Going Digital Gives Publishers Safety Net

Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Sarah Lacy provides an articulate and approachable list of digital lessons for book publishers. Her passage on going "electronic from the get-go" is an important reminder about the vital efficiences of digital content:

You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version. The manuscript is FedEx'ed back and forth with Post-it Notes. If FedEx were to lose it, publishers lose months' worth of copy edits, legal edits, and other elements of the painstaking publishing process. There's not even a photocopy. No joke.

That makes publishing the book in other digital formats a challenge at the outset. Publishers would do well to keep the book electronic-- even if it's PDFs of typeset pages. That would help them blast teaser chapters around the world (engaging bloggers and the long tail of the press). Presumably it would help get the book on Kindle and other e-books from day one.

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2 Comments

bowerbird said:
August 22, 2008 2:17 AM

oh boy this is so funny.

because it's _true_! it is!

publishers, they just make me
laugh and laugh and giggle and
laugh and smile and laugh some more.

-bowerbird

bowerbird said:
August 22, 2008 2:34 AM

of course, what makes this _even_more_funny_ --
and who would have thought that was even possible?
-- is that sarah lacy has proven here that she is
smarter than the publishers who do it for a living.

sarah lacy!

you go girl!

i'm sitting here laughing so hard i'm gonna have to
take a break, because i'm laughing so hard...

-bowerbird

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