Last week Apple announced iBooks Author, free software aimed at making textbooks for the iPad. Here are my first thoughts on Apple's announcement, which has created a fair amount of debate in the few days since it was made.

First, to set the scene, iBooks Author is a one-trick pony: it can't do anything else but create iBooks for iPad, but it seems to do that rather well (better than, for example, InDesign does at present). It isn't a generic eBook solution and isn't meant to be.

iBooks Author is aimed first at increasing Apple's market share and second at furthering the interests of authors. Having said that, it looks like it could be successful in both of these aims. We can't ignore it.

Any iBooks created using iBooks Author can be distributed freely. That has to be a plus. But some folk are not too keen on being locked in to Apple if they want to sell files created by iBooks Author, which they will be if they aim use it for commercial publishing. But there is an answer to that view (just don't use it!)… and another but in response, and so on...

Apple has chosen to recover its costs by iBook sales rather than charge for the software used to create them. A recipe for differing world views to surface. The business model isn't all that different, I suppose, from how iPhone apps are created (the Apple software to develop them is free to developers, but any apps constructed using it must be sold through the App Store). Software developers are used to working with several cost models, including this one; the general public isn't, and hence the debate.

As far as I can see, all that Apple wants is control over sale of files created by its software, not over the content of the files, which remains with their authors. Anyone can choose not to use iBooks Author (or create an ePub in parallel with something else, such as InDesign, for sale through another channel). 

It is more sophisticated than I expected would be the case for a version 1 release (it even has MathType integration). It has been influenced by, at least, Keynote, Pages and iWeb. It will be interesting to see what versions 2 and 3 bring. It isn't InDesign, with all its bells and whistles and flexibility, but it isn't trying to be.

Anyone involved in digital production will definitely have to watch this carefully. Apple has just enabled millions of people to become digital publishers. For free (if their iBook is free). Or for 70% of sales income (if their iBook is for sale). Apple takes 30%. Publishers, take note.

There may be a great number of poor-quality iBooks, or attempts at such, by authors who don't understand the copy-editing, layout and proofreading processes. But I think there will also be publishers (Apple already has Pearson on board) who see the opportunity for this software to be used as a professional assembly platform for digital publications, and as an alternative to conventional typesetting. We are preparing to offer this service as well.

The price of digital textbooks will fall, with many more copies being sold than in the past. iBooks Author is just another part of the jigsaw.

We want to wish everyone we do business with a very happy Christmas. That doesn't just mean our clients, but also all our authors, editors, artists, indexers, printers, distributors and anyone else and who has helped produce one of our publications over the past year.

We are closed for business on Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 December, and again on Monday 2 and Tuesday 3 January 2012.

Only a few members of staff have chosen to work between Christmas and New Year. Normal service resumes on Wednesday 4 January 2012.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year...

But it’s also the most stressful, especially when it comes to hitting the shops. So here are my top three tips for tackling Christmas shopping, which should also come in handy for project management within your business.

1. Be specific

Never accept a vague idea from a friend for buying a gift. ‘A jumper would be nice.’ So you buy her a blue jumper and it transpires she hates blue; had you bought it in red, however, she’d have been delighted. To avoid such scenarios, ask people to be as specific as they can when they are telling you what they would like for Christmas (or, even better, ask them to create an Amazon wish list!).

As I trudged through the slush in Edinburgh this weekend, it felt a million miles away from only 6 months ago when I had enjoyed A Midsummer’s Night Dream in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens on a long summer’s evening. Part of Shakespeare’s famous comedy really stuck with me: Oberon’s brief to Puck (to drop the juice of a magical flower into Demetrius’s eyes) was not specific enough, and there the problems began.

Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.
Did not you tell me I should know the man
By the Athenian garments he had on?
And so far blameless proves my enterprise
That I have 'nointed an Athenian's eyes;
And so far am I glad it so did sort,
As this their jangling I esteem a sport.

Puck

Project managers can learn a lot from Oberon and Puck: brief as specifically as you can. If you don’t, you will eventually end up running into problems with quality, cost and schedule, even if they don’t seem obvious at first.

2. Manage expectations

Probably the most difficult person to buy for at Christmas is the new boyfriend/girlfriend. How much do you spend on each other? What if you appear too keen/not keen enough? What if one of you buys the other an amazing gift, but it isn’t reciprocated by the other?

Have a brief, subtle chat with the other half to gauge what you will buy each other and how much you plan to spend. Communication is key. If you are clear in each other’s expectations early on (and this could be applied to the rest of the relationship) neither of you will be disappointed or embarrassed.

In our business, it’s the same with any new client. To forge a strong relationship early on, we need to ensure that we know exactly what is expected of each other. Communicate openly with your new client right from the start and you should be able to avoid difficult or awkward situations, and the risk of potentially losing the client will be significantly reduced.

3. Always have a back-up plan

Your mum has requested a particular gift. As it’s so straightforward, you leave buying it to the last minute. But when you reach the shop, said item is sold out – not just in this branch, but nationwide. The gift that your mum had her heart set on is impossible to purchase.

Good project management is about having foresight. It’s thinking early on what could possibly go wrong at every single stage, and having some sort of alternative in mind for when it’s needed. Because, according to the laws of project management, things never run smoothly and nothing is ever easy. Be prepared: you might get surprises along the way, but by having a bit of foresight those surprises won’t be as nasty as they would sometimes like to be.

Finally, a sincere thank you to everyone who has read this blog over the course of the year. We want to bring you useful tips and insights as well as entertain you, and we hope you have enjoyed it. Happy Christmas to you all, and may 2012 be everything you wish it to be.

First things first, this blog posting isn't meant to be a substitute for professional proofreading. It is, however, meant to help proofreaders by summarising a few of the more common errors we seem to encounter when checking proofs. 

Next, a confession: while most of the following blunders have been encountered in proofs that have been typeset elsewhere, usually abroad these days, we are not too proud to admit that we have made these types of mistake too. We constantly aim never to make the same mistake twice, of course, but sometimes these errors have sneaky ways of reappearing. 

But that's why proofreading is a profession and why professional proofreaders exist. And don't believe any typesetter who tells you that they create perfect proofs.

wrong leading
It's not always easy to spot, but watch out for the wrong leading being applied to the final line of each paragraph. This oversight is usually caused by the end of paragraph marker having the wrong leading, and hence causing the final two lines to have incorrect interline spacing.

Once you see one, watch out for others. 

misapplied corrections
Are you checking revised proofs? Do you sometimes wonder why some proof corrections appear not to have been made at all? Well, take care. When you discover corrections that appear to have been missed consider that the typesetter applied them in the wrong place. Does the word or phrase concerned also appear just before or after the place in the text you are checking? It may be that a correction has been made, but in the wrong position. Missing corrections = look at the surrounding text for other places where your typesetter could have made the correction through carelessness.

This is a common mistake for those new to layout work; experienced typesetters shouldn't make this type of error at all.

transposed figures
This one is more frequent than you may think. Typesetters may, for example, import all the figures for a spread at once, thinking that they will remember which is which, but then forget. This problem usually happens in highly illustrated texts, perhaps with several dozen or even several hundred figures. Typesetters can become too confident after placing the first 30 or 40 figures and can easily get figures 44 and 45 the wrong way around, with figure 45 being shown above the legend for figure 44 (and vice versa). 

Another cause of transposed figures is that the production editor or project manager has named them wrongly: The file called Figure_52.6 should really be called Figure_52.7, and so on. In this case the typesetter can place the figures 'correctly', in order, but the resulting problem is the same.

Whatever the reason, in all cases the future legend will not match the figure it describes. This mistake will be easy to spot if the legend refers to a blue square and all you can see is a pink circle, but can be difficult to spot if you have a series of almost identical figures, with only incremental changes in each, e.g. maps with more detail being added gradually.

mirror images and wrong orientation
Not so common these days is the mirror image of a figure, but watch out nevertheless. These are always easy to spot when there is text in the image; they are not so easy to spot if the image shows, for example, a surgical operation being carried out, when certain organs should appear on the left- or right-hand side of the patient as appropriate.

Similarly look out for a figure rotated by 90º. Don't rely on authors to submit figures in the correct orientation. Now, while those might seem very easy to detect, we did once produce proofs of an aquaculture book with mountaineering prawns, bravely climbing a vertical rock face under water, rather than crawling across the ocean floor. But we did catch that before the proofs were sent to the author. Honest.

hard hyphens
Once almost eliminated in hard copy, these are beginning to crop up again in eBooks. Discretionary hyphens should appear only when required, when the word is split over two lines, and at the proper places to break the word concerned. Some typesetters, again usually the inexperienced, will insert a hard hyphen inside a word to get the break at the right place (e.g. to have ther-apist  rather than the unpleasant the-rapist). While their intentions may be noble, a hard hyphen is a very bad thing. If the page reflows a hard hyphen will appear inside the word even when it is no longer at the end of a line. Experienced typesetters know this and avoid the problem by using discretionary hyphens.

This explains my reference to eBooks. Some books, originally produced in hard copy only, have now been repurposed for Kindle or iPad. When the pages reflow to accommodate the differing screen sizes and line lengths, the concept of firm pagination disappears, and words containing previously undetectable hard hyphens reflow. The hyphens that appear in mid-word look ugly and are a result of unnoticed problems in the past. 

in conclusion
Detecting the problems is important, and to do that one must be eternally suspicious. More important is trying to put processes in place that ensure the problem doesn't recur. That can be easier said than done, but doesn't mean not trying. If you are a proofreader, then don't trust anyone, not the production editor, not the copy-editor and certainly not the typesetter. Good colleagues will welcome your feedback on generic problems: it is in their interest to get as much right as possible. Ego-less production = high-quality proofs.

We are looking for a production editor with a life sciences background. See here for more information.

Our clients, particularly if they are not publishers themselves and unfamiliar with the publishing process, are sometimes uncertain of what to ask us for when working with their text. It whittles down to two essential tasks: copy-editing and proofreading, always in that order. Here I try to explain the difference between them.

What is copy-editing?
Copy-editing is, essentially, tidying up, but not in any ordinary sense. Picture a messy teenager’s bedroom: it needs gutting, for want of a better word. Time and effort are needed to, firstly, figure out where to start, and then to do the actual tidying. The teenager isn't usually part of the process, nor is the author when it comes to copy-editing.

The scale of the intervention required means that it is time to bring in the professionals. When it comes to text, then, copy-editing involves knowledge, skill and commitment. It’s much more than checking spelling and grammar. A copy-editor makes text readable. Copy-editing also involves making decisions on and applying style and consistency. References and their citations need checked and, sometimes, fact checking may be involved.

A big part of copy-editing now is also preparing the text for the typesetter or web designer so that text can be flowed in more easily and proofs and web pages created more quickly. This largely involves paragraph or character styling, or tagging, during which the copy-editor identifies (think of it as labelling) every piece of text (e.g. headings, numbered lists or quotations).

Macros and wildcard changes, such as those mentioned recently, can be very useful clean-up tools for professional copy-editors, but they don't replace the need to read every word in every sentence, making improvements as required.

Note that a copy-editor does not substantially rewrite or restructure text – this is the realm of the development editor (who would work on the text before copy-editing).

What is proofreading?
Proofreading is fixing the fine detail and checking for any errors not picked up by the copy-editor – essentially part of quality assurance.

Let’s return to the messy bedroom, which has now been tidied by mum. She stands back and feels satisfied at the hours of work she has put in. Then dad comes along, and immediately spots a few things out of place – there’s a CD in the DVD pile, there’s now only one dirty sock left on the floor, and only just in view. Cue marital strife. Changes are required to make the room look perfect, but they should, by now, be minimal changes.

Proofreading is done on proofs following typesetting (proofs are usually very good these days, but never perfect). Proofreading is only truly effective if it is done with fresh eyes – by a proofreader who is ‘blind’ to the text, who hasn’t copy-edited or previously worked with the text in detail.

A proofreader checks for accuracy, completeness, consistency and for layout errors (e.g. figures 54 and 55 have been transposed, some text has mysteriously vanished).

No text should be rewritten at this stage. By this time, web pages have been designed or paginated proofs created, hence changes are more awkward (and therefore more expensive) to make, which is why it’s so important to sort out as much as possible during copy-editing, before any press or web layout is carried out.

Copy-editing is about making the text clear, consistent and correct; proofreading is ensuring that it is.

Do you need a copy-editor or a proofreader?
You’ve established that you need a professional to look over your work – but what service do you require? Ideally, both, but time and budget constraints often play a part (see my guest blog post on the value of having professional material proofread).

The SfEP has provided helpful, detailed descriptions on what is involved in copy-editing and proofreading and answers to other common FAQs. Or you may decide that this page is a suitable next port of call, in which case I look forward to working with you.