The Well-Formed Document

Articles by publishing professionals

Let’s End Status Quo Publishing (Part 2)

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

In part one of this newsletter, I defined status quo publishing as the method whereby publishers try to reduce the cost of producing and distributing books. The majority of these methods—be they outsourcing or freelancing our work or relying on Amazon to sell our products to unknown customers—cause us to rely on anonymous transactions. I further argued that status quo publishing separates us from our customers (readers) and is a major cause of our current struggles. In conclusion, I stated that

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Resources for Accessibility

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

At the AUP Conference in June, I had the honor of being on a panel with a well-informed group of colleagues. The session was entitled, “Creating and Using Accessible Scholarly Ebooks: Tips from Those in the Trenches.” For those of you who attended, thanks for your participation and thoughtful questions and comments.

During the session, we mentioned a number of resources that are listed below.

The resources that Jon McGlone mentioned are:

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Let’s End Status Quo Publishing (Part 1)

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

Adobe recently developed a method that allows you to import comments from a PDF directly into InDesign. Theoretically, this can lead to a more efficient input for proofreading alterations and corrections. Scribe has yet to fully test this new feature, so we have not determined how helpful it will be for the proofreading process. However, as with any other new development, it does lead us to consider better practices. Due to the topic of our last newsletter, challenges from our clients, and a desire

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Proofreading Techniques

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

Adobe recently developed a method that allows you to import comments from a PDF directly into InDesign. Theoretically, this can lead to a more efficient input for proofreading alterations and corrections. Scribe has yet to fully test this new feature, so we have not determined how helpful it will be for the proofreading process. However, as with any other new development, it does lead us to consider better practices. Due to the topic of our last newsletter, challenges from our clients, and a desire

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Sub Subsidiary Rights

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

By definition, subsidiary rights are a mystery. We have no sure way to predict revenue generated through the various streams that account for the backlist life of a publication, so any revenue that is generated from subsidiary rights is often excluded from a book’s profit and loss accounting and is rarely a consideration when producing a book.

Though I would argue that the accounting methodology employed in this consideration is outdated and that the reasons behind it (along with all the tax implications

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Readers Defined

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

Every historic instance of growth in the publishing industry can be connected to the increase of readers within a given population. In medieval Europe, it wasn’t the printing press per se1 that increased literacy; it was a change in social and religious structure. In eighteenth-century England, it was the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying shift in wealth (not to mention the British’s imperial reach) that led to increased readership. And the great boom in US book consumption can be directly

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We’re Back—Scribe’s Newsletter Revival

By David Alan Rech of Scribe Inc.

At the beginning of 2016, Scribe decided to phase out our monthly newsletter. Our message was no longer resonating among our subscribers, and we realized we were no longer offering any new ideas to improve editorial and production processes. By the end of its run, we considered the newsletter to be ineffective and unhelpful.

The newsletter’s failure became evident in 2015. There was a stronger trend in publishing that was contrary to the message we were trying to get across. In addition to the instability

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How to Get the Most Out of OCR

By Michael Maher of Scribe Inc.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process of taking an image of text and making it “machine readable” or “live.” The software views (or reads) the image (Optical), scans for text (Characters), and then recognizes the relevant characters and outputs them as live text (Recognition). This process has been around for a few decades, but it still is very much a work in progress.

While the quality of current OCR software (and the concept of OCR itself, if we are being honest here) is nothing short

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