The Business of Publishing

There is an informative discussion on the move from print publishing run by a high class culture to smaller companies being taken over by conglomerates in “An Archipelago of Readers: The Beginnings of Archipelago and International Publishing on the World Wide Web,” the typescript of a lecture given by Katherine McNamara at the University of Trier in 2005.

There is constant shifting of companies, where the big names, Random House, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Harcourt, and Houghton Mifflin, are buying and closing subsidiaries. The industry is quite incestuous with employees moving up the ladder by transferring over to competitors.

While most people might think of publishing, whether educational/academic or trade, as cultivated by the quality of writers and intellectual minds, it is forgotten, as McNamara reminds us, that publishing has developed into an industry and a business.

I mentioned it in previous blogs, but I feel the need to hit this point again. Publishers are businesses and for-profit.

Books are driven by the market, in textbook publishing this means having a close connection to educational trends and knowing what would be useful to professors.

In recent years, we’ve seen trade books published by the likes of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, both former beauty contestants and both with by-lines (ps- these books are ghost written). However, because of the publicity surrounding both of these women in recent years, these books, not necessarily with any sense of quality-control, will sell.

The types of books that are out there, the price of your textbook, the information contained within your books, these are all factors controlled in an effort to make money.

Pi Day

I notice grammatical errors everywhere, like walking by a piano bar with an “open Mike” night or wanting to order a Cobb salad sans “blue cheese”. I feel the innate need to correct mistakes.

However, I don’t work for authors trying to sell the next best fiction novel, who might share in this obsession for perfection.

Instead I am surrounded by mathematically inclined folks, including both the authors and customers. This is the complete opposite of my creative minded co-workers, who in college tried to avoid math courses.

Yet, we all connect with variations of the dork factor.

I fully came to realize this on Pi Day. What is Pi Day you may ask?



Well, it’s not the celebration of pizza or the success of Don McLean.

It’s in celebration of pi, the mathematical constant, 3.14159 (and as the cartoon expresses, most normal people, including us editors, know it to be 3.14).


At work, we e-mail icons of celebratory pi like the image below to our authors and the VP springs for pizza and someone bakes a good old apple pie for all the employees. The technology division decorates the halls with posters of the symbol. There is all out recognition for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

I thought perhaps this was a specific holiday that the mathematical division of the textbook publishing world would have interest in; but last year days before the big celebration, Congress approved a resolution to make March 14th (3/14) officially National Pi Day.

Acronymania

No, my workplace isn’t exactly full of IM jargon, but as the readable portion of the cartoon above notes, it is getting “acronymious.”

You probably know what an ISBN is, but you may not know what it stands for.

In case you are wondering, it’s International Standard Book Number.

In my first week of work I had an RTP meeting. I quickly learned that this meant “release to production,” and basically it was the first of several status meetings on the progression of making the textbook.

I furiously took notes when I was given the BBD and asked to get the CIP data and make copies of the MS that had AC and marks like tr, lc, or wf on it.

Translation: I was given the estimated book bound date. My co-workers wanted me to order the Cataloging in Publication data for the Library of Congress and make copies of the manuscript with author comments and proofreader’s marks.

I used to think that nothing was as irritating as being required to come up with the work login password that must require a capital letter, number, symbol, must be at least 13 digits long, and cannot be anything close to any of your last five passwords.

How are we supposed to remember all of this without writing it down?

And if I have to write it down doesn’t that take away from the confidentiality element of a password when this secret is written on a stick-on note attached to my computer.

I spent an entire week creating a binder for new-hires that includes a glossary of terms that are abbreviated or given an acronym, so no one would have to go through the guessing game of what these things mean like I did.