MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-06-17 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Free Software Publishing
|
Once upon a time, publishing was the domain of large corporations. Then
came desktop publishing and the tools to produce a book shrank from the
cost of an aircraft carrier to the price tag of a PT boat. Now, small
publishers on the bleeding edge of technology are fomenting a revolution
that may change the publishing market forever. Open source publishing
tools, long derided as not being ready for battle, are proving
themselves in the trenches of small publishing.
If
you walked into a production lab of just about any small- to
medium-sized publisher, you'd find pretty much the same tools: Photoshop
for raster graphics; Illustrator, Freehand, and Corel Draw for vector
graphics; InDesign and Xpress for page layout; and Acrobat for creating
camera-ready output. Together these programs cost well over a thousand
dollars, and any publisher who wants to play has to pony up. The book
buyer pays at the point of sale.
What makes book production expensive isn't just the cost of software.
Proprietary publishing tools run on proprietary operating systems -- Mac
OS and Windows. They require high-powered hardware. They might even have
intrusive product activation "features" or draconian licensing
restrictions. In short, publishing is like most other markets -- it's
very close to a D-Day invasion by open source forces.
Linux lubbers
John Bartlett owns and operates Bartlett Publishing, which puts out
approximately four titles per year in programming, business, and ...
religion. Huh? Those don't go together, do they? This is the strength of
small publishing, to bring together the disparate genres that make up a
particular publisher's passion.
Bartlett is a true believer, in God and Linux. He chose open source
tools because he "believes in free information." He uses the DocBook
DTD, running the manuscript through OpenJade with a heavily customized
version of Norman Walsh's stylesheets. "Using OpenJade and Norman
Walsh's stylesheets to typeset gives me a huge advantage in both costs
to produce a book and time to market. In particular, with DocBook, an
index is amazingly easy to produce," says Bartlett. Post-processing of
the PDF is done with Perl's Text::PDF module and Adobe Acrobat for
complex work. A professional graphic artist produces the cover and
Bartlett does post-processing with the GIMP. Finally he uploads the
finished materials to CafePress or LightningSource.
Bartlett's recommendation of the open source tools he uses is
unequivocating. "DocBook makes your book look professional with very
little effort. The combination of DocBook and a good cover artist gives
you very professional results with a minimum of time and money."
John Cullenton of Able Typesetters and Indexers provides services for
small- and self-publishers with a completely Linux-based workflow using
variants of TeX. First, he keys in and corrects the source text in Gvim.
Cullenton compiles the text to PDF with ConTeXt or pdfTeX and views the
output in Xpdf. He also uses various other bits and pieces: grep; the
Ghostscript ps2ascii translator; pfaedit (FontForge); PSUtils for
brochures, makeindex for indices, and some custom macros and scripts. He
does image processing in the GIMP and has recently begun using Scribus
for book covers because it can handle < a
href="http://www.color.org/">ICC profiles and produce CMYK output.
Cullenton makes two points about the strengths of open source software.
First, "All of these tools are supported by active email lists. I don't
have to call an underpaid clerk.... I get superior support from users
and maintainers of the software." (Ask any XPress user about Quark's
customer support. It's infamous.) Second, when Donald Knuth backed away
from TeX, others picked up the torch. Development continued and TeX is
still going strong. Meanwhile, in the proprietary world, PageMaker is
dying a slow and painful death and is no longer the behemoth of book
production; FrameMaker has been losing ground as well. Adobe now pushes
InDesign. QuarkXpress went years between updates on the Mac, still the
dominant desktop publishing platform. With proprietary software,
Cullenton says, "[You] face the potential discontinuance of the product,
just like users of the once excellent WordPerfect have found their own
purgatory -- the Curse of Corel."
Mac-o-philes
The work flow is a bit rougher in the Mac world. Mac-based senior editor
Kevin Walzer of WordTech Communications LLC produces 50 poetry and
literary criticism books each year. In the recent past, WordTech used
all proprietary software for its workflow. But Microsoft Word is giving
way to OpenOffice.org and LaTeX. They're replacing InDesign with
Scribus, and Corel PhotoPaint with the GIMP.
Most of the open source offerings are not Aqua-based, but run under
Fink. "The Fink packagers and Apple have done a brilliant job in
bringing this software over to OS X," says Walzer. "But it seems to run
a bit more slowly and certainly doesn't integrate as cleanly into the
Aqua environment as native software.... We see a huge difference in the
interface between Microsoft Word for OS X and OpenOffice.org that isn't
there on Windows."
But in general, Walzer is satisfied with his open source tools. "Scribus
was a bit rough when we first used it for cover layout but ... version
1.1.6 supports color mixing, better text editing," says Walzer. "Gimp
has proven to be a very able tool. We're still using Word for most of
our manuscript formatting. We are planning to experiment with
OpenOffice.org and AbiWord (now in a native OS X-Cocoa build) and see if
these are compatible or offer improvements." LaTeX is a powerful tool
but has a very steep learning curve, and thus WordTech is moving slowly
on that front. Vector graphics are a more of a challenge; WordTech
hasn't found any of the open source vector-editing programs, such as
SodiPodi, to be equivalent in power to Corel Draw. "We are still using
CD for vector art development."
Windows on open source publishing
Many of the same open source tools that run on Linux have been ported to
Windows. Whil Hentzen of Hentzenwerke Publishing Inc. runs a
cross-platform shop. About two-thirds of his mostly freelance staff is
on Windows, and the other third is on Linux. "We start in Word 97 or
OpenOffice.org, whichever the author or editor is comfortable with,"
says Hentzen. "We have fairly unsophisticated needs -- text, figures, a
few tables. The neat thing is that it's transparent. I was using Word on
Windows and then OpenOffice.org on Linux. No one knew I'd changed.
OpenOffice.org plays well with others."
PDFs created in OpenOffice.org go straight to Hentzenwerke's offset
printer and right into their machines. Once the printer figured out
exactly the right settings, it was less work than when Hentzenwerke used
Adobe Acrobat and Distiller. Perhaps the best aspect? Hentzen doesn't
need heavy duty hardware, "Our computers were getting creaky running the
Windows stuff. They run the Linux programs just fine."
The future
It is harder than ever to "get published" by the big guys in New York.
There are now only five big publishing conglomerates increasingly
focused on double-digit profits in a shrinking market. Big New York
Publishers (BNYPs) no longer put out books because they are good, or
important, or of lasting literary value. BNYPs see, at most, 35% of the
cover price of any given book and about half of that goes to printing
costs. They want -- and can afford -- only blockbusters.
Anything that brings down the cost of production makes it possible for
large publishers to take a few more chances on a few more books. Open
source tools mean more opportunity for authors of all stripes. Open
source tools lower the barriers to entry. More self-publishers and more
small publishers in business -- and profitable because of lower costs --
widens the market for books of all kinds. This is an increase to freedom
of expression across the board. Instead of just the same old same old
King, Jordan, and Roberts, new voices get heard.
If you like to write -- or read -- that is very exciting.
--
__________________________
Brooklyn Linux Solutions
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://fairuse.nylxs.com
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Consulting
http://www.inns.net <-- Happy Clients
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive or stories and
articles from around the net
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/downtown.html - See the New Downtown
Brooklyn....
1-718-382-0585
____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
|
|
