   #copyright

Publishing

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Media

   Publishing is the industry concerned with the production and
   dissemination of literature or information – the activity of making
   information available for public view. In some cases, authors may be
   their own publishers.

   Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works
   such as books and newspapers. With the advent of digital information
   systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to
   include electronic resources, such as the electronic versions of books
   and periodicals, as well as websites, blogs, and the like.

   Publishing includes the stages of the development, acquisition,
   marketing, production – printing (and its electronic equivalents), and
   distribution of newspapers, magazines, books, literary works, musical
   works, software and other works dealing with information, including the
   electronic media.

   Publication is also important as a legal concept: (1) as the process of
   giving formal notice to the world of a significant intention, for
   example, to marry or enter bankruptcy; (2) as the essential
   precondition of being able to claim defamation; that is, the alleged
   libel must have been published, and (3) for copyright purposes, where
   there is a difference in the protection of published and unpublished
   works.
   A printing press in Kabul, Afghanistan.
   Enlarge
   A printing press in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The process of publishing

Submission by author or agent

   Book and magazine publishers spend a significant proportion of their
   time buying or commissioning copy. At a small press, it is possible to
   survive by relying entirely on commissioned material. But as activity
   increases, the need for works may outstrip the publisher's established
   circle of writers.

   Writers often first submit a query letter or proposal. The majority of
   unsolicited submissions come from previously unpublished authors. When
   such manuscripts are unsolicited, they must go through the slush pile,
   in which acquisitions editors sift through to identify manuscripts of
   sufficient quality or revenue potential to be referred to the editorial
   staff. Established authors are often represented by a literary agent to
   market their work to publishers and negotiate contracts.

Acceptance and negotiation

   Once a work is accepted, commissioning editors negotiate the purchase
   of intellectual property rights and agree on royalty rates.

   The authors of traditional printed materials sell exclusive territorial
   intellectual property rights that match the list of countries in which
   distribution is proposed (i.e. the rights match the legal systems under
   which copyright protections can be enforced). In the case of books, the
   publisher and writer must also agree on the intended formats of
   publication -— mass-market paperback, "trade" paperback and hardback
   are the most common options.

   The situation is slightly more complex if electronic formatting is to
   be used. Where distribution is to be by CD-R or other physical media,
   there is no reason to treat this form differently from a paper format,
   and a national copyright is an acceptable approach. But the possibility
   of Internet download without the ability to restrict physical
   distribution within national boundaries presents legal problems that
   are usually solved by selling language or translation rights rather
   than national rights. Thus, Internet access across the European Union
   is relatively open because of the laws forbidding discrimination based
   on nationality, but the fact of publication in, say, France, limits the
   target market to those who read French.

   Having agreed on the scope of the publication and the formats, the
   parties in a book agreement must then agree royalty rates, the
   percentage of the gross retail price that will be paid to the author.
   This is difficult because the publisher must estimate the potential
   sales in each market and balance projected revenue against production
   costs.

Editorial stage

   Once the immediate commercial decisions are taken and the technical
   legal issues resolved, the author may be asked to improve the quality
   of the work through rewriting or smaller changes, and the staff will
   edit the work. Almost all publishers maintain a house style, and staff
   will copy edit to ensure that the work matches the style and
   grammatical requirements of each market. Editing may also involve
   structural changes and requests for more information. Some publishers
   employ fact-checkers.

Prepress

   When a final text is agreed upon, the next phase is design. This may
   include artwork being commissioned or confirmation of layout. In
   publishing, the word "art" also indicates photographs. This process
   prepares the work for printing through processes such as typesetting,
   dust jacket composition, specification of paper quality, binding method
   and casing, and proofreading.

   The activities of typesetting, page layout, the production of
   negatives, plates from the negatives and, for hardbacks, the
   preparation of brasses for the spine legend and imprint are now all
   computerized. Prepress computerization evolved mainly in about the last
   twenty years of the 20th century. If the work is to be distributed
   electronically, the final files are saved as formats appropriate to the
   target operating systems of the hardware used for reading. These may
   include PDF files.

Publishing as a business

   The publisher usually controls the advertising and other marketing
   tasks, but may subcontract various aspects of the process described
   above. In smaller companies, editing, proofreading and layout might be
   done by freelancers.

   Dedicated in-house salespeople are rapidly being replaced by
   specialized companies who handle sales to bookshops, wholesalers and
   chain stores for a fee. This trend is accelerating as retail book
   chains and supermarkets have centralized their buying.

   If the entire process up to the stage of printing is handled by an
   outside company or individuals, and then sold to the publishing
   company, it is known as book packaging. This is a common strategy
   between smaller publishers in different territorial markets where the
   company that first buys the intellectual property rights then sells a
   package to other publishers and gains an immediate return on capital
   invested. Indeed, the first publisher will often print sufficient
   copies for all markets and thereby get the maximum quantity efficiency
   on the print run for all.

   Some businesses maximize their profit margins through vertical
   integration; book publishing is not one of them. Although newspaper and
   magazine companies still often own printing presses and binderies, book
   publishers rarely do. Similarly, the trade usually sells the finished
   products through a distributor who stores and distributes the
   publisher's wares for a percentage fee or sells on a sale or return
   basis.

   The advent of the Internet has therefore posed an interesting question
   that challenges publishers, distributors and retailers. In 2005,
   Amazon.com announced its purchase of Booksurge, a major print on demand
   operation. This is probably intended as a preliminary move towards
   establishing an Amazon imprint. One of the largest bookseller chains,
   Barnes & Noble, already runs its own successful imprint with both new
   titles and classics -— hardback editions of out-of-print former best
   sellers. Similarly, Ingram Industries, parent company of Ingram Book
   Group (a leading US book wholesaler), now includes its own
   print-on-demand division called Lightning Source. Among publishers,
   Simon & Schuster recently announced that it will start selling its
   backlist titles directly to consumers through its website.

   Book clubs are almost entirely direct-to-retail, and niche publishers
   pursue a mixed strategy to sell through all available outlets -— their
   output is insignificant to the major booksellers, so lost revenue poses
   no threat to the traditional symbiotic relationships between the four
   activities of printing, publishing, distribution and retail.

Academic publishing

   The development of the printing press represented a revolution for
   communicating the latest hypotheses and research results to the
   academic community and supplemented what a scholar could do personally.
   But this improvement in the efficiency of communication created a
   challenge for libraries which have had to accommodate the weight and
   volume of literature.

   To understand the scale of the problem it can be pointed that
   approximately two centuries ago the number of scientific papers
   published annually was doubling every fifteen years. Today, the number
   of published papers doubles about every ten years. Modern academics can
   now run electronic journals and distribute academic materials without
   the need for publishers. Not surprisingly, publishers perceive this
   emancipation as a serious threat to their business. In reality, the
   interests of scholars and publishers have long been in conflict.

   Today, publishing academic journals and textbooks is a large part of an
   international industry. The shares of the major publishing companies
   are listed on national stock exchanges and management policies must
   satisfy the dividend expectations of international shareholders.
   Critics claim that these standardized accounting and profit-oriented
   policies have come to the fore and now constrain more altruistic
   leanings. In contrast to the commercial model, there is non-profit
   publishing, where the publishing organization is either organised
   specifically for the purpose of publishing, such as a university press,
   or is one of the functions of a an organisationn such a a medical
   charity, founded to achieve specific practical goals. An alternative
   approach to the corporate model is open access, the online distribution
   of individual articles and academic journals without charge to readers
   and libraries.

   A somewhat related development is open source publishing, which is
   participatory group editing, as exemplified by various wiki projects,
   such wikipedia, wikiversity, and citizendium.

Tie-in publishing

   Technically, radio, television, cinemas, VCDs and DVDs, music systems,
   games, computer hardware and mobile telephony publish information to
   their audiences. Indeed, the marketing of a major film often includes a
   novelization, a graphic novel or comic version, the soundtrack album, a
   game, model, toys and endless promotional publications.

   Some of the major publishers have entire divisions devoted to a single
   franchise, e.g. Ballantine Del Rey Lucasbooks has the exclusive rights
   to Star Wars in the United States; Random House UK
   (Bertelsmann)/Century LucasBooks holds the same rights in the United
   Kingdom. The game industry self-publishes through BL Publishing/Black
   Library ( Warhammer) and Wizards of the Coast ( Dragonlance, Forgotten
   Realms, etc). The BBC has its own publishing division which does very
   well with long-running series such as Doctor Who. These multimedia
   works are cross-marketed aggressively and sales frequently outperform
   the average stand-alone published work, making them a focus of
   corporate interest.

Independent publishing alternatives

   See also Alternative media Though many less-successful writers need to
   hold another job, they have found smaller alternatives to the mass
   market in the form of small presses and self-publishing. More recently,
   these options include print on demand and ebook format. Though there is
   little market exposure in addition and royalties, these publishing
   alternatives provide an avenue that expresses diversity in styles and
   political views that the mass markets haven't seen in the last 10-15
   years.
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