Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aipna!cstr!tim From: tim@cstr.ed.ac.uk (Tim Bradshaw) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: expensive TeX book Message-ID: Date: 28 Aug 90 12:46:47 GMT References: <8164@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> <1990Aug22.222115.936@nmt.edu> <44813@cornell.UUCP> <1990Aug23.101127.22458@ioe.lon.ac.uk> <584@array.UUCP> <414.26d69db9@venus.ycc.yale.edu> Sender: news@aipna.ed.ac.uk Organization: CSTR, University of Edinburgh Lines: 53 In-reply-to: Leichter-Jerry@CS.YALE.EDU@venus.ycc.yale.edu's message of 25 Aug 90 20:48:09 GMT >>>>> On 25 Aug 90 20:48:09 GMT, Leichter-Jerry@CS.YALE.EDU@venus.ycc.yale.edu said: > In article <584@array.UUCP>, colin@array.UUCP (Colin Plumb) writes: > A printer is faced with a large number of fixed, or very slowly variable, > costs, including maintaining equipment and paying employees. Any successful > printer will ALWAYS be near capacity at at least some bottleneck point in the > process. It's a fundamental thing about queues: As you approach and exceed > the capacity of the system, queue lengths go up rapidly. I don't think this is what's on the critical path for most books and most publishers. > Besides, the larger the organization the slower it is likely to respond. > There are layers of approval, people who HAVE to get their hands on it, pro- > cedures that MUST be followed. It's easy to say "who needs that", and to > a certain extent that's true. On the other hand, once an organization gets > large, the only way to maintain any control over it is to have all those > procedures and committees and sign-offs. I think this is the problem. I used to work for a fairly large & well-known academic publisher as a desk-editor (= junior editor). My experience after about 6 months was that the whole thing was dominated by overwhelming bureaucracy. Everything had to be signed twice, faxed across to the US branch, faxed back, corrected &c &c. In all this chaos, books take a long time and get very little attention in terms of design or contents. I never did more than glance at any book that I dealt with. I got so fed up with this I left. >> I realize the latency is longer, but does a typical textbook >> where the author does the illustrations in pic or whatever take more than >> a month of an editor's time? No. Or rather, yes: it takes a month but an editor spends little of this time looking at the book. > Considering the quality of the typical self-typeset, self-illustrated book I > see out there, I wish editors would spend MORE time on these books. Yes!! I think there is a crying need for a publisher that is really oriented towards electronic books. It *can't* be that hard to deal with them -- all you need is some reasonably technical people and some willing. The results obtainable now from typesetting systems available to most authors are as good or better than anything that can be achieved with traditional typesetting: all it takes is competent designers with knowledge of the systems to guide people, and this is what the publisher should provide. --tim Tim Bradshaw. Internet: tim%ed.cstr@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk UUCP: ...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cstr!tim JANET: tim@uk.ac.ed.cstr "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"