An overview of the publishing industry

In about 200AD, people in China started printing on fabric and paper using woodblocks. This was a great innovation. Before this, copies of books always had to be written out by hand. This made books very expensive and only a few people could afford to own them. With woodblock printing, a whole page of text or pictures could be cut into a woodblock and many copies of that page printed easily and quickly. This made books much cheaper and more people could buy them. But many woodblocks were still needed to print a whole book – one woodblock per page.

The next great innovation in printing came about 1,000 years ago with moveable type, also in China. Instead of creating an image of the text and pictures on a page, and printing the whole page as one, people realised that they could make individual characters or letters, put them together in a tray and print different texts using the same characters. This was called moveable type because you could move the characters or letters in the tray, and make different words (and therefore pages and books) from the same characters.

The next innovation in printing happened in Europe, when Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press that used moveable type in about 1450. From this point, printing technology spread across the world.

But publishing is not printing! Modern publishing involves much more than just printing books, magazines or newspapers – in fact, many modern publishers do not own printing presses of their own any more. Instead, they pay other companies to do their printing for them.

One of the most important jobs a commissioning editor, usually working for a publishing company, does, is to decide what to publish. The commissioning editor may then commission a writer to write what the publishing company wishes to publish. Sometimes publishing companies do not commission writers, but instead rely on writers who send in their works to be considered for publication.

A publishing company is also usually responsible for editing and illustrating a writer's work, producing it in a suitable form, marketing it, selling it, warehousing it, and keeping good records of what money a work has brought in, and what share of that money the writer is entitled to. This has not changed very much in the last 500 years, although writers were more often paid royalties in the 20th and 21st centuries, rather than fees as they were before that (and sometimes still are).

Some writers choose to publish their works themselves – this is called self-publishing and can take place in print or in digital formats.

• Analyse the South African publishing industry with reference to salient challenges and opportunities within the contemporary context.

 Each of the sectors also has a set of sub-characteristics, or dynamics, meaning trends, events or policies that influence how publishers in the sector perform.

Table 1.7. The dynamics and sales cycles of publishing market sectors in South Africa

 All of the market sectors contribute more than the Rand value of the revenue they generate to the economy.

Royalties and author fees. Publishers give creative and/or knowledgeable people the opportunity to generate an income from the rights related to their intellectual property. Authors may earn a percentage of the net receipts from the sale of their books in compensation for the intellectual effort they put into developing and providing the content. Alternatively, authors may earn fees for their content. Publishers therefore ensure a revenue stream for authors, by investing in their books, distributing and marketing them, and ensuring that monies owed to the authors reach them.

Employment. A PricewaterhouseCoopers (2017) report states that publishing companies employed 7,657 people, full-time or part-time, in 2015. This does not include authors.

Education, knowledge and development. All publishers, by making carefully curated content available in textbooks, monographs, journals, works of literature, teacher guides, exam preparation guides for professionals, reading and numeracy schemes, etc. enable the end-users to access learning and knowledge, become educated, learn technical skills and vocations, enjoy entertainment, explore hobbies, and, effectively, improve their lives.

 The political environment most obviously affects the Education sector. Since 1994, successive education ministers have wanted to address the impact of apartheid education, and incorporate modern thinking on education and best teaching practice into revised curricula.

The curriculum for public schools has been revised numerous times since 1994. Each time the Department of Basic Education revises the curriculum, publishers submit new learning and teaching materials (textbooks, teacher guides, resources) for possible inclusion in the provincial or national catalogues from which teachers select books to use. Publishers and  authors whose education products are in the approved catalogues, generate considerably higher revenue than those whose products are not. In 1997, many publishing companies retrenched staff as there were no opportunities to make new books for  the school curriculum.  The 2000s were boom years for educational publishers but since the mid-2010s, there has been a significant decline in submission opportunities and government procurement practices. As a result, there have again been retrenchments at several big educational publishers.

Another example of politics affecting publishers occurred when the Higher Education part of the Academic sector was disrupted by the #FeesMustFall movement at universities in 2015 to 2017. Protests were against issues of fee increases which excluded poor students. The "missing middle" students felt unsupported by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. The protests grew to include issues of access to higher education generally, including the employment of black  academics. Protesters supported the transformation of universities from what they saw as elite institutions with mainly Western curricula to institutions reflecting African students and diverse curricula. The protests affected publishers, firstly because the supply of textbooks, through booksellers to students, was disrupted, as were classes and exams at many institutions. Secondly, publishers realised that they needed to evaluate whether their textbooks for South African students do in fact support the students properly, e.g. through their features and by including knowledge to them. This has led to the revision of some textbooks.

 A trend mentioned in the characteristics and dynamics of the market sectors is “digital”. People outside the book publishing industry often assume that e-books have devastated the book trade. It is true that digital publications have come to the fore in some sectors internationally. For example:

• International journal publishers sell access to electronic journals using a subscription model
• The sale of adult fiction titles published as e-books, bought via the electronic bookseller Amazon (or similar, such as Kobo) and read on devices such as tablets or e-readers, has increased.

In South Africa, there are policy developments that suggest the government intends to promote digital publishing for education. Publishers are adapting their content generation and production processes, their contracts, and their suppliers, in order to disseminate learning and teaching materials digitally.

A second trend is that attitudes towards copyright material are changing. Many end-users do not completely understand the concept of authored material being owned by the persons who created it or published it, or the need to ask and acknowledge those persons or publishers when re-using the material. End-users use pirated copies of the original materials instead of buying the books. There is a perception that the right to education, for example, trumps the rights of authors and publishers to earn an income from the content they have produced.

The Copyright Act of 1978 is being amended by government. A Copyright Amendment Bill was passed by the National Assembly of Parliament in December 2018 and introduced to the National Council of Provinces for approval. If passed and signed by the President, this could decimate educational publishing in South Africa because it applies a "fair use" principle to educational content. In other words, the amended legislation will mean that people using an author’s content for an educational purpose will not have to pay for permission to reproduce and use it.

Because such a large proportion of publishing in South Africa is educational (i.e. the Education sector and most of the Academic sector) and the proposed amendment will negatively affect publishers and authors in these sectors, the publishing industry as a whole may be negatively affected. Some of the revenue from the sale of educational products enables publishing companies to invest in other kinds of products, which may not generate as much revenue, or do so as reliably. However, some argue that non-educational publishers and other industries will benefit from the amended legislation since people and institutions who would have had to pay for access to content will now be able to spend that money in other parts of the economy.

 After studying this section, you must be able to:

• Describe the elements of the print and digital publishing and book manufacturing process using the correct terminology
• Analyse the effect of technological development and innovation on the publishing and book manufacturing process in terms of present and future challenges and opportunities

 There are many elements to the publishing and book manufacturing process. The majority of the key terms related to this process are explained thoroughly in Chapter 9, as well as in the glossary. However, you will need to understand the following key terms to gain the most out of this textbook:

• Manuscript: This is sometimes referred to as the raw manuscript; it is sent to the publishing company by the author; it is raw in that it has not been developed, checked, edited or typeset and may still change in many ways.
• Authors: These are writers who either write the manuscript by themselves or contribute to a project as part of a team of writers; they provide content which is their intellectual property – they may later assign the rights to this intellectual property to the publishing company, or they may retain some or all of the rights.
• Editing: Once the manuscript has been approved for production, it goes through a number of editing processes; these can be developing the manuscript, content editing the manuscript and/or copy-editing the manuscript; editing is the task of improving the manuscript at different levels to make sure it’s accessible to the reader.
• Design: There are a number of design elements in book production, especially designing the cover and designing the spec for the inside pages; this design will give the book its unique look and feel.
• Typesetting: This is the process of converting the raw manuscript text into content which can be printed or made available digitally; this is usually done with particular software which can accommodate the design styles as well as illustrations.
• Artwork: This can refer to technical drawings, illustrations, photos, figures or tables which complement the text; they are used differently depending on the kind of book and often make the text more accessible and understandable for the reader.
• Page proofs: These are usually pdfs which the typesetter provides to the editor or project manager; there are usually three sets of pages proofs which need to be checked, proofread, used for artwork commissioning and indexed; the final set of page proofs is called the master set; typesetters will then supply a print-ready pdf.
• Printing: This is the process of producing multiple copies by a printer; it includes various technical checks, checking layout, and providing proofs for checking.
• Publication: This is when print books are brought into stock at the warehouse and are available to dispatch to bookshops and other retailers.

• E-book: An electronic book that can be read on computer, tablet or cellphone. PDF and EPUB: E-book formats that will be described further in Chapter 9.
• Metadata: The descriptive data that accompanies the e-book, e.g. its title, ISBN, and author.
• Digital conversion: The process of creating an e-book from a book (or master set of typeset pages).
• Interactive assets: Items that complement the book content, such as a video or an animation, or interactive items that together form the whole product.

We will discuss terminology in more detail in Chapter 9.

 An ISBN is to a book what an identity number is to a person. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number.

An ISBN is a unique number allocated to one publication or edition of a publication, made by a specific publisher, in one format. The number is unique in that it can only be allocated to a single publication

– each format of the same publication (whether a print book, an e-book, an audio book or a mixed media book) would receive its own ISBN. The ISBN is printed on the back cover of a physical book and included on the copyright page of print and digital products.

An ISBN has 13 digits which are divided into 5 distinct segments, each separated by a space or hyphen. A person who can "read" an ISBN is able to detect information about the publication, as in this image sourced from the International ISBN Agency, 2014:

• The prefix segment – is either 978 or 979. It always contains three digits.
• The registration group segment – is the next one to five digits. It represents the country of origin, or the geographical region, or language area.
• The registrant element – identifies the publishing company or the imprint they are using. It can be up to seven digits long.
• The publication element – identifies the edition and format of the title, and can be up to six digits long
• A check digit – this is the last, single digit. It validates the rest of the number.

The ISBN system is run on an international, national and publisher level, from the ISBN International Agency (IA), the global authority for the ISBN system situated in the United Kingdom. The accuracy of the ISBN system rests in that, all across the world, more than 160 agencies tasked with administering ISBNs are governed by an international standard, the ISO 2108: Information and Documentation. In South Africa, the International Standard Number (ISN) Agency is based at the National Library of South Africa (NLSA). The NLSA ensures that batches of ISBNs are issued to publishers for use on their books. Once an ISBN is allocated to a book, a record of what book it is attached to must be sent back to the NLSA.

The importance of ISBNs is that:

• They are used for information-processing by all parties in the publishing value chain – including publishers, booksellers, other retailers, distributors, and libraries. ISBNs are used for ordering and listing books in catalogues, and for stock control.
• They identify any South African publication worldwide and facilitate its listing in directories including those on the Internet. This means users can search for information on where to obtain the publication.
• They record accurate information on South African publishers – who published what.
• They give a “label” to the copyright content that an author has assigned to or licenced to a publisher in their contractual agreement, in addition to the title of the book. If an author has signed a contract with a South African publisher assigning copyright to that publisher, and the author's book is identified by an ISBN, it means that that unique book with the same content cannot be published by another publisher for the term of the contract.
• They help keep records of all books published up-to-date – as required by the Legal Deposit Act of 1997. Individuals who publish, or publishing companies, are required by law to submit copies of their publications to a repository. The purpose is to preserve South Africa’s written, and published, heritage. In South Africa, the repository for printed and digital books is the NLSA.