Robert Pancotti, a production manager for Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a medical publishing company, approaches the production process as a "value added process".. His experience in the industry leads him to believe that the digitization of the production process has made it easier for the publisher to give that to the author.

Mr. Pancotti has been working in production of both books and journals for fifteen years now. He has been involved in these changes on a day-to-day basis. When he first began working for Raven Press, one of the ancestors of the current company, everything was done the "old way" (Fig. 1). Manuscripts were received from authors and sent to copyeditors who hand-edited the entire book without the benefit of spell check or Pub Med. The manuscript then was outsourced to a company who "keyed" the whole manuscript–they retyped it, input the copyeditor’s changes, and saved it in a digital format. From there, the manuscript traveled to the compositor, who painstakingly handled the cut-n-paste layout of the book. Nothing, from sizing the art to reflowing the page, worked as seamlessly as it does today. Finally (at least for the purposes of this paper), the page proofs traveled to a proofreader whose thankless job it was to check the copyedited manuscript laboriously against the "keyed" page proofs and to catch as many of the errors that were caused by the retyping and typesetting as he or she could.

In Figure 1, the gray boxes represent the steps in the process where the publisher, instead of adding value to the manuscript, was actually likely to introduce errors because of the human aspect of the process.

This whole process, now digitized, differs dramatically. Instead of passing around reams of paper that are arduously checked by hand and then rechecked against the copyedited manuscript, the manuscript is routed in digital format. It comes to the publisher on disk as a word processing file; the publisher standardizes the file, gets rid of any special formatting, and sends the disk to the copyeditor. The author’s printouts are also sent as a safety net. The copyeditor inserts special codes (called tags) to aid the conversion process and also checks grammar, spelling, and meaning. The manuscript is then sent to the compositor, who uses a customized SWOP program to float the files into Quark, the software used virtually industry wide for page layout and design. Any error messages that appear in conversion are checked and corrected. The new pages automatically import and size the art–no more painstaking physical cutting and pasting or tedious hand creation of boxes for page layout in a computer program. My company still sends the output, called page proofs, to the proofreader, who checks for conversion errors and grammatical mistakes that may have slipped by the copyeditor. Other companies have dispensed with this step.

This process is illustrated in Figure 2. The shaded box represents the only step still done on paper; the remainder is done electronically (paper printouts accompany the digital files as a backup and reference aid).

From the handy flow charts, one quickly notices that the digitized production process eliminates a whole step in production and also greatly reduces the amount of human error introduced into the process. In fact, the second process theoretically introduces no error except in the conversion of the file formats into Quark. The proofreader, who no longer has to worry about keyboarding errors, should catch those introduced in the conversion process.

According to Mr. Pancotti, this revolution in the printing industry came into its own in the early 1990s. In the late 1980s, some companies began to experiment with digitizing the workflow by using a DOS-based program called Xywrite. Similar to WordPerfect 5.0, the program allowed copyeditors to do editing functions, such as spell check and find-and-replace searches, with greater ease as well as to tag the manuscript for the compositor. However, the file still had to be keyboarded as few authors turned in manuscripts on disk.

By 1992, Mr. Pancotti said more manuscripts were received on disks from author. By 1996 or 1997, the standard author’s contract mandated that the manuscript be turned in digital format as well as on paper.

The benefits to the publisher include improved efficiency (leaves out the step of keyboarding), reduced composition costs (only transplants the author’s work, does not redo the entire manuscript), and minimal time savings. According to both Mr. Pancotti and Ms. Cassie Moore, the manager of Lippincott’s in-house composition group, even though the digitized production process cuts out the step of keying the manuscript, the time a book spends in production has not been reduced substantially, possibly because of complications introduced by digitization, which is still being refined.

However, the importance of this development for the publisher can probably only be understood by the concept of a "value added" product, as discussed by Mr. Pancotti earlier. The greatest value of digitization for the publisher is that it makes it easier for the publisher improve the value added proposition that it promises the author. The publisher can take the manuscript on disk and output the content in different formats, while minimizing the inherent (the author’s) and introduced (the publisher’s) errors. A coworker of mine, Jeff Somers, who wrote the macros for our in-house conversion program (for using MSWord, tagging, and floating into Quark), summarizes the benefit of workflow digitization as one of "keeping up with the times." He explains that the world now demands that CD-ROMs and web pages accompany printed material, especially in scientific, academic, and medical publishing. If the workflow is not digitized, then many additional and expensive steps are added to the production of the book so that the publisher can create the output it MUST have if it is to thrive or even to survive in today’s publishing environment.

Mr. Somers also points out that digitizing has given the publisher more choices for output at the end of the production process. Not only are different formats available, but the material also potentially lives longer. New editions, he said, now might take much less time to produce. Before, the author had to start from scratch and rewrite the whole book. Now, the possibility of sending out files for the original edition to the authors, having the authors make corrections as necessary, and then reoutputting the amended files exists. This could drastically reduce the time a new edition takes to be produced, which will make the industry much more responsive to changing market conditions.

Additionally, the use of files for production has made integration with another industry development much easier. Because of digitization and computer-to-plate printing, content is much more easily customized for consumers; small print runs and print-on-demand are also now a feasible possibility in the near future.

However, digitizing the process does have drawbacks. Mr. Pancotti stressed that now the publisher depends more heavily on the author to make things as correct as possible because of the time spent by the production personnel on aspects of digitization. The final product is also expected to be more current and up-to-date because of the ease of making changes in today’s production environment. Mr. Somers, expanding on the first theme, pointed out that the copyeditors spend a lot of time tagging and coding the files for the conversion into Quark. They are not given significantly more time to edit the book, so time spent tagging takes away from the time that they actually check the book’s grammar, mechanics, clarity, etc. This reduces the quality of the final product. The production editor also often spends more time looking for errors in tagging than he or she does actually testing the linguistic or stylistic quality of the copyeditor’s work.

Mr. Somers also stressed that, while using digital files for the production workflow, has made output a lot more flexible (e.g., book, web page, CD-ROM, personal digital assistant [PDA], etc.), digitization actually reduces the flexibility of the production process. As the process becomes more and more advanced, the ability of the production editor or department to be flexible is further and further curtailed. When asked what he meant by this, he said, "Ten years ago, it didn’t matter how the author turned in his or her manuscript. He or she may have used a typewriter, an obsolete word-processing program, or MSWord. Whatever the author gave us, we could use because we edited on paper and then we sent the manuscript to the keyboarder. Paper editing was always the same, and we could easily adapt. Now, if it comes in the wrong format, we have a lot of problems. We do give the authors standards now, but they ignore them. Sometimes, a manuscript still has to be keyed." He continued, saying, "When that manuscript does come in and the disk is unreadable, we can’t just adapt as we used to because the process is now more rigid. We actually have to develop a solution, if possible. As we look to moving into SGML in the future, this process becomes even more rigid."

In addition to these drawbacks, the use of technology in the printing industry is still very fluid. Industry standards are not yet truly established; and with each new software used, new problems are discovered. This was the topic of an article in the February 2001 issue of PrintMedia. In the column titled "Digital Directions," Linda Manes Goodwin traces the move of the publishing industry from postscript files to pdf files and examines problems that have cropped up with the use of PDF. Though her article concentrates on the problems that the use of PDF by magazine advertisers has introduced, a lot of the problems are analogous to those which production editors in both books and magazines face. She points out the problems with PDF/X-1 creation and use. The main problem is that, because the industry is still fluid in the programs it uses, many of the bugs that exist have not yet been ironed out.

• Although digitization has introduced many problems, everyone agrees that it is here to stay. The possibilities it gives to the publisher, author, and printer far outweigh the inconveniences (see Table 1). In the future, software should become more standardized; and a lot of the problems that we now face with its use may be eliminated (of course, that just means new ones will be introduced). Production people such as Ms. Moore, Mr. Pancotti, and Mr. Somers anticipate that many publishers will begin using SGML in the production process so that output can go directly to print, CD-ROM, or the Internet. Use of SGML will introduce even more rigidity into the process and will mean more work for production departments, accompanied by a possible further reduction in quality. However, use of SGML in the production will reduce costs of producing other forms of output–currently, all production work needing to be done in SGML is outsourced after the production process has been completed. It will reduce the amount of time between the production of a book and other formats (theoretically, the pub date for all could be the same).
• Publishers also anticipate the streamlining of the production process as it becomes more and more digitized. Many publishers already skip the proofreading stage, and more hope to eliminate this step (more cost- and time-efficient).. Or, proofing may also be done digitally so that the process becomes truly and universally digital.
• Publishers are already receiving books with the author’s own formatting, which he or she often wants preserved. This trend will probably also increase in the future, causing added headaches for publishers and, possibly, further strain on author-publisher relationships.
• Most publishers would agree with Mr. Pancotti, who says that, with the e-book format, the industry is moving into "uncharted waters." He specifically mentioned acquisitions editors who want to launch Palm Pilot projects (personal digital assistants or PDAs). The industry will have to figure out how to take that format through the production process. Will there be page proofs? What is the most effective layout and design for this format? How would the copyeditor do his or her job?

The printing industry’s production process has changed dramatically in the last five years, and the next five years will probably contain just as much upheaval. However, most publishers and their employees are very excited about future changes and the possibilities of being innovators in the information age. The digitization of the production process will continue to produce its shares of headaches and frustrations, which are countered and outweighed by the benefits, particularly of "added-value," that the process brings for both the publisher and the authors.

Goodwin, Linda M. PDF/X-1 update: making digital file exchange easier. PrintMedia 2001;15:20.

Moore, Cassie. Unpublished interview. February 12, 2001.

Pancotti, Robert. Unpublished interview. February 12, 2001.

Somers, Jeff. Unpublished interview. February 12, 2001.

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