5.8 Binding

Printing is merely a process of putting ink on paper, whereas binding is a complex multi-step process using specialist equipment to a high level of precision.  Binding happens towards the end of the production process, however, the decision on which method of binding and coving to select is made long before the order is sent to print. This decision is fundamental to the both quality and cost of the end product. 

When it comes to books, there are four principal binding methods:

• Perfect binding (cheapest, most often used for paperback books, but can also be used for hardbacks)

• Notch, slotted, or bust binding (more expensive than perfect binding, and increasingly used as an alternative)

• Section sewn binding (most expensive binding method, but it is the strongest and most durable; can be used in paperback and hardback)

• Saddle stitching (used for edition binding, and for when the extent is very short)

There are some instances when you might use an alternative binding method to the four mentioned above. In the example below (Figure 6), wire-o has been used for a handbook of sewing techniques. The benefit of wire-o is that the pages will lie flat without mousetrapping (flipping shut); a feature that is essential for a hands-free read. 

Figure 6: Wire-o binding used for a handbook of sewing techniques.

A disadvantage of wire-o is that the binding itself provides no spine, so you cannot identify the book if it is on a shelf in a bookshop. As you can see in Figure 7 below, this can be overcome with the choice of casing.

Figure 7: Casing options for wire-o bound titles.

Image placement: The type of binding can impact the display of images placed across the double page spread. Therefore, the designer should think carefully about how double-page spreads will appear in three-dimensions. This can be relevant at the point of commissioning illustrations, as the artist should be briefed to avoid placing the focal point in the middle of the image as it will ultimately fall across the gutter. As illustrated below (Figure 8), the perfect-binding does not allow the page to lay flat and a small sliver of the image has been eaten up. One possible solution is to compensate for the binding choice by using the same image twice, placed on facing pages, and cropped at the gutter edges so part of the image is printed twice.

Figure 8: Image placement on a double page spread and effect using perfect binding.

5.9 Finishing - Hardback

We are all familiar with the saying “never judge a book by its cover”, yet the truth is people do! The cover of your book is one of the most important marketing tools at your disposal, and above all else, it is the thing that will make your book jump off the shelf and say “buy me!” There are a variety of covering techniques and finishes available, each has implications in terms of cost, quality and time for the production department when they come to specify the print order and obtain quotes from suppliers. Let's first look at some of the most common options for hardback books before moving on to paperback in the following section.

Case Binding: This technique is used for hardback books. A thick card is wrapped in real or more commonly, imitation cloth, and attached to the book block with endpapers. Text and line drawings can be impressed into the cloth front, back and spine – this process of punching lettering into the cloth is called blocking endpapers (see Figure 9 example below). The binding company should be supplied with the text and graphics, and instructions about their positioning. 

Figure 9: Example of case binding and blocking.

Printed Paper Cases (PPC): Another technique used for hardback books is the printed paper case (See example Figure 10 below). Constructed in a similar way to case binding, PPC has the additional benefit of allowing 4-colour covers to be printed and wrapped around the thick card. Here, you would include the PPC files in your print order. During the design process, the PPC page dimensions and images need to exceed the card size by 20mm along all edges, and allowance must be made for the circumference of folds.

Figure 10: Example of printed paper casing.

Dust Jackets: As you can see from the examples below (Figure 11), both cloth and PPC hardback books can be covered with a dust jacket of some kind, or left unjacketed (if that is the desired finish). Jackets need to be printed on fairly robust paper (125gsm or more) to be durable. They are usually printed single sided, and often they have a duplicate of the cover design printed on them. From a design perspective, the dust jacket can be used to achieve some clever finishes.

Figure 11: Hardback dust jackets.

Alternatively, the case might be left blank (except for the spine). The dust jacket in Figure 12 below is the only surface on which the front and back cover is printed. The hard card is covered with a simple white case. 

Figure 12: Blank case with printed dust jacket.

The printer should be supplied with pdfs of the dust jacket which is usually printed on a single side of paper. The page size of the dust jacket needs to allow 90mm (depending on the dimensions of the book) for the flaps to wrap around the case. The flaps also provide a little extra space for information about the book to be printed.

Endpapers: You will have noticed that endpapers are used in hardback binding to attach the card to the book block. If you are not intending to print on the endpapers, then you could specify plain or coloured paper be used; this is certainly the least expensive option. Alternatively, if you are after a very high-quality finish, you can also use decorative endpapers such as the ones in Figure 13 below. The designs can be printed single or double sided as the reverse (unglued half) is visible. As with all other printed materials, the pdf for endpapers should be supplied to the printer along with the number of colours being used, specifying single or double sided. Decorative endpapers are commonly used in highly illustrated hardbacks such as cookbooks, gift editions and children's picture books.

Figure 13: Decorative endpapers for a high-quality finish.

Head & Tail Bands & Register Ribbon: Other finishing flourishes include head and tail bands on the spine (such as the green fabric visible in Figure 14 below) and register ribbons. These come in a range of colours and in the case of the register ribbon, serve a practical purpose of bookmarking the page.

Figure 14: Head and tail bands, and register ribbon.

5.10 Finishing - Paperback

In this section, we will look at some of the finishes commonly (but not exclusively) used on paperback books. Most of these finishes could equally be used in hardback casing.

Lamination: Paperback books are encased with cover card of 220 to 280gsm. While this can be left uncoated for aesthetic reasons, most covers are laminated to protect and strengthen the book and prevent ink from transferring off the page. These can be gloss or matt depending on the desired finish. It is not particularly easy to illustrate a matt lamination, however in the example below you can see the red areas of the cover are reflecting light (where a spot UV varnish is applied) whereas the dark (matt laminated) areas are dull. During the journey from printer to customer, books are stacked, slid and generally handled quite a lot. Therefore, a factor to consider when deciding between a gloss, matt, or no laminate, is the effects of scuffs and scratches. Dark coloured covers with matt lamination will show scratches more easily. Similarly, white or very pale coloured covers can pick up scuffs and stains if not protected. Your printer should be able to supply you with samples of certain finishes and advise you on the durability of a particular finish.

Figure 15: Lamination example - the red areas of the cover are reflecting light (where a spot UV varnish is applied) whereas the dark (matt laminated) areas are dull.

Spot UV Varnish: Spot UV varnish can be used to give specific areas of the cover a gloss shine. In Figure 16 below, a floral pattern has been applied over the cover image, as well as highlights to the text. In order to achieve this, the graphic designer must create a separate layer in the pdf file containing the spot UV image that is set to overprint. Any use of spot UV should be included in the specification to your print supplier. Spot UV varnish will increase the cost per page of printing, therefore you should ensure it is within your production budget.

Figure 16: Example of spot UV varnish where a floral pattern has been applied over the cover image, as well as highlights to the text.

Embossing & Debossing: Texture can be added to the cover through embossing and debossing; this produces raised and sunken areas on the cover respectively. From a graphic design perspective, this is achieved in a similar way to the spot UV varnish, a separate image layer is created within the pdf, indicating the areas to be treated. The example below (Figure 17) shows the front and reverse side of an embossed cover (where the texture can be more easily seen).

Figure 17: Example showing the front and reverse side of an embossed cover.

Die-Cutting: Die-cutting is a technique used to cut shaped holes in cover card, dust jackets or board. It can be used to create some clever effects where the die-cut holes provide a window through to the page underneath (as in the example below). As with spot UV varnish, and embossing, the printer will need you to include a layer within the pdf, indicating the shape to be die-cut and ensure this finish is within your budget.

Figure 18: Example of die-cutting providing a window through to the page underneath.

5.11 Preflighting

Before sending a job to print, a production editor needs to check the pdf files are print ready. This step of the workflow is called preflighting (named after the checks carried out by pilots before take-off ...preflight). Once with the printing company and to create the plates used in lithographic printing, the publisher’s pdf must be turned into a high resolution RIP (or bitmap) image via raster image processing (RIP). This converts all the information within the pdf file (text and graphics) into one large rasterized (made up from dots) image.

Preflighting is necessary to ensure the file:

• can be successfully converted into a RIP image
• does not contain errors, omissions or features that will impede the conversion process.

Composition tools, such as Adobe InDesign, can be set up to warn the designer of a range of issues with the file which might not be apparent just by looking at the pages on screen. These might include:

• Do the pdf page dimensions match the output page dimensions?
• Have all fonts been embedded correctly?
• Have images been embedded, in appropriate file formats, and at a suitable resolution?
• Have transparent layers been flattened into one raster image?
• Is there any overset text (text outside the printable area of the page)?
• Have colours been set to the correct CMYK profile?
• Are additional spot colours correctly defined?
• Do colours bleed off the page, and have the correct bleed margins been set?
• Have unused layers or objects been removed?

There is also specialist software that can be used to preflight the pdf file once exported from InDesign (or equivalent software) in case any errors were introduced in the output pdf.

Printer's Marks: Below in Figure 19 is an annotated example of a paperback book cover. The front, spine and back are printed as one page so that it can be wrapped around and the spine glued to the book block. 

Figure 19: Annotated example of a paperback book cover.

A number of marks are printed in the slug (area of page which will be trimmed off) to aid the printer.

• Crop marks – indicate the edge of the page to which the paper needs to be trimmer.

• Bleed marks – indicate the bleed margin. In the example below, the orange colour of the back cover is desired right to the very edge of the trimmed page. To achieve this the colour is set to bleed 3mm beyond the crop line.

• Registration marks – used to check that the cyan, magenta, yellow, and key plates are correctly aligned. In the example, the registration mark appears black, because all 4 colours are directly on top of each other. If a plate was misaligned (out of register), even by a tiny amount, then cyan, magenta, or yellow would be visible on the printed output.

• Colour bars – used by the printer to check the cyan, magenta, yellow colours and key are consistent and that tints (halftones) are the correct density. This can be done by eye, or a densitometer can be used to automate the process.

5.12 Print Suppliers

Chapter 8 will look at a broad range of suppliers in detail. First, let's spend a little time thinking specifically about print suppliers.

The Global Supply Chain: The global environment is such that it is possible to source print suppliers from anywhere in the world. If you are a UK publisher printing for international markets, such as India or Australia, then it is now possible to print in China (for example) and have stock distributed by the printer from there. It used to be the case that publishers would have their own printing operations, managed internally. However few, if any, publishers have their own printing presses, and nowadays it is the norm for publishers to procure their printing from external suppliers by one of the following methods:

• Spot buying - seeking the most competitively priced print supplier on the open market for each print job.

• Contract buying - securing a fixed price over an agreed period of time, in return for a given volume of work.

Localised Printing: Because of the way publishing is developing, there is a trend to opt for smaller initial print runs, thus reducing investment in stock and risk. If a title takes off, then additional print runs can be ordered to fulfil the proven demand. While publishers might benefit from lower prices from overseas print suppliers, it is important to bear in mind that to get stock back from an overseas supplier can take anywhere between two to six weeks to get stock back from the supplier. This would make just-in-time printing difficult if not impossible. For this strategy to work publishers must turn to local suppliers for speedy distribution of stock, and accept the higher unit costs.

It is possible to have the best of both worlds: for a title that will be distributed in the UK, US and Australia you may choose to work with a local printer, who is able, through the International Printers Network, to outsource your print job to partner companies around the globe. Thus allowing localised printing for each territory. What we are seeing here is the industry moving away from product only, to more sophisticated service offerings.

Reviewing the Terms & Conditions: When you send a production order to the printer you are setting up a contract between your company and the supplier which involves both parties agreeing to each other's T&Cs. These cover certain eventualities (delivery, overs and unders*, insurance etc…). If there are some T&Cs that you feel unable to agree to then they can be negotiated. In all events, you should certainly read them carefully before entering into a contractual agreement with the supplier. The next reading activity will provide examples of the common clauses found in a print supplier agreement.

* Overs and unders refer to more copies being delivered than requested, or fewer copies. A typical percentage is 10 per cent allowable either way in terms of the number of copies delivered to the client. This takes account of overprinting to allow for spoilt copies; or where there is a large amount of spoilage.

5.13 Green Printing

At the beginning of this chapter, we touched on the reality that printing has environmental consequences. At every stage of the design and production process publishers are faced with decisions that can reduce or increase the environmental footprint of each project they work on. Seemingly small things like choice of typeface, typesize, leading and margins can dramatically reduce (or increase) the extent of a book, which in turn affects the quantity of paper and ink used, the number of plates created, the number of units per pallet, and the final weight of the shipment. As you know, many of these decisions are made by marketing and editorial, therefore a production editor may have limited influence over these design choices, but alternative designs can always be put forward and made more compelling when highlighting the savings to production costs.

In terms of the raw materials and physical printing process there are some key questions to ask your suppliers:

Paper

• How many trees were used to produce the pulp and were they sourced sustainably?
• What quantity of chemicals, water and energy were consumed to produce the paper?
• How much waste and pollution was released during production?
• How much carbon was emitted during the transportation of the paper?

If you choose a supplier who is either Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), or Program for Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), or ISO14001 accredited then they will be able to answer these questions. Suppliers who are not accredited in this way are unlikely to be running their businesses in an environmentally friendly way, and are therefore unlikely to satisfy a publisher's efforts to produce green products. The Environmental Paper Network offers a calculator tool that allows you to evaluate the total environmental impact of your paper choice as well as making comparisons with similar papers. See also the PREPS tool (Publishers’ Database for Responsible Environmental Paper Sourcing).

Printing

The printing industry is an industrial process, and like all industrial processes, it creates pollution. In the case of the printing industry, the main pollutants are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which affect the quality of the air we breathe. These VOCs are released into the air from printing inks and the isopropyl alcohol used in lithographic printing. Printers can reduce VOC emission by using vegetable based inks and waterless litho.

Among the questions you could ask of printers and binders are:

• Do they offer vegetable inks or waterless litho?
• Do they have an Environmental Management System?
• Are they ISO 14001 accredited?
• Do they have a waste reduction policy?
• Do they have an energy policy?

6.1 Chapter Aims

• To explore a variety of management techniques, styles, and leadership qualities that are necessary to operate successful management of publishing projects
• To examine the importance of clearly identifying and communicating objectives for projects
• To assess the risks involved in a project lifecycle, and identify what defines quality in a product

6.2 Introduction

In this chapter, you will explore how a product is put together and the leadership and management necessary to ensure it is delivered to the market. The examples in this chapter focus on websites as products, but the processes and procedures are similar for any digital publishing project. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

6.3 What is the Digital Project?

Before initiating a project, the project manager needs to ask, “what is the project?” and perhaps more importantly, answers to the questions “why do it?” and “what is in it for your company and your customers?” are needed. Get to know your users/audience! The success of any project depends on whether it meets someone’s needs and whether they will pay for it. At the same time as planning your project, you need to get to know your users/audience. Keeping the product customer-centric will ensure you end up with a successful product. You need to truly understand your customers’ needs and wants. What sort of people are they, what type of tasks do they need to carry out and what sort of information do they need? At this stage it is also useful to set out some project objectives; what will be delivered, by when, and how the success will be measured. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will be covered in more detail later in the course. 

6.4 What is Project Management?

Project management is the business of initiating, planning, acquiring, organising, and managing assets and resources to bring about the successful completion of a specific project. For example, this might be a printed book, an ebook, or any other publishing project. The separate processes that contribute to a project and their relationships are shown in the following diagram (Figure 1).

The challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives, working to time and budget constraints. We will attempt to simplify this process by thinking first about the skills that a good project manager must offer. The important point here is that project managers need to have many qualities and skills. And, they need to remain cool under pressure.

These skills are applied to the varied role of the project manager. In essence, the role of a project manager is:

• to take responsibility and be accountable
• to act as an interface between the business interests of the company and the capabilities of the implementing team
• to be able to use the vocabulary of all parties involved
• to be able and willing to have difficult conversations and make decisions.

In a perfect world, projects would be delivered on time, under budget, and with no major problems or obstacles to overcome. But we don't live in a perfect world - projects, especially digital projects, are particularly challenging as they use new and emerging technology and require new workflow processes. A manager needs to take all the problems in delivering the project in their stride. It is particularly true of digital projects that the problems are often due to change.

6.5 Project Management Techniques and Tools

Simple everyday tasks and project management: The simplest everyday tasks often illustrate real-world publishing project issues.

If you were to give instructions on how to make me a cup of tea, they might be as follows:

1. Boil the kettle with enough water for one cup
2. Put a teabag in the cup
3. When the kettle has boiled, ¾ fill the cup
4. Wait 2 minutes, then take the teabag out with a spoon and place it on the saucer
5. Top up the cup with a small amount of milk.

This project has the objective: to make a cup of tea. The person making the cup of tea needs to identify the resources needed, such as the tea leaves (tea bags), the kettle, and water, in order to complete the project. There is a series of tasks that need to be completed in the correct sequence. Finally, what are the risks? How would difficulties such as boiling too little water be coped with? Sometimes the project may be deemed a failure, for example, if the milk put into the teacup is rancid, then the tea must be thrown away and the project restarted with new fresh milk purchased.

Some of the best managers have in the past installed team tea breaks where many good ideas have been generated more quickly than when the team held more formal meetings. I’ll say more about communication channels later; for now, tea-making introduces some of the processes in project management. Next, you will explore three methodologies for project management: waterfall, iterative and agile. They all have their origins in the software industry and are consequently very apt for digital publishing projects.

6.6 Waterfall Project Management: If you’ve been involved in any project, you have probably addressed the task in hand in a sequential manner just as in the making of a cup of tea that we have just looked at. The ‘Waterfall’ model (Royce, 1970) uses a sequential process, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards, like a waterfall, through the phases of conception and specification, design, coding and construction, and testing and maintenance. Each phase, such as specification is signed off and cannot be changed or altered thereafter. The Waterfall model maintains that a project should move on to a phase only when the preceding phase is completed and perfected. Using this approach in a large and complicated project can be criticised for the following reasons:

• Each stage represents a large investment of time and money. This means that going back to a stage is prohibitively costly, if not impossible. Clients may not know what they actually want and after seeing a mockup or prototype change their minds. This means the project needs to restart at the specification stage.
• Designers may not be aware of implementation difficulties and hence designs may need to be changed after getting to the coding phase.

Skills Builder 1: Study the diagram of the Waterfall project management model above. List at least three advantages of this approach and one major disadvantage [See Sample Answer]

6.7 Iterative Project Management

An approach known asIterative and Incremental Development (IID), evolved in response to the criticisms of the Waterfall model. Here, the basic idea is to develop a product through repeated cycles (iterative), and in smaller portions at a time (incremental). This allows staff to respond to what was learned during the development of earlier parts or versions. At each stage or iteration, design modifications are made and new functional capabilities are added.

In this approach, a cut-down (smaller, less complex) version of the product is created which allows the user or client to sample and react to the product. The sample should offer the key aspects of the product and it should be simple enough to understand and implement easily. The team reacts to feedback on this initial skeleton product and alters the specifications or designs accordingly. The product is enhanced a little and shown to users again. And this carries on iteratively, moving closer to a finished product.

There are particular aspects of iterative project management. With an Iterative approach you:

• Don’t try to do everything at once, rather you work on small aspects of the project
• Don’t think you need to know everything before you start, rather you reassess through the development process
• Do the most important things first as these are key aspects of the project
• Set a short time limit so that you can iterate a number of times
• Ensure everyone learns from every iteration
• At the end of each iteration be able to show something that works.

Note that this approach still uses the logical stages of the Waterfall model. It simply runs through the sequence from beginning to end many times and allows for alterations on each iteration.

6.8 Agile Project Management

Some have described the Waterfall model as a heavyweight approach to tackling problems. The Agile approach is a fairly recent idea proposed by a group of software developers in 2001 (Beck et al, 2001). They put together an Agile Manifesto for software development. The values stated are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

The key point is that some things are valued more by agile developers than others. So you can see, for example, that although a plan is thought of as a good idea, the developers will override the plan if changes are deemed necessary. 

Twelve principles underlie the Agile Manifesto:

1. Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Working software is the principal measure of progress
5. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
6. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
7. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
8. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity
11. Self-organising teams
12. Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Beck et al. (2001). "Principles behind the Agile Manifesto".

An agile approach values working software over comprehensive documentation and some proponents of this model believe that agility and documenting are simply not compatible. They believe the single most important thing is ensuring you build the right product, and that it meets the identified needs.

Criticisms of agile project management include:

• Scope creep - without a clear definition of the end product from the outset
• Budget vs deliverables - with agile you can budget for the amount of developer time spent on your project, but it isn't always clear how much of the product and functionality will be delivered
• Over-reliance on team knowledge.

If projects that you are involved with use this approach, how will you monitor and control the project without detailed documentation to refer back to? When outsourcing technical work, it needs it to be clear what developers will, or will not, be expected to contribute.

In responding to and implementing these various approaches to project management, there is no process or tool that can replace good communication. That is to say, people sitting together and talking about what is needed.

6.9 Digital Production in Practice

As we saw in chapter 1, Make Our Book is a web-based service that allows school children to design and print their own books. Below, Managing Director, Emma Barnes, discusses the process of developing the web application and software as a service (SaaS):

Case Study - Make Our Book: How does it work? 

“Well, the school children design the cover, type in their written pieces and upload their pictures. The web app makes a pdf which the children proof. Once the book is ready the app produces letters home which invites parents to buy copies, so the school can print to order. The exact number of copies required is then ordered via the Make Our Book web app. The web app is linked to the POD printer via an API, there's an automated call (from the printers) asking for the print job details which includes: quantity, cover file link, interior file link, shipping details and production spec. It is printed on demand and delivered directly to the school. Billing is done on account from the printer to us, a month after the school has received the books.

The intention of an automated Software as a Service publisher is to remove as much manual effort as possible. So my day is more concerned with building the tools required to make the process as seamless as possible, and less to do with fielding on-the ground enquiries. The rule of thumb is that if someone has to make an enquiry, then the tooling is still lacking. So a normal day will be spent optimising an existing feature or building out new features. Critically, you should not build a feature because a customer has asked for it. Customers are not in charge of ‘speccing’ a SaaS application. Instead, you should delve into the deeper need behind an enquiry.

For example, a recent customer request was to allow images to be placed anywhere on a page. That would be a hugely challenging technical requirement since it would require the implementation of reflowable text, image scaling, a UI that allowed replacement and so on. Instead, we enquired what the customer actually needed through a series of questions, both broad and more focused. In the end the real need was to be able to mark the shift from one piece of text to another. A more simple "divider image" feature delivered the real need. Early stage SaaS companies often fail because they interpret customer requests too literally and fail to understand the deeper requirement.

Baking efficiencies into a SaaS app mean paying as much attention to the back end and all customer processes as the customer interface. So I will spend time on integrations between, for example, the app and accounting software, or scheduling or marketing software, and on writing easily-searchable documentation. Further development comes when it delivers a strategic point of difference. So a current initiative is to be able to allow customers to design their own font which then gets used as the drop caps font. This functionality is hard for competitors to match, and also delivers a "wow" moment to the customer. 

We are a customer success driven company, and so further time in my day will be spent on finding ways to ask customers for feedback, in appropriate ways at the right time. Interruptive questioning can backfire, so carefully crafting easy ways for customers to tell you about their experiences, in their own time, is important."

6.10 Managing and Controlling

The project manager oversees all stages of a project, from initiation, through development, to closure. To keep track of the stages, this individual will develop and communicate a project management plan that will normally describe the approach and methodology for managing and controlling a project. The project management plan might include:

The project:

• Project plan
• Project lifecycle
• Project organisation:
• The client
• The customer
• The steering committee
• The project team
• The suppliers
• Other stakeholders
• Quality management:
• Quality objectives
• Change control
• Communications:
• Meetings of the project team
• Meeting of the steering group
• Information repository of all key documents and information
• Risk management:
• Identification of risks
• Mitigating action
• Procurement:
• hardware, software and data requirements
• resources and services needed throughout project

 This long list of headings might be included in a written report for the project plan, a number of these are explored more fully in the following chapters.

6.11 Managing the Project Team

Publishing any product is almost always a team effort. The size and makeup of the teams will vary depending on the product, the size of the company and the resources available. With book production, the team might include a publisher (who keeps everything running smoothly), a commissioning editor (who decides which manuscripts to publish), editors, designers, production people, marketing people, and sales representatives. In journals and magazine publishing, the roles are similar but the responsibilities might be divided up across different individuals.

6.12 Communication

Given the number of individuals that make up and contribute to even small projects, communication is key to the success of any project. One of the earliest tasks in any project is to formulate a communication plan. The plan should take into account any standard procedures the company might already have, consider suggestions from all members on the project team, work with the customer to agree on communication requirements and timescales and ensure everyone has the right information at the right time. Below in Figure 5 is an example communication plan for a project.

Figure 5: An example communication plan for a project.

Skills builder 2: Think of a project you have been involved in (either as a manager or team member). If you can't think of a business project use an example from domestic life (e.g. a family holiday or wedding). Using the table above as a template complete a communications plan retrospectively for the project. On reflection, what worked well and what didn't? Are you able to identify any improvements if you were to undertake a similar project in future? 

6.13 Quality

Ensuring products are of the required standard is necessary before delivering them to the customer. There may be pre-written quality criteria or standards that the product can be checked against in-house, and that are applied to external suppliers. 

When software is involved the quality criteria can be quite complex and testing needs to be done often and at many stages during the project. Quality criteria need to be set for individual projects.

Testing can be split into:

1. Non-functional - Does the product work on a range of browsers, with suitable page load times? Is it compliant with accessibility standards?
2. Functional testing - Does the product do what was specified in the brief, does it work as intended?
3. User acceptance testing - Is the product what the user really needs? Does it solve the identified problem?

A survey by Jeff Offutt of George Mason University in 2002 of web software development managers found the three most important quality criteria for web application success were:

1. Reliability
2. Usability
3. Security

He notes that there are many other quality criteria such as availability, scalability, maintainability, time to market, speed of execution, product quality, and so on, but the above three came out consistently important in his survey. Some publishing companies may organise a quality review meeting, where errors in the product are identified. The meeting brings together people who have an interest in the project's products and people on the project team able to address issues identified. The meeting will discuss and decide how the issues will be addressed.

6.14 Risk Management

In any project, there is a danger, or risk, that things won’t go as planned. A project manager has to be aware of the risks and plan accordingly. As you get closer to deadlines the impact of errors or setbacks becomes greater. Risk management is all about identifying risks, calculating the likelihood (or probability) of them happening, and minimising the potential damage. For example, in facilities and estate management, a potential risk is that a fire could happen within a science laboratory. Mitigating actions might aim to reduce the probability of this happening via safety protocols - storage of flammables in secure containers/rooms, electrical equipment checks and staff training. Furthermore, they might also aim to reduce the potential damage in the event of a fire by ensuring the building is sectioned off with fire doors; furniture and fittings are made from suitably fire retardant fabrics; staff regularly practise exiting the building when a fire alarm sounds.

It is impossible to eliminate risks altogether, therefore risk management is as much about how you react when things go wrong as it is about avoiding issues. It is rare for any project to run smoothly from beginning to end.

Some key risks are:

• Failure to meet the schedule or not keeping to time (schedule flaw)
• Project becoming overly complex (scope creep)
• Employee turnover
• Specification breakdown
• Poor productivity
• Data problems
• Communication breakdown

The first three of these risks can be addressed to minimise their impact on the overall project.

• Schedule flaw - what do you do if a project is slipping off schedule and is not going to be delivered on time?
• Scope or feature creep - Considering the second of the key risks in the list, scope creep or feature creep is when members of the team, in their enthusiasm for the project, suggest more features for the product and the To Do list ends up being just too long. 
• Employee turnover - This occurs when staff leave, this could be through retirement, a move to another position, maternity leave, or sick leave.

Managers can try to keep their staff happy, but sometimes they are not available to the project for a variety of reasons. A manager’s response to this might be to build in contingency time in the schedule for these unforeseen events. Equally, they could insist on meticulous record-keeping of project tasks, and work product. 

However, as hinted at in the principles of agile project management, there is a point where the time spent documenting everything can dramatically reduce efficiency. A common way to increase visibility across a project team, and mitigate the impact of one person leaving, is to share responsibilities across teams and use collaborative workspaces like Slack <https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/>.

6.15 Project Closure

Earlier in this chapter, we considered how many projects now live on and never end. For the purposes of this course, we need to address what does happen when a project meets the completion stage, but recognise that this stage may be defined differently in continuously updated digital products such as e-journals, websites, or apps.

Here we are really considering what happens when a team has completed the development of a product and it has been successfully launched. At this point, the project needs to be closed or put into hibernation in some orderly fashion. Now consider what happens to a project at this stage and the documentation that needs to be done after a final project review meeting.

Skills Builder 3: You are working in a medium-size publishing house that produces illustrated books on lifestyle, such as photography, cookery, gardening and recreational activities such as crafts like knitting and sewing. You asked to revive and publish, for the next financial year, a digital project that originated ten years ago. The product was written using a software tool that is now obsolete, and for a format (CD-ROM) that is now not suitable for the market. Most of the people who worked on the original project have since left the company. You hope that the project manager at that time closed the project appropriately and that the assets have been archived. Write an annotated list of the items you would expect to find in the closure documentation [See Sample Answer].

6.16 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have explored how a product is put together and the leadership and management necessary to ensure it is delivered to the market. You should be able to:

• Understand the life cycle of a project and the role of the manager
• Describe management techniques and identify appropriate development methods for a project
• Understand the involvement of people in the development of a website.
• Identify where in a project life cycle risk may occur

References 

Bann, D., (2006) The all new print production handbook. Mies : RotoVision SA.
Beck,et al., Principles behind the Agile Manifesto [online] Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]
Cohen, J., (2003) The Unusually Useful Web Book. [ebook] London : New Riders. Available via Brookes Library: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]
Larman, C. and Basili, V.R., (2003) Iterative and incremental development: A brief history [pdf]. Computer, (6), pp.47-56. Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]

Further Reading:

Anderson, P., (2017) The UK’s Make Our Book: An Internationally Available School-Publishing Program [online] Publishing Perspectives 7 November Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]
Tom DeMarco, T., & Lister, T.,  (2003) Waltzing with Bears: Managing risk on software projects. New York : Dorset House Publishing
Verzuh, E. (2021) The fast forward mba in project management : the comprehensive, easy-to-read handbook for beginners and pros. Sixth edn. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Available at: [Accessed: May 4, 2021].

Skills Builder 1 – Sample Answer

Did you think of any of these advantages? Perhaps you had others.

• A simple structured approach – some argue that it is more disciplined
• Time spent early on making sure requirements and design are correct saves you much time and effort later.
• Emphasis on documentation of each stage. Better if turnover of staff.
• Milestones are easy to implement
• It demarcates responsibility and accountability

The major disadvantage of the Waterfall method is that it is so rigid. It assumes the requirements will remain static during the life of the project, so there is little or no opportunity of incorporating changes once work begins. It also means that only at the final stage does a product appear; what if that product is not what was wanted?

Skills Builder 3 – Sample Answer

A typical closure document might include:

• An overview of the project: start date, first release date, etc.,
• Specification: updates to the specification in the light of the development of the project. Perhaps including final screenshots
• Lessons learned: Reflections on the schedule, changes and updates to estimates of time and budget. Reflections on communication between the team, the design and technical issues.
• Archival: All documentation for the project, along with media content files and computer code should be in a safe and known location. (These details should be noted in this closure document.)

7.1 Chapter Aims

• To examine the importance of planning the project
• To understand how to write a specification document for a printed book and a website
• To understand scheduling techniques for products
• To assess good briefing techniques
• To explore estimating the cost of producing products

7.2 Introduction

This chapter on briefing, scheduling and estimating will look into the details of project managing three key measures: quality, time, and costs.  It will draw upon your knowledge of structured text, print design and production from chapters 3, 4, and 5, along with project management techniques covered in chapter 6. This chapter will help you to think about how to write a brief or specification document and how to keep a clear vision of the end product in mind; a clear vision is essential when identifying the methods, costs and timescales of development. The chapter will then go on to explore scoping and briefing of digital products as well as briefly looking at budgeting. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

7.3 Briefing Prepress

This chapter begins by considering a number of processes that production (or editorial) teams may need to prepare a brief on. The responsibility for briefing on certain tasks can vary depending on the size and structure of the publishing company, and so some of these tasks might fall under the remit of the editorial team.

Copyeditor: Upon receipt of the author's completed manuscript, copyediting is the first step in the publishing process. Copyeditors are tasked with getting the manuscript ready to be typeset and usually specialise in a subject area. Their work can include checking and correcting spelling, grammar and punctuation errors; ensuring a consistent tone-of-voice appropriate to the audience; checking facts for accuracy; and marking up the structure of the text. In newspaper and magazine publishing, copyeditors can be more deeply involved with identifying potentially libellous copy, and designing the layout of pages.

Some questions you need to answer before briefing a copyeditor are:

1. Do you have house style rules or a style guide they should follow? E.g. UK / US spelling, treatment of numbers, hyphenation, etc...

2. To what extent is it permissible to change the author's style/tone of voice? Particularly if the text is poorly written, and so would benefit from heavy editing and restructuring.

3. Do you want the copy editor to tailor the text for the market? For example, if the author has used specialist terminology, should this be changed to non-specialist terms?

4. Do you need them to structure the text in order to instruct the typesetter on how each element should be formatted (e.g. by adding codes, or Word styles)? - If you are using a text design template then the copy editor can make sure that every element in the text has a corresponding design instruction.

5. What is your budget and schedule for the work? 

Style Guides: Some publishers have their own house style guides to be used as a reference for authors and editors working on a text, these can give guidance on spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, preferred terms and formatting of text. 

Skills Builder 1: Imagine you are responsible for briefing the copyeditor for a manuscript of your choice.  

1. What information would you include in the brief to the copyeditor?
2. What level of copyediting would you expect is needed?
3. What information would you need from the copyeditor?

7.4 Typesetter

Let's assume your copy editor has finished all the corrections and supplied you with a structured manuscript (marked up with styles) as a Word document. The next step in the process is to send the edited manuscript to the typesetter to be laid out using a composition tool like InDesign, QuarkXPress or LaTeX (for mathematical equations). Typesetting can be done manually, by eye, using WYSIWYG editors to position and style the text. This is still common and is often necessary when designing products that have inconsistent layouts from page-to-page like magazines, picture books and highly illustrated books. Where text styles are consistent and repeated throughout a book there are a number of ways of automating the process. Macros and scripts can be run within the composition software to batch format the text. Or if the content has been (or can be) marked up in XML then a Document Type Definition (DTD) and design template can be used to layout the book using rules. Most typesetters can cope with a broad spectrum of work, however, it is worth finding one who has experience working on similar kinds of books before.

Some questions you need to answer before briefing a typesetter are:

1. Will you ask them to style the text or are you using a design template? Do you want them to follow the style of another book?
2. Is this the first in a series? Do you want them to produce a DTD and design template for the rest of the series?
3. Do you want figures and other features like boxes to appear in a specific position? Or should they be put at the top or bottom of the page near their mention in the text?
4. What format should the running heads take?
5. Do you want each chapter to start on a recto (right-hand page)? Or are you happy to use either recto or verso in order to reduce extent?
6. Does the document require specialist typesetting such as complex mathematical formulae, screenplays, or poetry?
7. What is your budget and schedule for the work?

Once all of these stages have been completed, a proofreader may be used to check that the typeset manuscript is error free and adheres to the brief given to the typesetter.

7.5 Indexer

Indexing is a specialist job, requiring subject knowledge and an ability to identify key themes and concepts – not always explicitly stated in the text. Traditionally an indexer begins work after the book has been typeset when first proofs are being checked. This is because the index needs to reference specific page numbers; it is dependent on the pagination being fixed.

However, as you have seen in chapter 4, flowable ebooks have no fixed page numbers so an index would need to be dynamically referenced (or is omitted entirely since users can search the ebook themselves). This can be achieved using hyperlinks to anchor points in the text, or better still, by marking up the index themes with XML tagging.

Although indexing software is available and might be used to partially automate the process, there is no substitute for a human being if you want a good quality output.

Some questions you need to answer before briefing an indexer are:

1. How many entry levels would you like them to include? - If this is a book for the mass market you may only want a concise index with one level of entry, rather than lots of sub-levels.
2. If the book has an introduction and/or appendices, should these be covered in the index?
3. Has the author provided any instructions for the indexer, for example, a list of keywords?
4. Does the index need to be a particular length?
5. What is your budget and schedule for the work?

7.6 The Print Specification

In chapter 5, a range of common printing and binding methods were explored. The role of the production editor at the specification stage is to consider a book's design and intended function and identify the most appropriate way to physically manufacture the product.

Production will have been told by the editorial team which binding, format, dimensions, design and production values the book requires, along with the budget, schedule and print quantity for the title. This information is used to create a print specification, detailing the raw materials and printing methods so that quotes can be obtained from print suppliers.

The following reading activity will take you through the contents of a print specification step-by-step, in order to help you then create your own.

Skills builder 2: We have created an example print specification for the first print-run of the Frania Hall book, The Business of Digital Publishing. [See Sample Answer 2]. Why not grab a book off the shelf in your home or office and have a go yourself! The benefit of this type of exercise is to reveal the gaps in knowledge, so make a note of any points you are unsure about and you can follow up on these later. 

It can take 1-2 weeks for a print quote to come back, depending on how busy the supplier's estimating department is. If you are in a hurry you may need to make it clear that the request is urgent!

7.7 Estimating Print Products

Once you have received the quote for printing and binding from the supplier, these costs can be added to the editorial costs to estimate the total production costs and the cost per unit. Some of the information needed to calculate the full cost of publishing a title comes from editorial, and others from production. Many publishers have in-house costing tools, into which the quotes from suppliers are input, and this is used to determine whether a product is falling within budget, and how likely it is to make a profit.

7.8 Scheduling

Before creating a schedule a project manager should have a list of tasks, or analysis of the work needed for the project. An estimate for each task in terms of time, resources and budget can be made. This estimate needs to be agreed with the members of the development team, if it is to be as accurate as possible.

Often there may be critical times and dates that have an effect on the deadlines for the product. For example, the product may be for the school academic market and hence needs to be ready in time for the new school year or it may be a trade product and as such will sell more in the lead up to Christmas. In setting out a schedule you should note the impact of not meeting the deadline; what is the financial impact of not having the product for sale at the beginning of the Christmas buying season?

There are many ways of creating a schedule. A Gantt chart is a formal visual method of illustrating a schedule showing the start and finish dates of the tasks or elements within a project. Other commonly used methods include the Critical Path Method with Pert charts or Activity-on-Node diagrams. In many publishing companies, online project management software is used to help complete projects on time. Figure 1 is a screenshot taken from Consonance title management software developed for publishers.  

Figure 1: Illustrating how a list of tasks and dependencies can be visualised as a Gantt chart.

7.9 Digital Product Development

In chapter 1, you explored the idea of books as containers for content, providing a linear structure. When they are reinvented as digital products they can take on a variety of different forms: ebooks, websites, databases, virtual learning environments, and so on. Nevertheless, if the starting point is a printed book then the content you are working with will mainly consist of text and graphics – with the opportunity to further enhance the product using video, audio and interactive elements such as quizzes. The challenge is how to best arrange the content, in a logical way, so that your target user can navigate through it effectively.

7.10 Briefing for Digital

Unlike print production, web development can be an ongoing, iterative process. You don't need to build everything at once, and this is why prioritising functionality is important. Before starting this type of scoping activity, think about the total budget for the project. Then think how much time is sensible to spend scoping the project and writing the initial brief. Set yourself a time limit and stick to it. The more detail you are able to give a developer the easier it will be for them to accurately estimate the work involved. However, if the project is low budget, then the time you spend scoping it should be proportional.

7.11 Functional & Technical Specifications

The functional specification is simply a list of all the things you want your website to be able to do - predominantly from a user's perspective. A web developer can use this to create a technical specification, which outlines their proposed method of implementing the functionality. There may be more than one way to achieve the desired results, so this is where an in-depth understanding of software development and systems is useful. However, this shouldn't stop you from beginning to list things you think are necessary.

For example, if you want to create an author website that can amongst other things promote author events, then you should include an event booking function on your list. This can be technically achieved in a number of ways. The developer can custom build an event booking system from scratch (which is expensive), or they could find an open source event booking function compatible with the content management system being used (cheaper, but less customisable). If you already use services like Eventbrite to manage event bookings, you can enquire about whether it is technically possible to embed this into the site.

Questions that need answers when writing a functional and technical specification:

1. What is the main purpose of the site (e.g. social, marketing, e-commerce, gaming)?
2. What type of user is it for, and what is the expected volume of traffic?
3. Who will maintain the content on the website?
4. Which devices must the site be optimised for (PC, mobile, tablet)?
5. Which content management system should it use (or is this up for discussion)?
6. Will users need to login to access the site / have their own account profile?
7. Will you be selling things / taking credit card payments on the site?
8. Can users post to the site (e.g. comments on blogs) / how will this be moderated?
9. What type of media will the site contain (e.g. basic text & images, 3D images, HD video)?
10. Will the site contain any interactive functionality (e.g. users can draw or position things on the screen)?
11. Will it need to capture data provided by users via forms (e.g. email messages, surveys)
12. Will users need to search for information via different criteria (e.g. title, author, series, subject category, location, date)?
13. Will the site need to query data held elsewhere (e.g. currency exchange rates)?

The functional specification needs to include enough information to give developers a clear picture of the product you envisage, but this is just the beginning of the conversation. The finer details have to be worked out as the project progresses.

7.12 User Journeys

Until a computer is developed that can read our minds and create software from our imaginations we have to make do with trying to communicate our thoughts in words. If you aren't a software developer or a systems expert it can be difficult to express the technical specifications for a website comprehensively. There can be many unknown unknowns to trip you up.

A user journey is a good way of communicating your product requirements to developers so that they get a clear picture of your vision and expectations. It describes the steps a user is expected to perform when interacting with the product in a given context along with their emotional response. It is not a comprehensive journey through the whole site, but rather a single journey describing a particular task a user might want to carry out. It is a good way of sense-checking the functional requirements, reducing ambiguity, and avoiding omissions.

This method can also be a useful tool for diagnosing imperfect user journeys such as the example below:

Helena has bought 300g of Rowan Tweed yarn from a local haberdashery and is visiting the Rowan website to find knitting patterns. → she enters the type of yarn she has into a search field and is given all the available patterns in the database → there are a lot of them so she will need some way of narrowing her search (colour, type of garment, complexity of pattern) → browsing is enjoyable because there are lots of high-quality fashion photos of the finished garments → finally, after much deliberation she picks the pattern she wants to use and goes to purchase it → there is no way of downloading or purchasing the pattern from the website → Helena has to find a local store with a copy of the pattern in stock → she leaves very disappointed without the pattern she wanted.

As you can see the dissatisfied customer was willing and ready to spend money on a pattern book. Not only is Rowan missing out on sales revenue, but also the other benefits that direct to consumer retailing offers (such as targeted email marketing). When a digital product is tested in this way, from the user's perspective, the functional solutions are often easier to identify. User Experience (UX) is central to product development, particularly if that product is delivered in a digital format but the principles can be applied to any product or service offering.

7.13 Content Inventory & Information Architecture

A content inventory should list all the assets (text, images, blogs, videos, quizzes) that your site will include. For estimating purposes it is crucial that you know how much content is already available, as well as the additional elements such as videos, animations or quizzes you plan to include, and who is going to be responsible for producing them. Photographs and illustrations in print books usually require some form of payment to the rights holder in the form of permissions fees. These are often agreed as a one-off price solely for the print edition, therefore you should not assume images can simply be repurposed for a digital edition without seeking permission from the copyright holder and paying additional permissions fees. The term for the study of the structure and organisation of information is called information architecture. The diagrams used to visualise information architecture are known by various names: site plans, site maps, flow charts or structure diagrams. A site plan shows how the parts of a website fit together and the interaction points. In the diagram below (Figure 2) the boxes represent the web pages themselves and the lines show the major links between them as illustrated in the example below.

The information architecture of a linear book can be thought of as sections, chapters, headings and subheadings. However, these are not the only elements used to navigate the information, for example, there are indexes, glossaries, cross-references, and footnotes. When developing digital products from books it is worth re-evaluating the information architecture for use in a non-linear, hyperlinked medium.

7.14 Navigation & Visual Design

So far we have outlined what the site will do (functional specification), the content it will include (content inventory), and how that information will be structured (site map). If you have a very clear picture of how you want the site to look, you could include a sketched out wireframe of your site in your brief to the web developer. However, this presupposes that they will be custom building the site to your exact specification, which can be more costly than basing the design on a pre-built template. Another approach is to send them some screenshots of existing websites that you like the general design of and then ask them to present you with some navigation and design options that fit with the rest of your brief.

Screen wireframes, or annotated sketches:  Wireframes are simple page design representations that contain the content and functional elements of a page (or template) without any graphical elements present. They are easy to create, distribute and manipulate, so they are a great tool for collaborative working and refinement of ideas. They are very cost-effective as you can rapidly try various approaches without committing yourself to more time and cost-intensive activities like actual page designs and working prototypes.

Figure 3: An example of a wireframe design containing the elements of a webpage.

You may have come across additional methods for communicating ideas about a product - Mindmaps, flowcharts, and collections of images or even sounds come to mind. The film industry uses the storyboarding techniques invented by Walt Disney to ensure artists and animators bring the thoughts and imaginings of a team of people to the big screen. Disney called this 'imagineering', a cross between imagination and engineering. Your specification needs to take that spark of inspiration and show everyone who is involved in the making of the product what exactly is required.

7.15 Budgeting

Asking how much a website costs can feel like asking "how long is a piece of string?". However, just as market research informs the retail price and expected sales for print production, it should also inform the available budget and expected revenue when developing digital products. It is crucial that you understand the rationale or business case for the site. It may generate revenue directly by selling access to the product, as is the case with educational websites for schools, such as Educake. It may be a marketing tool intended to drive book sales such as an author or community website. Or it could be that the site is required to remain competitive against other products, such as a companion website for a bestselling textbook.

Your budget will dictate how much developer time you can afford (along with how much content you are able to include). It is worth being upfront in the specification document about the budget you have available. Developers will often quote a fixed price based on the number of days they think it will take to complete the work, therefore it is worth asking them to break down the costs according to the functionality you have requested. That way you can see where savings might be made by changing the specifications.

7.16 Estimating Digital Products

For print products, we categorised costs as either fixed (unrelated to print volume) or variable (linked to the print volume). For digital products, there are no variable costs, because there is only one website being built. Instead, there are:

• Investment costs relating to the initial costs of development
• Ongoing costs for the maintenance of the site over time

7.17 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have explored how to begin setting out to write a brief or specification document (asking the right questions!) while keeping a clear vision of the end product in mind. We have explored the initial stages of scoping and briefing of digital products as well as briefly looking at budgeting. You should be able to:

• Ask the right questions in order to lay the groundwork for a specification document 
• Understand how to produce a specification for a printed product and website
• Understand the principles behind the scheduling of a product
• Produce estimates for costing a website and a print product

References

British Psychological Society (2004) Style Guide [pdf] Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]

Bullock, A., 2012. Book Production. Routledge, Abingdon.

Garrett, J. J., (2002) The Elements of User Experience [pdf] Ch2. Berkeley, CA : Peachpit Press. Available at: [Accessed on 6 June 2014]

The Guardian (2014) The Guardian Observer Style Guide Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]

Jisc (2020) Style Guide [online] Available at: [Accessed 30 April 2020]

Modern Humanities Research Association (2013) Style Guide. [pdf] 3Ed. Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]

Sage Publications (2011) SAGE UK Style Guide [pdf] Version 3. Available at: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]

Society of Indexers (2010) Last but not least: A guide for editors commissioning indexes [pdf].  Available at: [Accessed on 19 April 2019]

Further reading

Clark, G., Phillips, A., (2020) Inside Book Publishing 6th Edition. Ch9. pp.206-40. Abingdon : Routledge

Cohen, J., (2003) The Unusually Useful Web Book. [ebook] London : New Riders. Available via Brookes Library: [Accessed on 30 April 2020]

Szabo, P. W. (2017) User experience mapping : get closer to your users and create better products for them. [ebook] Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. Available at: [Accessed: May 4, 2021]

Skills Builder 1 – Sample Answer

Information: You might want to provide the copyeditor with:

• A description of the intended audience.
• Number of words/pages in the manuscript.
• The Routledge Style Guide
• Instructions to use UK spellings.

Level: Due to Frania's experience we could probably assume this manuscript only requires a light edit for spelling and grammar. You might also ask the copyeditor to check:

• structure and markup the text document using styles for: headings, introductions, body text, figures, captions, case studies, references, and study questions.
• citations and URLs are accurate, accessible, and referenced consistently.
• terminology is accessible to the non-specialist (as this book is aimed at students)
• acronyms and abbreviations are expanded.

Required Information: You would need the copyeditor to tell you:

• when they can start, and how long they estimate the work taking.
• the cost per page of the job.
• you might also need to ask how busy they are, and how much flexibility they have if you deliver the manuscript late.

Skills builder 2 – Sample Answer

Author: Frania Hall
Title: The Business of Digital Publishing
Subtitle: An introduction to the digital book and journal industries
ISBN-13: 9780415507318
Format: Paperback, 244 x 173mm (portrait)
Extent: 208 pages (194 numbered + 14 prelims)
Impression: first
Quantity: 2000 copies

Text / Book Block: We will supply you with a preflighted pdf of the text (includes line drawings and tints). You can print by sheet-fed offset litho 1/1 (black ink throughout) on a white 90 gsm paper (you to supply).  No bleeds.  On completion of printing you to submit a complete set of printed sheets folded and trimmed for approval before binding starts.

Cover: We will supply you with a pdf of the cover to be printed 4/0 on 240gsm single-side white art card.  Cover scored on spine and 5mm on front and back panels, for hinging. Matt laminate using a 12 micron OPP laminate. Cover bleeds.

Binding: You to fold and notch-bind in 32-page sections, cover drawn on and glued to spine, and 5mm to first and last pages of book block. Trim 3-sides. Pack in binder's parcels, and deliver to our warehouse at a single address in UK.

8.1 Chapter Aims

• To explain the role of the production department in the creation of the publisher's products
• To explore the establishment and management of the publisher-supplier relationship
• To consider the issues associated with the global production environment

8.2 Introduction

In this chapter, we consider how to select, monitor, and control the suppliers used to produce our print and digital products. With strong print and digital services situated around the globe some of the most desirable suppliers are working in different languages, currencies and time zones. A busy production department may be responsible for investing large sums of money in stock each year. Therefore selection processes need to be in a position to find suppliers who are reliable in terms of cost, quality and speed of delivery.  We will explore the management of suppliers from the perspective of a Production Editor so that you may anticipate issues that might arise, in order to reduce or eliminate risk and mitigate the impact when things do go wrong. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

8.3 Types of Supplier

All publishing companies are dependent on a variety of suppliers in order to get the finished product, print or digital, to the end-user. Often these suppliers are providing specialist skills and equipment that could not easily be acquired by the publisher making them a necessary link in the supply chain. This dependency means that it is important to select suppliers carefully, negotiate good terms of service, and build reliable business relationships. It is worth noting that. Increasingly. larger publishers outsource a lot of work in the areas of editorial, design and production to service companies. A company in India, for example, might take a project through from manuscript to the final digital file.

As a Production Editor, you would expect any book project handed over to you to be in a certain state of readiness. That is to say, you would expect all the content to have been written, edited, images supplied and permissions cleared. If you had been asked to layout the manuscript in InDesign and discovered a chapter was missing, it would be very strange for the Editor to ask you to write the missing chapter yourself in order to finish on schedule. Similarly, suppliers will expect you to deliver an accurate description of the job you are asking them to do; they will want to agree in advance who is to supply the assets needed to get the job done; how these are going to be supplied (e.g. pdf, original prints); what they are being asked to do and by when; and what will happen in the event that changes have to be made.

Skills Builder 1: Think about the different types of suppliers that you might work with – how might you categorise them? You might also want to think about what stage in the process they appear (they may span more than one category). Arrange the suppliers listed below in the table according to the position they appear in the production workflow.

• Picture Researcher
• Shipper
• Typesetter
• Web Developer
• Project Manager

Next, add as many other types of suppliers to the table that you can think of that might contribute to the production of a print or digital product. Are there any that you haven't heard of before? [See Sample Answer]

8.4 Finding Suppliers

In the previous section, you thought about types of suppliers and their position in the production workflow. Next, let's think about the process of finding suppliers in a little more detail. As a Production Editor, significant procurement decisions concerning suppliers like printers and typesetters may not always be in your control. However, when managing the day-to-day relationships you will often need to provide feedback on the quality and communicate this to the strategic decision-makers within your organisation.

Freelancers: A Production Editor is usually responsible for choosing freelancers to work with on a title by title basis (commonly copyeditors, proofreaders and indexers). The better your understanding of the title you are working on and its intended audience, the better-placed you will be to choose someone appropriate.

Before recruiting a freelancer, it is prudent to check you have the authority and budget to do so. Speak to the finance department and identify the person responsible for processing freelancer payments, find out from them what paperwork should be completed, which costs codes to use, and when the monthly deadlines are. Make sure you are clear about what needs to be submitted and by when so that you can instruct your freelancers to do so in good time. If a freelancer isn't paid promptly for the work they have done, then they may think twice about working with you in the future.

Once certain everything is authorised and you are ready to recruit, how do you decide who to employ? When trying to find new copyeditors, proofreaders and indexers it can be useful to consult the websites of professional associations. Two UK based examples are: the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP, formerly SfEP), or Society of Indexers. You may want to consider asking for references, or sample work. If you are in a hurry to find someone then there is a temptation to go with the first person you find; nevertheless, it is still worth looking for a second or third supplier. Not only will this mean you have a choice of candidates, but also some backup options should you be let down at the last minute. 

8.5 Business-to-Business Suppliers

As you move through the publishing process from content creation and editing, towards the manufacturing and logistics end of the supply chain it is common to see a shift from freelance to business-to-business suppliers. A global publisher may work with thousands of authors, hundreds of printers, and fewer than a dozen distributors. Finding the right business-to-business suppliers is therefore critical to the success of the company.

In the distribution of physical books, journals or magazines there are a number of factors that affect the total cost of using a particular supply chain, above and beyond the price quoted by the supplier. These include:

• shipping costs
• inventory costs
• warehousing costs
• quality costs
• cost of management effort
• supplier capabilities (meeting demand, lead times, on-time performance, flexibility)
• exchange rate trends, taxes and duties
• security of intellectual property

When such a wide range of factors need to be considered, it is useful to take a methodical approach to evaluating and choosing a supplier. Using information-based decision-making techniques (e.g. a tendering process) can make the process more reliable, and eliminate bias. A tender invites suppliers to pitch for large portions of the business, it should:

• describe the work required volume, timescales, quality levels
• specify the minimum criteria which the supplier must meet (size, resources, machinery specifications, production capacity, location)
• request recommendations or evidence of similar work being done
• request a quotation for carrying out the work described
• request documentary evidence to support the tender

The work being offered by the publisher has to be of a large enough scale to warrant the effort involved in completing the tender process. In some cases, the tender process identifies one winning supplier, but it can also be used to generate a list of preferred suppliers. It is customary to invite suppliers to apply by sending them a Request for Proposal (RFP).

If a supplier has never done any work for your company before, they will need to set up a new account agreeing credit terms. This is a two-way process and can take time. It may be that you work for a small publisher, with limited financial history, in this instance a supplier may require you to pay for services in advance via proforma, or ask you to make arrangements with your bank to set up a letter of credit - which guarantees the payment providing the supplier fulfils their obligations.

Certain risks relate to the products themselves, for example holding a large inventory is acceptable if the product is low value, with high demand, and will not date easily (Chopra and Meindl, 2013) such as classic paperback fiction (e.g. Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights). However, if the product is high value and predicted to become obsolete quickly, such as a hardback illustrated guide to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, holding large quantities of stock is not advisable. One way of reducing the risk of holding high value, slow-selling, items in stock is to adopt a more responsive supply chain strategy such as print-on-demand. 

Where the risk of intellectual property being leaked is very high, as in the case of the Harry Potter novels, extra measures need to be taken to make sure the manufacturing, transport and warehousing are secure enough to prevent leakage until the official publication date. At some point, the cost of managing risk has to be weighed against the cost of potential loss of revenue or intellectual property.

8.6 Managing Suppliers

Successful management of suppliers hinges on providing clear instructions and ensuring that expectations (both your own, the suppliers', and those of other stakeholders such as editorial, the author, sales and marketing) are realistic and well-managed. As a Production Editor, this will be much easier if you have a good understanding of the process you are managing.

Information about a supplier's obligations to a publisher can come in the form of general documents and agreements, or documents tailored to individual projects (e.g. copyediting, typesetting and indexing briefs). Once a supplier has developed a good understanding of your requirements for a particular type of product you may find it beneficial to keep similar types of work with them in future, as they develop expertise and familiarity with the way you work and what you are looking for in your product.

You need to be clear not only about the work required but also about how much you are going to pay for it. Sometimes this will be pre-determined in your service level agreement or scale arrangements. You may also apply standard costing frameworks when setting freelancer budgets, such as amounts per page or word. However, supplier budgets must also take into account other factors such as text complexity, technical requirements, whether the original content has been well-written and consistently formatted, or whether there are lots of errors that need to be tidied up.

You may also have to revise budgets during the course of a job if unexpected obstacles mean the job is taking longer than expected – doing this fairly is crucial in maintaining effective working relationships with your suppliers, but costs must also be carefully controlled to maintain adequate margins. As a Production Editor, you will often find yourself performing a balancing act between these two competing demands.

Another balancing act comes in allowing enough time to create accurate and attractive content whilst also making sure you get the product to market before it has gone out of date or been pipped to the post by a similar title from one of your competitors. You do this by making sure your suppliers and your author are aware of all key dates well in advance, and know what is expected of them and when. Be realistic about how long things take, and schedule in contingency time. Book the freelancers you want for your job well in advance (but not so far in advance that you end up messing them about by cancelling the job when your author is late with their manuscript, yet again!). Providing clear instructions at the outset saves an inordinate amount of time and money which would otherwise be spent doing things again.

8.7 Digital Service Providers

Much of what we have covered in this chapter regarding finding and managing suppliers is equally applicable to digital production; many print typesetters also offer ebook conversion and digital distribution services. The nuts and bolts of this will be covered in more detail in the following chapters, however let's consider them briefly here at a supplier management level.

There are additional factors to think about when choosing a supplier to develop less standardised products such as websites and apps. This type of work broadly divides between technical software development, and designing the look and feel. These require quite different skill sets - coding (for the former) and graphic design (for the latter). Lots of excellent, but ugly, software has been developed over the years. So if you are thinking of saving costs by recruiting a freelance developer, have you assessed the level of design work involved? Will you need to find a graphic designer to work with them?

As mentioned in chapter 7, the web or app developer will need you to supply a brief, describing the in order to quote you a price; the more detailed your brief the more accurate the quote you will receive. When you request a quote from a supplier to build a website or app, you should ask them to break down the quote by task so that it is transparent how the costs are apportioned. You should also ask whether they are custom building software for you, or using a generic template as the starting point. A custom build is more expensive but will get you exactly what you ask for, whereas an "off the shelf” solution will be cheaper but you won't have quite the same control over the finer details.

Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs): If you are scoping a product that is particularly sensitive to competition then it is normal to ask developers to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) prior to any discussions about the nature of the product. The supplier will find it difficult to provide you with an accurate quote if you are withholding key information from them.

Contracts: It is common for web developers to have their own standard client contract - detailing the ownership of any intellectual property created, payment terms, confidentiality, termination clauses, etc. However, these are negotiable, you don't necessarily have to agree to all the terms. Large publishing companies will often have their own contract drafted up and ask the supplier to agree to them instead.

Reporting: As you have seen in the earlier chapter there are a number of different approaches that can be used to manage projects, whichever one your supplier is using, they should be able to supply you with a plan of how/when they will complete the work detailed in their quote. Once a project is underway, it can be useful to ask the web developer to submit a weekly report of:

• This week's completed work
• Next week's scheduled work
• Any issues and the proposed resolution
• Required action

This will give you visibility of the work completed, and regular opportunities for your supplier to communicate with you. Should the project be terminated prior to completion, this will also provide a record of work carried out to date, and therefore deliverable (assuming you are contractually entitled to it!).

8.8 Key Performance Indicators

Publishers like most organisations are typically concerned with the control of time, cost, and quality. KPIs are often used to track and assess the performance of business operations. A performance indicator can be anything, any data that can be measured, from sales growth and gross profit margin to staff turnover and absenteeism. However, a key performance indicator should be something critical to meeting business objectives. Bernard Marr (2012), a leading author on the subject of business strategy and performance argues that:

“For KPIs to be the vital navigation instrument that helps you understand whether your business is on the right track or not, we have first to define the strategy and then closely link our KPIs to that. Too many organisations fall into the trap of retrofitting objectives to existing and established metrics: which is simply back to front. KPI development has to start with your strategy and the objectives the business is trying to achieve.”

Marr (2012) also advocates the use of key performance questions (KPQs) as a way of ensuring metrics are aligned with objectives. For example, if the KPQ is “to what extent are we leveraging our full production/work potential?”. Then the associated indicator would be capacity utilisation rate (CUR): actual output per day, divided by possible output per day, expressed as a percentage:

A simple way of displaying KPI data so that it can be easily analysed is a Pareto Chart. This allows you to show the frequency of an issue on one axis relative to the cumulative percentage of all issues. It can be a useful way of identifying which issues to tackle first in order to make improvements or drive efficiencies. Below (Figure 1) is an example of a Pareto Chart, looking at the causes of a project running over budget and the causes of production delays. In this example, you can see that animations and extra coding account for almost 50% of the project overspend. Controlling these two costs will make a significant difference to the project budget. However, there are some large benefits to be made by addressing the Quizzes, User Testing and Graphic Design costs.

Figure 1: Example 1 Pareto chart

8.9 International Suppliers

In chapter 5, you considered the global supply chain in relation to printing. Now let's consider some of the other areas where you may benefit from working with international suppliers.

XML & Ebook Conversion: Although ebooks are a relatively recent phenomenon the process of digitising content and marking up with HTML or XML is well established and many companies offer both XML conversion and ebook conversion. The workflow begins with an analysis of the input content to determine the complexity and types of formatting contained within it (language, illustrations, tables, footnotes, references, etc...) the supplier then uses OCR software to digitise the text and images. The content is checked against the original for OCR errors, this might include font styles (italics/bold), special characters (en dash/em dash), subscript and superscript. Once this is complete the content can be marked up in XML or HTML according to the client's specification using the software. The XML or HTML coding is checked for errors using validation software, and the final output file is checked against the original pdf or page for accuracy.

The key factor here is that while much of the process is automated with specialist software, there is still a need for skilled staff, with a high level of technical competency, in the tagging and checking stages. Where publishing companies are based in countries/economies with a high cost of living it can be cheaper to outsource processes like digital conversion to countries with a lower cost of living. India, in particular, has built up specialist services catering to the publishing industry's demand for digital versions of legacy print content.

HTML5 Animation: The latest version of web markup, HTML5, allows for animations to be described within the code itself. Prior to this, animation had to be written in a separate language (e.g. Flash), using proprietary software, and embedded into websites. The use of HTML5 animation is growing as publishers are developing more and more HTML-based content: ebooks, apps, marketing materials and advertising media.

Below is a case study of an Ebook Manager for a Children's Publisher wanting to source animation for a new range of ebooks.

"I needed to source some HTML5 animations for some interactive ebooks we were developing. It was a pilot, so I needed the animation quality to be high because we wanted the end product to be impressive - something we could show off. The tricky bit was that I also needed to keep the costs down, to prove the ebook series could be profitable.

The animations we wanted were only short, about 5-10 seconds long, and fairly simple... just manipulation of the original artwork we supplied along two dimensions. Making an animal walk across the screen in time to some audio clips. That kind of thing.

I started by talking to UK suppliers, they were quoting us £800 per animation. This wasn't really an option for me, one animation would blow my entire budget, and I wanted more than one animation in each ebook. It turned out the quality of the sample they did was not very good either. So I decided to look abroad, I found a supplier in Poland quoting around £150 per animation. The samples they did were actually very high quality, I would have been happy to use them in the final product. In the end though, we went with an Indian supplier, they charged us around £25-50 per animation. The quality is just as good, if not better, than the other samples I received. I'm glad I shopped around, and considered international suppliers, as has allowed us to develop the product we want, within a tight budget."

International Issues: Now that we have considered some of the benefits of working with international suppliers, let's stop for a moment to think about some of the issues that can arise:

• Payment - when sourcing work from international suppliers it is often preferable to make payments in your company's local currency as fluctuation in exchange rates can impact your final costs. If a supplier insists on payment in their own currency you should build this into your product estimate, allowing some margin for fluctuation in exchange rates.
• Socio-Cultural - it is worth speaking to international suppliers about their working week and public holidays and factor this into your schedule. For example, Chinese New Year is a three-day public holiday occurring in January or February depending on the lunar cycle. Muslim countries usually work Saturday to Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday off as their weekend.
• Time zones - If you are working with international suppliers, be aware of the time zones. If you send work off at lunchtime, your colleagues in India or Hong Kong may have gone home for the day and factor that into your schedule.
• Logistics - Your pallet of books may have arrived in Australia, but if they are unloaded off a boat on Monday morning in Cairns, you are going to struggle to get them to the author's book launch in Perth on Wednesday evening (because that's a distance of over 5000km by road!).

8.10 Chapter Summary

In this chapter we have considered how to select, monitor and control the suppliers used to produce our print and digital products. We have also explored the management of suppliers from the perspective of a Production Editor so that they may anticipate issues that might arise, in order to reduce or eliminate risk and mitigate the impact when things do go wrong. As such, you should now be able to:

• Assess and recruit suppliers through a structured decision-making process
• Monitor and control the supply chain through measurable objectives
• Anticipate supplier issues and mitigate their impact

References 

Bullock, A., (2013) The Green Design and Print Production Handbook, Routledge: Abingdon
Chopra, S., Meindl, P., (2013) Supply chain management: strategy, planning, and operation. 5Ed. Pearson: Boston.
Marr. B., (2012)75 Measures Every Manager Needs to Know, Pearson
Severs, J 2011, 'How should print's green giant go on the offensive?', Printweek, pp. 32-34, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 27 April 2014.

Further Reading

American Society for Quality (2014) Pareto Chart. Available at: [Accessed 30 April 2020]
Browne, M.,Whiteing, A. E., McKinnon, A. C., (2013*) Green logistics: improving the environmental sustainability of logistics 2 Ed. Kogan Page: London; Philadelphia. Available via Brookes library at [Accessed 30 April 2020] *NB. Newer edition (2015) available in print but not electronic format.
Cao, H., Folan, P., (2012) Product life cycle: the evolution of a paradigm and literature review from 1950-2009. Production Planning Control 23, pp.641-662.
Deresky, H., (2013) International Management, Global Edition. [ebook]. Ch4. p130-163. Pearson. Available from: [Accessed 30 April 2020]
Excel-Easy (2014) Pareto Chart. Available at: [Accessed 30 April 2020]
Norrick-Rühl, C,. Vogel, A., (2013) 'Green Publishing in Germany: A Passing Trend or a True Transition?', Publishing Research Quarterly, 29, 3, pp. 220-237, Available at [Accessed 30 April 2020]

Skills Builder 1 - Sample Answer

It is unlikely that a Production Editor would be responsible for managing all of the suppliers listed in the table below, but they may have to deal with them in some way or another.

A distinction has been made between the suppliers involved in print production (pink), and digital (green) however this is slightly misleading as printed products can come with digital media supplied via CD-ROM or memory stick. Equally, a born-digital product, such as an iPad app, will require content to be written and edited.

Skills Builder 2 - Sample Answer

It is clear that 80% of delays are cumulatively caused by Author, Printer, Permissions and Typesetter. If these four areas could be improved it would dramatically reduce the number of delayed publications.  It's likely that they may be linked.  When a manuscript is submitted late by an author it may miss its scheduled slot with the typesetter and printer, causing further delays.  

Author delay is not an issue that a Production Manager can control alone, it will need to be raised with Editorial.  Some actions that could be taken are:

• Weekly/monthly meetings with Editors (and possibly Sales) to discuss titles that are due highlighting any delayed manuscripts well in advance.

• Discussions with printers and typesetters about capacity and their ability to turn around delayed titles quickly

• Allocation of additional staff time to clearing permissions.

9.1 Chapter Aims

• To explore the range of ebook formats, devices and platforms
• To investigate the methods of creating and converting content into digital form
• To consider the distribution options available to the publisher

9.2 Introduction

The publishing industry has been in transition from print only, to print and digital for quite some time now. Some publishers have been producing and distributing all their products in multiple digital formats for decades while others remain solely focused on printed products. However, there are thousands of publishers who fall somewhere in between those two extremes.  Over the next two chapters, you will consider how a publisher might approach conversion of the print titles that form their backlist, which formats they might convert to, and which resources and suppliers they will need to achieve this. You will consider the workflow implications of simultaneous print and ebook publishing. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

9.3 Taxonomy of Digital Products

In chapter 1, we gave some thought to the variety of digital products that can be derived from the content within analogue books, journals and magazines. These range from simple, static, carbon copies of the printed page to complex, interlinked, and dynamic information.

The word ebook, is really a catchall term that can be used to describe any electronic book. For clarity, let's have a quick look at some of the terminology commonly used to describe ebooks and apps (some of these you should be familiar with from earlier chapters).

Figure 1 shows a number of the file formats that are commonly described, and sold, as “ebooks”, this often includes book apps (short for applications). There are many other ebook formats but these are the ones most commonly used commercially by publishers. Book apps tend to be developed to fit a particular device ratio (like the size of an iPad screen) and are thus often fixed layout, however book apps can also be developed to be viewed on multiple devices and/or a web browser and can often have dynamic or flowable elements.

What is the difference between an ebook and a book app?

There are various qualities that both ebooks and apps can possess. The line between the two is blurry, some ebooks can be heavily “enhanced”, and some book apps can be quite simple. The Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) .folio format sits on the borderline between the two, and is commonly used to produce enhanced emagazine editions. In the diagram, it has been classified as an ebook format, but arguably it could also be classed as an app development tool. 

Broadly speaking, the main factors that differentiate ebook from app are the:

• file format
• required device
• sales channel
• complexity of programming

Another difference is that apps often have custom built navigation systems, whereas ebooks have standardised navigation in the form of a table of contents.

9.4 eReader Software and Devices

Recapping briefly the concept of platforms from chapter 2, all file formats require some application software, running on top of the operating system that has been installed on a hardware device with a user interface. Ebook file formats require ebook reading software to interpret and display them. In the same way that you can view a website from a choice of web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Explorer). There is a wide range of ereading software that can be used to view ebooks.

Figure 2 below indicates the software required for each of the main ebook formats. Some of these ereading software applications are proprietary, like Apple iBooks, which can only be installed on devices within the Apple ecosystem. Other proprietary software, such as the Kindle ereader, has been developed to work across multiple platforms. The Kindle app can be downloaded and used on Windows, Apple, Android, Samsung & Blackberry devices.

Figure 2: Software required for each of the main ebook formats.

Another key point is that each type of ereading software has a functionality of its own. An example of this is the “double-click to zoom” functionality of the iPad software. When you open an ebook containing images you can double click to see them full-screen. If you opened the same ebook in Adobe Digital Editions on your PC and double-clicked the image, nothing happens. This is because the zoom functionality is part of the iPad’s ereading software rather than the ebook itself.

Finally, as you may already have noticed, software can become obsolete and support for it withdrawn. This is the case with the iBook Author (.iba) format, which is no longer supported by Apple. People who previously developed iBooks can no longer sell them via iTunes and customers who bought these products may not be able to view them on newer devices and operating systems. The interoperability of formats is a crucial factor to consider when deciding whether to invest in digital products and how much is prudent to spend on product development. As highlighted by the table above, the iBooks format was locked-in to the Apple ecosystem, this meant the marketplace was limited to those who owned and used iOS devices. Back in 2010, there was a sense that Apple users were more willing to spend money on apps/ebooks than Android users, but the long view shows that proprietary software and systems come with inherent risks.

There are a wide range of ebook formats not mentioned here. If you visit Project Gutenberg, one of the longest running ebook depositories, you will see a number of other file types available. Some of these are specialist formats (e.g. sheet music), but in total account for a very small percentage of the commercial ebook market and therefore they will not be covered within this chapter. However, it is good to be aware that other digital formats exist for specific niches.

Device Uptake

In chapter 1, we looked at the impact of ereading devices as new technology within the context of the Hype Cycle. Ebooks were available to consumers prior to the launch of eInk devices (in 2008), but it was really the hardware technology that triggered mass-market adoption of ebook software. Logic suggests that device uptake can be a useful measure for publishers to consider when deciding which ebook formats to develop. Information about device uptake is easier to obtain for the US market as the Pew Internet Research Center has been tracking and publishing market research in this area for a number of years.  According to their data from a report published in 2015:

• 32% of American adults own an e-reader
• 42% of American adults own a tablet computer

A report entitled The Rise of E-reading (2012), also provides some detailed breakdowns of the brand of tablets and ereaders being used within the US. At that point in time, if you owned an ereader it was most likely to be a Kindle and if you owned a tablet, it was most like to be an iPad. It would be interesting to know if this picture has changed, and whether Amazon has succeeded in stealing market share from Apple with the Kindle Fire.

Some of the most recent survey data from Pew Internet Research (2018) shows that device ownership in the US market has remained relatively stable since 2016. This implies that the market for digital devices within this geographic area has matured and thus one would expect the consumer ebook market to correlate.

9.5 Ebook Formats

These next few sections will explore five of the most popular ebook and emagazine formats in more detail:

• pdf
• Flowable ePub and Mobi
• Fixed layout ePub and KF8
• iBook Author (discontinued by Apple – we have left it here for context, so that if you come across the term elsewhere then you are aware it is an obsolete format)

For the most part, we will be considering ebook production from an established publisher perspective. Starting with a stereotypical print workflow and thinking about how it might be adapted for digital publishing. In part II of the chapter, we will look at some of the other options available to publishers and authors for creating born-digital products.

9.6 Portable Document Format (pdf)

We have discussed the features and benefits of pdfs as the industry standard to print format. However, they can also be a saleable ebook format. One of the most compelling reasons to opt for pdf ebook publishing is that it requires little to no change to the existing production workflow, as publishers are already creating pdfs for print. The key changes that need to be made to a print pdf are:

• Reduce file size (export at lower resolution)
• Remove references to print: ISBN, printed by, typeface
• Remove printer's marks (crop/bleed/registration marks)
• Add hyperlinks & cross-referencing (optional)

The pdf format is accepted by most ebook library aggregators (e.g. Ebrary, Dawsonera, My iLibrary, and Safari) and some online booksellers like Blackwell.co.uk (although not Amazon!). Because of these established distribution routes this option is often used within academic, professional and library markets. Some of the pros and cons of the pdf format are listed below:

Skills Builder 1: Pros and cons of the pdf file format

What do you think are the pros and cons of the pdf file format and why? You may wish to also seek out resources on the internet to help you formulate your answer. [See Sample Answer]

9.7 Flowable ePub & Amazon Mobi

The ePub standard and the Amazon Mobi/KF8 formats are a package of files (mainly xhtml) zipped up into folders called .ePub and .mobi. They are portable websites with a few bells and whistles on top. The .ePub file format is an open standard whereas the .mobi file format is a proprietary standard controlled by Amazon.

The structural difference between the two is that the ePub format has a separate .xhtml file for each chapter, while the .mobi is one big long .xhtml file. As the HTML standard has evolved the respective ebook formats have also been updated.

• HTML → ePub2 + Mobi
• HTML5 → ePub3 + KF8

We will look at digital-first publishers later in part II of this chapter, but the key thing for publishers with established print workflow is to know that existing composition tools such as InDesign and QuarkXPress can be used to output ePub. If typesetting is done in-house, production and editorial staff may require some software training on how to process content for simultaneously print and ePub output, along with the typographic limitations of the ePub format.

Amazon KDP previously allowed publishers to supply either a valid .epub file OR a .mobi or .kf8 file, but since 2021 will only take .epub files. Amazon KDP then converts the files to its own proprietary format before making them available to customers to download. In a way, this simplifies the workflow for publishers, but results in less control over Quality Assurance (QA) of the product, because a publisher can only check the final display of their ebook within the Kindle ecosystem after it has been made available to purchase.

In terms of outsourcing, most ebook conversion suppliers can work from original print books, pdf files, or a combination of InDesign/QuarkXPress files and pdfs. They price the work according to the complexity and extent of the original text: quotes can range between £70 and 120 per book. The scanning of original texts can be achieved in two ways:

• Destructive - the spine is cut off to allow pages to be scanned on a flatbed close to the camera.
• Non-destructive - the book is held open in an angled cradle and the camera positioned further from the page. This is therefore more appropriate for digitising rare and antiquarian books.

9.8 Fixed layout ePub

The fixed layout ePub is in many ways similar to a pdf, in that the page dimensions are fixed. Text and image positioning is set by the designer along with typefaces and page layout. This is achieved within the ePub folder by creating an individual XHTML file for each page of the ebook The fixed layout ePub format is therefore suited to highly illustrated books where the page design is key to maintaining quality.

Until 2014, it was not possible to export finished fixed layout ebooks directly from InDesign without manual intervention. However, the current version of InDesign (via Adobe CC) allows fixed layout ePubs to be exported. This simplifies the workflow for publishers wanting to simultaneously create highly illustrated print and digital books.

Table 1: Differences between Flowable ePub and Fixed format ePub3.

Device compatibility: The biggest disadvantage of fixed layout ePubs is that they are not currently supported by all ereading software or devices. Most significantly Adobe Digital Edition (ADE), the default ereader software on most PCs, does not display fixed layout ePubs correctly. It is possible to view fixed layout ePubs on PCs using browser-based ereading software, but this might require additional research on the behalf of the consumer.

The older Kindle eInk reading devices and mobi format do not support fixed layout, but the Kindle Fire tablet and KF8 format do.

However, because of the small screen size, and the absence of any zoom functionality, there are still concerns over the quality of fixed layout ebooks for Kindle. iBooks, the Apple ebook ereading software does support fixed layout ePub across all devices. The iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch do have pinch-to-zoom functionality, however the reading experience on the smaller devices is still questionable.

This aspect of digital publishing is one that is constantly changing. Ereading software is continuously updated and new devices are launched. So worth remembering the compatibility issues of today will be replaced with the compatibility issues of tomorrow. If publishers want to ensure a positive, hassle-free, reading experience, they need to monitor their target users, the devices they have access to, and the best way to provide them with digital content.

9.9 Ebook Apps

Earlier we touched upon the question of what is a "book app?”- over the last decade, in the case of one-off, book-app products, the trend we have seen is experimentation, limited success, and eventual withdrawal by book publishers. The market for apps is highly competitive, they are costly to make and difficult to sell, which means limited opportunity to make a profit. If we take the Children's picture book market, Nosy Crow was competing in a space alongside public service broadcasters like BBC and PBS, these companies have access to big brands (such as Hey Duggee or Sesame Street) and close ties to animation studios. Both broadcasters offer a lot of excellent children's game content in multiple formats, on multiple devices for free. Freely available high-quality content is not the only issue, book-apps are also competing against established games on consoles like Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. It is still possible to find success stories but these are more likely to be subscription products, or SaaS, where development costs can be balanced against customer lifetime value. Let's explore this in more detail by looking at some examples of digital products, their estimated cost of development and device requirements.

The Waste Land

This app was custom built by Faber & Faber in partnership with Touch Press.  It contains the T.S. Eliot poems, plus video performances, audio readings and commentary, original manuscripts and reading notes.  

[Click to view product page]
Estimated cost to develop: £150-200k
Price: £9.99 (£14.99 on launch) 
Sales Channel: Apple iTunes: App Store
Required Device: iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch

9.10 Chapter Summary (Part I)

In this chapter we have explored digital products in more detail. You should be able to:

• Compare and explain the differences between a variety of ebook formats and platforms
• Identify suitable distribution methods for digital products

References 

Burke, P., 2013, ePublishing with InDesign CS6, Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons. Ch.1, Ch2, Ch3.

Eyre, C., 2018 Nosy Crow close in house app department [online] The Bookseller 26 April Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/nosy-crow-closes-house-app-department-776276

Furness, H., (2016) Books are back: Printed book sales rise for the first time in four years as ebooks suffer a decline [Online] TheTelegraph.co.uk 13 May. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/12/books-are-back-printed-book-sales-rise-for-first-time-in-four-ye/

Greenfield, J., 2013 DoJ wins ebook antitrust case what's next will apple appeal? [online] Forbes. 10 October. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremygreenfield/2013/07/10/doj-wins-ebook-antitrust-case-whats-next-will-apple-appeal/

Hall, F., 2013. The business of digital publishing: an introduction to the digital book and journal industries. Abingdon : Routledge. Ch.7, Ch.9,

Horne, L. (2012) ‘Apps: A Practical Approach to Trade and Co-Financed Book Apps’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 28(1), pp. 17–22. doi: 10.1007/s12109-012-9257-4. Available at: [Accessed: 23 April 2020] 

Jennings, C., 2014a, A midsummer night's dream - 4 ways. [Video] Available at: http://www.pagetoscreen.net/screencast/a_midsummer_nights_dream_4_ways

Jennings, C., 2014b, Using iBooks Author - Episode 2. [Video] Available at: http://www.pagetoscreen.net/screencast/using_ibooks_author_episode_2 

Jones, P., 2015 The e-book market in 2014 [online] The Bookseller Available at: http://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/uk-e-book-market-2014 

Kaplansky, J., (2012) Keeping up with Fixed Layout Support: What, Where, and Huh? [Blog] 11 June. Digital Book World. Available at: <http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/keeping-up-with-fixed-layout-support-what-where-and-huh/ 

May, N., 2011a, Worldwide E-Book Aggregators: Market Size, Share & Forecast Report [pdf] Outsell Inc. Available via Brookes library at: http://www.outsellinc.com 

May, N., 2011b, Worldwide E-Books Market Size & Forecast Report, 2009-2012 [pdf] Outsell Inc. Available via Brookes library at http://www.outsellinc.com 

PA, 2018, The year in publishing 2018 [pdf] The Publishers' Associations. Available at: https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/the-pa-publishing-yearbook-2018/ 

PA, 2016, The year in publishing 2016 [pdf] The Publishers' Associations. Available at: https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/the-pa-publishing-yearbook-2016/ 

Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2012. The Rise of E-reading [Online]. Available at: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/04/04/part-1-introduction/ 

Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2014. Device Ownership [Online]. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/mobile/device-ownership/ 

Jenetics, K. 2019 Amazon eBook Market Share [online] PublishDrive.com https://publishdrive.com/amazon-ebook-market-share.html [Accessed on 21 May 2021]

Tivnan, T., 2016 'ebook sales abate big five' [Online] The Bookseller 29 May http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/e-book-sales-abate-big-five-321245 

Wischenbart R., 2013 Global eBook: A report on market trends and developments [pdf] O'Reilly Media. Available at http://www.wischenbart.com/upload/Global-Ebook-Report2013_final03.pdf

Wischenbart R., 2016 Global eBook 2015. A report on market trends and developments [pdf] Available via Brookes
RADAR: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/95c5cc45-305b-478a-8a52-898ffd29e83b/1/

Vital Source, 2019, 'VitalSource delivers high impact personalised learning' [blog] CampusReview.com Available
at: https://www.campusreview.com.au/2019/06/vitalsource-delivers-high-impact-personalised-learning-experiences/[Accessed 18 May 2020]

Further Reading

Grover, A.P. E-Books as Non-interactive Textual Compositions: An Argument for Simplicity over Complexity in Future E-Book Formats. Pub Res Q 32, 178–186 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-016-9470-7

 Skills Builder 1 – Sample Answer

Pros:

• Password protection: expiration dates, digital watermarking and other forms of DRM - digital rights management can be embedded into the pdf.
• Publishers can control the production quality. The page appears exactly the same in print & ebook. Beneficial to educational & academic publishers needing to reference accurately across formats.
• Can include interactivity (cross-references and hyperlinks) and embedded multi-media (video & audio).
• The proprietary software needed to open pdfs (Adobe Acrobat Reader) is free and runs across all platforms

Cons:

• Readability on different screen sizes. It is possible to create flowable pdfs, but this sort of defeats the point, as they are then no longer page faithful.
• The proprietary software needed to open pdf (Adobe Acrobat Reader) is free, however the composition software used to create enhanced pdfs (such as InDesign and QuarkXpress) is expensive and an ongoing cost.

10.1 Chapter Aims (Continued from Part I)

• To explore the range of ebook formats, devices and platforms
• To investigate the methods of creating and converting content into digital form
• To consider the distribution options available to publisher

10.2 Introduction

In this chapter, we continue our journey into considering how a publisher might approach conversion of the print titles that form their backlist, which formats they might convert to, and which resources and suppliers they will need to achieve this. This chapter will also consider the workflow implications of launching simultaneous print and ebooks on the same publication date. This chapter is designed to equal approximately 5 hours of independent study and as you work through the chapter you will find skills builder exercises that will help you to develop what you have learned in a practical sense.

10.3 Ebook Sales & Distribution

We have looked at various ereader devices, ebook formats, and methods of production. Without question, the Apple ecosystem provides publishers with the highest level of quality control over digital products. The Apple iBooks ereader software allows original fonts to be embedded within flowable ePubs and supports the widest range of multimedia and interactive functionality available within the ePub3 standards. So why bother producing ebooks for the other platforms? Quite simply, because you want your products to be available in the places your target consumers are most likely to look for them.

In this section, we will therefore consider some historic ebook sales data for the UK book market followed by the market share held by consumer ebook retailers. 

Consumer Ebook Market Data: In 2008, when the major ebook devices were launched the market grew rapidly, tripling in value by 2009, and then doubling by 2010 (PwC cited by Gigaom, 2013). This is to be expected in any new market, going from a standing start. There was still reported to be growth year-on-year, up until 2016, but what we are seeing now is a stabilising of the ebook market in territories where they have become well-established. 

Comprehensive ebook-sales data are not always easy to find, when carrying out market analysis one must first understand how the data was collected, what was included, whether any extrapolations have taken place, and what methodologies have been used in the reporting. 

Source 1: The Bookseller ebook statistics

Tivnan's (2016) Bookseller article entitled 'E-book sales abate for Big Five' reports on ebook sales in 2015 and explains how extrapolation was used to calculate the total ebook market size it reports that:

‘The Big Five have a 56% share of 2015’s print volume through Nielsen BookScan. Assuming a broadly similar share in digital—the five probably garner a greater piece of the digital pie compared to other traditional publishers, but self-publishing makes up a decent percentage of e-books— that gives us 85.5 million e-books sold in Britain in 2015. […] digital books earned around £381.5m in 2015. That would mean an “e” and “p” total of £1.90bn, a 7.1% rise, of which 20.1% was earned through digital.’ 

Source 2: The UK Publishers Association ebook statistics

According to the UK Publishers Association Yearbook (2016) the digital market in 2015 was sized at £554m and the print market totalled £2.76b. ‘Digital book sales account for 17% of UK publishers digital and physical book sales’.  

When we compare the figures extrapolated by The Bookseller (highlighted in blue) to those published by the Publishers' Association (highlighted in blue) it is apparent that they are not measuring the same thing. Why might the PA numbers be higher than those reported by The Bookseller? The PA represents a range of UK publishing companies (trade, academic, educational, professional & STM), whereas The Bookseller and Nielsen BookScan are capturing just the UK Trade Consumer Market (TCM) in other words books sold through retail channels. Other points to note are that the PA statistics might include audiobook sales and export sales to countries outside the UK; and they almost certainly exclude self-published titles which can account for a significant share of the consumer ebook sales market. 

The key takeaway here is that different data sources can present slightly different narratives and so one should always pay attention to methodology when it comes to drawing insights from market data. Wherever possible it is worth looking to the parent source of data being cited in news media.

Consumer Ebook Sales Channels: When it comes to sales by distribution channel for consumer ebooks, data is even harder to obtain but the following is a rough estimate of market share.

US eRetailer Market

• 83% Amazon
• 4% B&N (Nook)
• 9% Apple
• 4% Other (Google, Kobo, Sony)

UK eRetailer Market

• 88% Amazon
• 7% Apple
• 5% Other (Google, Nook, Kobo, Sony)

In one respect this makes ebook distribution a pretty simple decision. By supplying ebooks to Amazon and Apple, publishers can quickly reach the mass market. However, Amazon's domination of both territories puts publishers in a somewhat precarious position. Disputes over control of ebook pricing are common (Hachette in 2014 and Macmillan in 2010), Amazon can afford to lose their lead on ebooks indefinitely, but very few publishers can afford to have the "buy button" for all their titles disabled.

Some efforts were made to tackle Amazon's stranglehold over the ebook market via the adoption of the agency pricing model. This model gave publishers control of the ebook purchase price while paying eRetailers (like Apple and Amazon) a percentage share of the revenue. This is in contrast to the wholesale model where the eRetailer 'buys' the ebook and can then subsequently sell it on for whatever price they want to the end consumer.

However, in 2012, a price-fixing antitrust class action was filed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) against Apple and five of the largest consumer book publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. The publishers all settled out of court, but Apple lost their appeal and was made to pay out $400m in refunds to ebook customers in 2016 (Greenfield 2013, Whitney 2016).

It is worth remembering that the ebook market share held by Amazon is different around the world, and certainly lower in other English-language territories (e.g. Canada, Australia and New Zealand). In non-English language territories Amazon is likely to only have a small (minority) share of the market.

Skills Builder 1: Watch video [from 07:31 to 15:45]

John B. Thompson Book Wars: John B. Thompson´s new book and Amazon as a central challenge to European-style book cultures.
Available at: https://video.uni-mainz.de/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=8fd0cb53-91db-40e1-85db-ad2b010d0dad
Which ebook categories does Thompson identify as the winners and losers for the mainstream publishers
What additional factors should be considered in terms of the ebook market statistics?

10.4 Digital First

So far in this chapter, we have considered ebook sales and production workflow from a well-established print publisher's perspective. However, imagine you decided to set up a brand new publishing company. You would have no backlist titles to convert and no existing print production workflow to fit around. Below are a few examples for you to consider; a digital-first publisher; a web-based ebook and print production tool; and an ebook production and distribution service. There are, of course, many other ebook production tools and services out there that might appeal to the publishing start-up (or indeed the self-sufficient author!).

1. Canelo

http://www.canelo.co
This start-up was launched in January 2015 by Michael Bhaskar (formerly Profile's Digital Publishing Director) alongside Iain Miller and Nick Barreto (formerly of Quercus). The digital only publisher of ebooks and apps focuses attention on overlooked titles with mass-market appeal such as crime thrillers, romance sagas and biographies. The Canelo team has attracted high calibre authors with their proven digital publishing credentials and generous royalty plan (50% - 60%).

Strengths:

• No upfront capital investment in printed stock (N.B. They do print books now too)
• Agility and speed to market

Weaknesses:

• Limited income from existing backlist to support new frontlist acquisitions
• Ebooks have lower price point than print, therefore need to sell in high volumes to generate significant revenue.

2. Pressbooks 

http://pressbooks.com/

This publishing tool has been developed on top of the Wordpress content management system. Content is entered into the system using the Wordpress text editor (which toggles between WYSIWYG and HTML) in the same way one would upload a blog post. Because is it web-based, multiple contributors can work on a book remotely (although not simultaneously as with google docs). Once the content has been input and edited, the publisher can use CSS templates to control the look and feel before it is output to web, ebook, and print ready pdf. 
Cost: £25-300 per title.

Limitations:

• No professional text editing tools (macros / scripts / GREP)
• Per title fee is prohibitive for scale publishing.
• No automated distribution service - publisher has to take their files and individually upload them to Amazon / Apple / Kobo.

3. Smashwords 

https://www.smashwords.com/
This tool allows users to upload Word documents (or ePub files) that have been pre-formatted to the Smashwords style guide. It then converts the files to flowable ePub / mobi / and pdf, and automatically distributes to a wide range of ebook retailers. The platform also serves as a retail space selling ebooks directly to consumers and allocating ISBNs.

Cost: 20% of revenue on Smashwords - 40% of revenue on all other platforms.

Limitations:

• Only a small range of top titles are distributed to Amazon.
• Pre-formatting is quite complicated.

Do develop your understanding further, below is a case study illustrating a typical day in the office for the Editorial Director at Sapere Books a recently established ebook and POD publisher

Case Study: Editorial Director, Sapere Books 

As a very new company (launched March 2018) with only a team of three, I am in charge of the publishing schedule for all of our titles, as well as editing the books and producing and publishing them. I often start the day with editing/ proofreading, as that is when I feel most alert. I am often working on more than one manuscript at a time, and on different stages of editing. When we have contracted a title, I will read through and use Tracked Changes on Word to highlight any major plot or character flaws and I will write up a developmental report with suggestions on what could be improved. Once an author has responded to that and made the necessary changes (also using Tracked Changes on Word), I will then copy-edit the manuscript, before giving it a final proof-read.

 We make use of Amazon’s Pre-Order function for Amazon Exclusive titles, which allows us to ‘pre-release’ a title for up to 90 days before publication. Once the novel has passed the developmental editing stage, I will commission the front-cover from a freelance designer and write the blurb, product description, and input all the metadata backstage on Amazon’s Publishing Platform. Once our team is happy with the cover and it has been approved by the author I will ‘publish’ the manuscript in draft form using Amazon Pre-Order, and during that 90 days I will finish the edits on the book, while the marketing team takes over and starts to create a buzz around it before release date. I also reformat the digital file into a paperback template and commission a paperback jacket (with spine and back cover added) so that the Print-On-Demand paperback is ready for release on the ebook publication date.

Amazon makes the formatting and publishing process very simple, so I don’t need to spend a lot of time creating digital files – I format the Word file correctly and then upload it and Amazon does the conversion process for us, providing an online previewer so we can check how the book will appear on an e-reader. Amazon provides very easy templates and instructions for creating the paperback edition as well. I register all the ISBNs and title information with Nielsen before the release date, but other than that I do not need to liaise with external suppliers – we manage everything in-house and have complete control over how and when we publish books on the Amazon platform, and what price we set them at.

Figure 3: ebook cover  

Figure 4: paperback jacket

10.5 Academic Sales Channels

Many academic and professional publishers have been producing ebooks, ejournals and digital companions to textbooks since the early days of computing and the internet. With the aim of fulfilling the market's need for speedy dissemination of scholarly research, they have invested heavily over the years in digital content management systems for ebooks and ejournals. There has been a reluctance to fully digitise textbooks, as these are the industry's “cash cows”. However, this seems to be changing with more and more companies adding e-textbooks to platforms like Ingram's CourseSmart & VitalSource.

In contrast to the consumer ebook market, the library ebook market is evenly shared between a number of well-established academic and professional digital content aggregators (May 2011). This market has benefited from years of database development and asset management focusing on searchability, accessibility and metadata. Audio and video provision is a growing area of business for these aggregators.

Due to the wide range of distribution options available, aggregators have battled to differentiate themselves through the business models they offer to both publishers and library customers. The question is not only “how do we reach our customers?” but also “How do we want our customers to pay for content?”.

The following are just a few of the business models available to library customers:

• Annual subscription to collections – this can be refined in terms of:

1. The number of users allowed simultaneous access
2. The number of titles available within the collection

• Access credits - here the library purchases blocks of credits, as users access (any title) within the collection their credit is spent.
• Patron driven acquisition – in essence, the library displays all titles in the catalogue but only purchases/subscribes to them when a user requests access. There is huge scope within this model to further refine by:

1. Duration of access period - is the title purchased outright or temporarily?
2. The percentage of book accessed prior to purchase – can users browse 5 pages for free? 
3. Time spent using book - can they access the whole book for 5 minutes before purchasing? 

Skills Builder 2: Read the blog article 'VitalSource delivers high impact personalised learning' 
<https://www.campusreview.com.au/2019/06/vitalsource-delivers-high-impact-personalised-learning-experiences/> 
What are your own thoughts regarding the opportunities and limitations of such platforms?

10.6 Workflow Planning

We've taken a bit of a whirlwind tour through the digital landscape over the course of these last two chapters. Some key questions to keep in mind when planning or reviewing digital production:

• What devices do our target audience own?
• Where do our customers go to buy ebooks online?
• What format/s is the content currently in?
• Which format/s do we need to produce?
• Can we manage conversion/development inhouse or do we need to find a supplier?
• Will the output be enhanced with additional media?
• What are the costs and lead times of production?
• How will digital products be checked for quality?
• How will the digital content be distributed to retailers?

One final question that is absolutely fundamental to the viability of any digital publishing is:

• Do we own/control the digital rights for this content?

In many ways this is an editorial rather than a production issue, but owning the copyright for print editions does not automatically grant to a publisher the copyright for digital editions. Publishers will need to check author contracts to see:

• if they have licensed the digital rights and for which territories
• what royalty rate the author was granted (historically this could be very high 50% of net receipts)

To further complicate things, all images contained within a print edition will also need to be checked to make sure they can be republished digitally based on the existing permissions (it is worth noting that sometimes images are omitted either to reduce costs or because permission is not granted for digital editions). Sorting out these legal issues, chasing up rights holders and amending author contracts can be a lengthy process, and need to be taken into account when planning the production schedule.

10.7 Chapter Summary (Parts I and II)

In these two chapters, we have continued our journey into considering how a publisher might approach conversion of the print titles that form their backlist, which formats they might convert to and which resources and suppliers they will need to achieve this. We have also considered some of opportunities offered by born-digital and digital-first publishing. Having completed these two chapters, you should now be able to:

• Compare and explain the differences between a variety of ebook formats and platforms.
• Analyse how backlist conversion and digitising new titles fits into the publishing workflow.
• Identify suitable distribution methods for digital products.

10.8 Course Conclusion

Over the ten chapters of this course, we have focussed on the production and delivery of publishing products in a digital environment. We have examined project management and workflow issues associated with the design and production of both printed and digital products. Particular attention has been paid to the analysis and the evaluation of the changes that digital technology is bringing about to the ways in which products are developed and produced in the publishing industry. Key issues affecting the design and production strategies and business practices for print, ebooks, and web have been discussed. Management skills such as planning, organising, briefing, costing and controlling a project from inception to completion have also been explored. Strategies and practices for international aspects of the publishing industry are investigated and the opportunities and constraints for the publisher have also been assessed. Upon completion of this course, you should be able to:

• Assess the strategic implications of the impact of technological and other forces of change on the way publishing’s creative industries specify, design and produce their products.
• Evaluate key issues that impact on design and production strategies and practices in an international context of print and digital publishing media.
• Assess project management approaches for processing and disseminating publishing products in appropriate international commercial and operational contexts.
• Evaluate the digital production processes and functions such as scheduling, estimating, quality management, costs and specifications for print and electronic products.

We hope that you have enjoyed this course.

References and Further Reading

Burke, P., 2013, ePublishing with InDesign CS6, Indianapolis: John Wiley Sons. Ch.1, Ch2, Ch3.

Eyre, C., 2018 Nosy Crow close in house app department [online] The Bookseller 26 April Available at: [The Bookseller 26 April]

Furness, H., (2016) Books are back: Printed book sales rise for the first time in four years as ebooks suffer a decline [Online] TheTelegraph.co.uk 13 May. Available at: [TheTelegraph.co.uk 13 May]

Greenfield, J., 2013 DoJ wins ebook antitrust case what's next will apple appeal? [online] Forbes. 10 October. Available at: [10 October]

Hall, F., 2013. The business of digital publishing: an introduction to the digital book and journal industries. Abingdon : Routledge. Ch.7, Ch.9,

Horne, L. (2012) ‘Apps: A Practical Approach to Trade and Co-Financed Book Apps’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 28(1), pp. 17–22. doi: 10.1007/s12109-012-9257-4. Available at: [Accessed: 23 April 2020]

Jenetics, K. 2019 Amazon eBook Market Share [online] PublishDrive.com [Accessed on 21 May 2021]

Jennings, C., 2014a, A midsummer night's dream - 4 ways. [Video] Available at: http://www.pagetoscreen.net/screencast/a_midsummer_nights_dream_4_ways

Jennings, C., 2014b, Using iBooks Author - Episode 2. [Video] Available at: http://www.pagetoscreen.net/screencast/using_ibooks_author_episode_2

Jones, P., 2015 The e-book market in 2014 [online] The Bookseller Available at: http://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/uk-e-book-market-2014

Kaplansky, J., (2012) Keeping up with Fixed Layout Support: What, Where, and Huh? [Blog] 11 June. Digital Book World. Available at: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/keeping-up-with-fixed-layout-support-what-where-and-huh/

May, N., 2011a, Worldwide E-Book Aggregators: Market Size, Share & Forecast Report [pdf] Outsell Inc. Available via Brookes library at < http://www.outsellinc.com

May, N., 2011b, Worldwide E-Books Market Size Forecast Report, 2009-2012 [pdf] Outsell Inc. Available via Brookes library at http://www.outsellinc.com

PA, 2016, The year in publishing 2016 [pdf] The Publishers' Associations. Available at: https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/the-pa-publishing-yearbook-2016/

PA, 2018, The year in publishing 2018 [pdf] The Publishers' Associations. Available at: https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/the-pa-publishing-yearbook-2018/

Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2012. The Rise of E-reading [Online]. Available at: <http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/04/04/part-1-introduction/

Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2014. Device Ownership [Online]. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/mobile/device-ownership/

Tivnan, T., 2016 'ebook sales abate big five' [Online] The Bookseller 29 May http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/e-book-sales-abate-big-five-321245

Vital Source, 2019, 'VitalSource delivers high impact personalised learning' [blog] CampusReview.com Available at: https://www.campusreview.com.au/2019/06/vitalsource-delivers-high-impact-personalised-learning-experiences/ [Accessed 18 May 2020]

Wischenbart R., 2013 Global eBook: A report on market trends and developments [pdf] O'Reilly Media. Available at http://www.wischenbart.com/upload/Global-Ebook-Report2013_final03.pdf

Wischenbart R., 2016 Global eBook 2015. A report on market trends and developments [pdf] Available via Brookes RADAR: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/95c5cc45-305b-478a-8a52-898ffd29e83b/1/

Further Reading

Grover, A.P. E-Books as Non-interactive Textual Compositions: An Argument for Simplicity over Complexity in Future E-Book Formats. Pub Res Q 32, 178–186 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-016-9470-7

Phillips, A. Have We Passed Peak Book? The Uncoupling of Book Sales from Economic Growth. Pub Res Q 33, 310–327 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-017-9527-2

Resources

Kindle Previewer, available at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765261