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The Production Revolution

03 Mar 2010 | Liz Thomson

The talk is always of digital publishing. But, over the past 25 years, digital technology has transformed traditional book-making. Liz Thomson reports

Slugs. Cow Gum. Scalpel. Em rule. Paste-up. PMT. CRC.  Letraset. Bromide. Ox Blood…

Twenty-five years ago, such items and terms would have been familiar to anyone working in book production – and, primitive as they now seem, they would have signified a pretty modern production department. Why, only a few years earlier, books were still set using hot metal, a long and laborious process which meant that the time from edited manuscript to plates – “pre-press” – was at least three months, as couriers sped back and forth collecting and delivering manuscripts, galley proofs, films and camera-ready-copy.

“Everything was much slower,” recalls Nick Ross, Production Director of Little, Brown, who began his publishing career thirty years ago having taken a production course at the London College of Printing. “The printer set the job in hot metal. Then along came photo-typesetting and PMTs.” In a then heavily unionised industry – remember, it was the print unions that shut down the mighty Times presses for over a year, a dispute that hastened inevitable changes across the entire industry – stickers were affixed at each stage of the job to show that correct procedures had been adhered to. The printing process itself – offset lithography, a world where oil and water don’t mix, and which replaced letterpress, still in use today for collector’s editions – has changed little over recent decades, though the possibilities, in terms of colour, finish and quality, have improved immeasurably.

“The mechanical process of printing has not changed that much but pre-press is now completely electronic,” explains Dr David Penfold of the London College of Communication. “If you were a publishing production manager in the old days, you were working with different companies for different parts of the process and you’d be checking proofs at different stages. Now some of those stages may be in-house. The actual process is much more digital – there aren’t all these mechanical stages. It’s just as easy to get things wrong – but in different ways. Images in the wrong format or the wrong resolution, for example. There are many of the same issues, dot-gain and so on. But it’s a question of knowing what you need to know so you send the correct files to the printer.”

In those bygone days, a copy editor would have worked on a hard-copy manuscript which would then be sent to a specialist typesetting company for keying on a glorified typewriter. Once proofed and corrected, the resultant bromides as they were called would be pasted up on boards, read again and any minor corrections stripped in (hence the scalpel and Cow Gum) and finally, by means of photomechanical transfer (PMT), turned into camera-ready copy (CRC). The CRC would then be converted to negative film, imposed (that is, arranged in such as way as to obtain the correct page order once the printed sheets have been folded) and plates created from it to be used for printing - which meant another set of proofs was required to check that all the pages were in the right order and the right way round. Binding was a completely separate operation, often undertaken by a standalone bindery.

To anyone under the age of thirty, a typewriter is an object of curiosity – a museum piece much like the valve radio or the penny farthing. But those who began their publishing careers in the late 1970s or ‘80s can remember when fax was an exciting new technology and the Amstrad PCW 8256 - launched by Sir Alan Sugar (not then a media star, much less a government spokesman) in 1986 and usually connected to a dot matrix or daisy-wheel printer - was the height of modernity. For the first time, a book could be delivered not as a pile of manuscript pages but on a disk. But it was the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout programme, which ran on the original Macintosh 128K, that launched the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution. While word processing systems such as WordStar and Wang transformed office documents, they lacked the typographic flexibility required for complicated book layout; but now, for the first time, pages could be made up on screen and printed out at a (relatively) sharp 300dpi.  If publishing had a big bang moment, that was it. For the first time, anyone could be a publisher. “All subsequent developments are based on taking that further,” Penfold explains.

Together with the Mac and PageMaker, it was PostScript, a “page description language” developed by Adobe, that made DTP possible and, by the late 1980s, PostScript was not just the language that drove laser printers but also the standard language for sending final documents for printing. However, PostScript was not the right format for viewing documents on screen so, based on PostScript, Portable Document Format (PDF) was derived and, by the late 1990’s, had become the accepted format not only for document exchange, becoming an open standard in 2008, but also for sending files for printing. That changed everything, allowing typesetters to take a Word manuscript and work in Quark or InDesign to create PDF files which, once passed, are sent directly to the printer who may either create plates (most economical for long runs) or run them straight to digital press (suitable for short-run printing). “Direct to plate means that imposition is done in software as opposed to manually,” Penfold explains. “What is effectively a glorified laser printer is used to create plates directly from the files; these files are then processed and put straight on press. There are no negative films and no bromides. Everything is done on screen, although you may print it out to look at it.”

Almost two decades ago, Ross worked with the printer, Clays, to introduce the Electronic Purchase Order, “which was revolutionary in that it allowed us, at the press of a button, to send an order, attaching any text corrections, directly into Clays’ computer system, and so part-schedule the book… What’s happened over the years is that the printing process itself has become less of an issue and more part of the process... Little, Brown is cutting edge,” Ross continues. “My design department supply me with PDFs for jackets and covers, and, because we’ve calibrated our machines with those of our printers, we hardly need to see a proof before going to press, though we supply cover proofs because that’s what the market demands.”

Those processes vary according to the style of publishing. Illustrated books are of course more complicated than a novel, but “colour management” now allows screens to be calibrated so that what you see is as near as possible to what you get colour-wise. Printers still need colour separations for offset printing, though these are often now produced digitally in-house rather than by an external repro-house. Academic titles and journals, and much else which requires only short runs, are likely to be produced by print-on-demand methods (high-quality laser printing, though this is about to change) which allows publishers to minimise inventory and thus save money. Turnaround time for all books has been cut drastically, with just two weeks required for some new titles, while the possibilities of little-and-often reprints and just-in-time delivery should ensure that even the most in-demand title doesn’t go out of stock. “That’s what makes it fun,” enthuses Ross, “the thrill of the chase, the speed at which things move.”

Over the past five to ten years, digital technology has transformed the production process. The coming years will bring more changes – probably not revolution but evolution. Meanwhile, digital publishing is finally gaining traction. Publishers everywhere recognise the importance and success of the App but take-up of ebooks is still small and may not gather speed until interoperability issues have been resolved or until one device, perhaps the iPad, emerges as a clear leader. Meanwhile, Ross and his colleagues must ensure that, along with a PDF for printing traditional books, XML files are created which can be repurposed for anything: “If every device took the ePub file it would be fine, but as yet Sony and Kindle require slightly different files. XML files seem to be the way to go, providing a stable platform while retaining the integrity of the design.”

The next generation of readers may well buy fewer traditional books, which will lead to changes not just in production processes but in production departments. “But at the end of the day, someone has to manage the production process,” Penfold points out. “Production people will still be required – it’s just difficult to predict what they’ll be doing in twenty years’ time.” While he still tells his students about the old-fashioned methods and they all know what an em rule is, the emphasis is on XML, metadata and new ways of handling content. The role of the production editor is now very different to the one that Ross and Penfold aspired to at the outset of their careers.

“If you were a production editor a few years ago you needed to understand about typesetting and proofing and about colour. These days,” concludes Penfold, “you might actually have to have the IT skills yourself. You may not just be managing the process – you may be doing it.”