Another Sunny Day

[netmouse]

Today I am having trouble motivating myself to go down in the basement and sand the trim and the stairs, given how lovely the sunshine is. For lunch I sat in the sun and read and ate, sitting among my plants in the livng room, and it was just lovely. I did the same thing yesterday - yesterday I finished Marvel 1602 and today I finally finished Starlight 2.

It's been a long time since I spent the greater part of a day reading fiction. This weekend I've also been editing a couple things as I read them on my laptop. -Which reminds me, I've been wondering, aren't we at the point where the final typsetting of things is done electronically? Is there a reason why the publisher shouldn't return a copyedited version of a book or story in electronic form to the author?

Comments

[stardustgirl.livejournal.com]

Maybe it depends on the production team involved or the editor or the publishing house? We were all electronic...stuff routed and was marked up in Acrobat.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

It's easier to scribble on paper.

That's the facetious answer, although since I personally find it easier to make and track changes on hard copy rather than via electronic copy, it's also the serious answer, too.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

hmm.. it's a good answer for what format to use mid-process. But what about when the process is done? Wouldn't you like to receive the corrected text in electronic format, if only for your own archive?

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's a silly sunny day here; tempatures in the 50s.

B

[vaxjedi]

The only issue really, would be control of the electronic copy - do you want extra PDFs of your book floating around? Of course, with Adobe's Policy server, you can fix that. But thats new and a shitload of money.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

well, but it should be easy to bind the author not to pass it around - and the author is presumably motivated not to do some anyway.

And actually, what I was proposing isn't so much that they should get a nice pretty copy of their book or story, as that they should get a corrected copy - with spelling and punctuation errors and such removed. The text that goes into the final layout. It doesn't seem that there's an extra cost associated with passing that back to the author once it exists, though you're right, there's a little extra risk.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

If our authors ask, we send them the final text in pdf form (since they generally don't have access to Ventura, our primary typesetting program, or Quark, our secondary typesetting program). Not many of them have asked, though.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

really? I would think they would prefer .rtf to .pdf

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

The final, correct version exists in the typesetting program (so .vp or .qxd rather than as .rtf or .doc) and gets converted to .pdf for the printer (our primary printer is going DTP from the .pdfs). We *could* convert it to .rtf (probably by cropping the headers and footers off the pdf and having Acrobat "save as") but we're all wearing multiple hats as it is and thankfully, haven't had to.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

*nod* thanks for explaining.

[brendand.livejournal.com]

I would think they'd want a copy in electronic format and on paper. But that may just be me.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

yeah, well they get a copy to edit on paper, and then they get a couple/few copies of the book, which is also on paper.

But I would definitely think they would want a copy of the edited story. Especially for short stories, where there's a fair chance they might get reprinted in some other volume than wherever they were initially printed.