July 2005
University press managers and staff, from both large and small publishers, continue to question standard production practices and workflow approaches in an attempt to stabilize income and reduce costs. General and production manager sessions at the June 2005 American Association of University Presses (AAUP) meeting in Philadelphia were focused on the evolving solutions to many current prepress and manufacturing challenges affecting the bottom line.
There is a demand for better digital proofing, in an era when author-supplied digital art, often unacceptable, is increasing. The appeal of economical color printing in China is undeniable, particularly as university presses look to sell more complex titles, but environmental concerns are being raised as well. Practical limitations of where to cut production costs, including inventory management, and hesitations to use XML coding as part of a content management strategy, also illustrated how university presses recognize challenges but may not be able to easily resolve them.
Dependable printed color art reproduction means mandatory advance profiling between color printers (often in Asia, using a specific color gamut) and prepress art scan companies (more prominent now and often American), a point continually stressed by Charlie Clark of C&C Offset Printing. Judging four-color image quality is much more reliable with thermal digital rather than ink-jet proofs, which is not yet a standard at many printers, according to Karen Schmidt of Getty Publications. Both Clark and Schmidt pointed out that any four-color digital imaging process is not sufficient to accurately decide on duotone combinations, still best determined by press proofing (with different curves).
Evaluating and correcting author-supplied digital art is now assumed, whether it means creating new in-house positions, using outside resources, or training production and manufacturing workers, which may not be the best skill match. The number of art programs has increased for most publishers, both because of easy author access to scanning technology and because of more complex subject matter as university presses look to expand into science fields. Repeated again was that authors and artists should not convert RGB files to CMYK, instead leaving this process and accountability to the prepress and print vendors.
Profiling and proofing black and white halftones at printers or between compositor/prepress companies and printers is just as important as color awareness, according to Doug Bischoff and Pam Minhas of Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group. Bischoff aptly described printing as "smashing" ink on paper at high speed, even more reason to agree on halftone dot values and gain before scanning and printing.
The economic advantages of printing in China are crucial to tight university press budgets, but so were concerns over declining air quality (with papermaking a factor) as China rapidly industrializes. Clark of C&C and Wai Man Yeung of SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd. both pointed out that North American print buyers are sending "mixed messages" by not often specifying recycled paper (more expensive), but also stated that a diminished environment is an acknowledged quality-of-life issue within China.
All presses are grappling with how to further reduce costs and streamline processes. Tracking staff hours, setting up discipline-specific teams, ranking title importance for production, asking copyeditors for more pages per hour on monographs, and trying to decrease art counts all were targeted approaches that have had some limited success. Panelists from Yale University, Princeton University Press, and Temple University Press represented publishers across a spectrum of $3-20 million in sales and front lists of 90-250 books annually.
Digital output for reprints--and to keep titles in print--is increasing, which is no surprise, but returns are still an issue even for print on demand (POD) products. Limiting time spent on each reprint, including few if any corrections, no jackets for hardcover reprints as libraries increasingly opt for paperback versions, and ordering most reprint titles together, by cartons, and mostly to last for 12 months are some of the evolving approaches the University of Illinois Press, Harvard University Press, and Princeton University Press have pursued to better limit reprint and warehouse inventory costs.
Knowledgeable staff and mutual support, including from outside vendors, for specific (and funded) projects are reasons XML coding has been successful for Oxford University Press electronic retrieval products. Oxford Reference Online, consisting of 920 monographs, and Oxford Scholarship Online (80 titles) resulted from a changed, all-electronic workflow at the U.K. and U.S. divisions of Oxford University Press. "Good XML," as dubbed by Dan Barker and Nancy Hoagland, came about only through patience and understanding document structure, and recognizing that compositors were better than copyeditors at tagging.
However, most university presses do not have similar internal resources, and shy away from full-program commitments to tagging, according to Byron Laws and Gurvinder Batra of TechBooks, even though standardization is less expensive overall. Understanding XML as a content structure tool separate from formatting is essential. Including authors and all production processes from the very beginning makes up the full electronic "well-formed document workflow" of Scribe's SCML Microsoft Word-based product, as explained by David Alan Rech.
The importance of production issues to university press viability was emphasized again at the 2005 AAUP annual meetings, as was the continued pursuit of improvements to save money and hopefully increase sales for publishing that is service- and mission-based, often operating under tight budget constraints.
John Cronin is Senior Production Coordinator at University of California Press