#CD-ROM PUBLISHING
8 messages in this thread
I work for a publishing company that specialises in publishing
academic books. We hire well known academics who are experts in
their field. These academics provide us with a list of articles
written by authors all over the world on a given topic- this is the
list of the most authoritative works on the subject. It is my job to
hunt these articles in various libraries & take very good copies of
them. After obtaining permission to publish these articles, the
collection of articles that I have copied, are published as one book.
We are considering publishing our books on CD-ROM but are
apprenhensive about many issues about the technology. I would
appreciate if you could help by answering these questions:
1. How does one publish a book on CD-ROM? Remember, my employer
republishes articles that have already been published elsewhere. Our
articles are published directly from photocopies that I provide my
employer. Each page is therefore, an image, and not editable text. It
is not considered feasible to enter the text manually for publishing
as a book or as a CD-ROM.
2. Software- how does one create software for accessing articles in a
CD-ROM? The articles must be accessible by keyword, date, author
name, topic etc. Will the software reside on the CD-ROM itself? Is
there a package that enables development of such a software?
Sorry that I can't help much with your questions. But did you read
the front page article in this weeks Wall Street Journal on text
books on CD-ROM? It may give you some clues as to what others are
doing.
Leave a message to Rich Bowers (sysop) 71333,1114. Also if you need
general information on CD-ROM technology download the files CDFAQ.TXT
and CDROMF.ZIP
Sanjay:
Here are a few quick opinions:
– 1. How does one publish a book on CD-ROM? Each page is an image, and not
editable text. It is not considered feasible to enter the text manually for
publishing as a book or as a CD-ROM.
This is certainly do-able, but one must ask why? Scanning page images
onto a disc is (with some exceptions) the least efficient use of the
technology. You can publish fewer pages this way, and the effort to
assign keywords and other attributes introduces production time and
inaccuracy potential that could easily justify re-keying the whole
thing to add functionality and value. This may not be a practical
product for your company.
2. Software- how does one create software for accessing articles in a
CD-ROM? The articles must be accessible by keyword, date, author
name, topic etc. Will the software reside on the CD-ROM itself? Is
there a package that enables development of such a software?
Yes there are several, used for those cases where an image of the page
is essential (such as legal documents with notes, drawings
signatures, etc). Some of them can be found in SFTWR.TXT in Lib #8.
You and your publisher may want to re-think your definition of a publication in
order to take maximum advantage of this medium and technology.
Hope this helps – Rich Bowers
Although everyone else mentions re-keying (that may even be available
from the authors themselves, since they may have created their papers
with wordprocessing systems) OCR may also be a possibility
(especially since you have already gone half way with your scanning).
And another option is to offer page images AND ascii text — with the
former for nice output and the latter for full-text and indexed
searching? Your books are not so large that storage will be a
problem, but neither will the indexing really with 20 papers or
whatever it is. A further obvious opportunity will be to collocate
several of your old/new books as a collection on disc. Don't take any
of this to heart — I'm not a REAL CD-ROM developer or consultant,
this is just from what I have read in books! The CD-ROM medium
appears to have possibilities for you, however, the big question is
whether your clients will be eceptive to this format. Supplying a
print AND CD-ROM at the same time, however, may be perfectly
economical for you and may condition your clients to the format
before a complete change or definitely alternate formats?
Sanjay,
I would agree with Rich Bowers that for CD-ROM publishing, you really want to
re-key the articles (and perhaps incorporate their figures as embedded
graphics). This is not a tremendously difficult task, and there are vendors
who hang out on this forum that offer these sorts of services.
The main advantage of course is that you can store more information. With
graphics, you are going to run into lots of trouble not only with storage
capacity but possibly also with differing graphics formats.
With text, your users can easily search the text of all articles for keywords
or phrases that actually appear in the articles. You can at best simulate that
in the graphical format.
Assuming you go this way, there's lots of different choices for publishing your
text. Many of the tools require an up-front fee plus royalties; but some (like
Microsoft Viewer) are inexpensive off-the-shelf products with no royalty. In
the case of Viewer you may end up doing some supporting programming, but the
end result can be pretty good — take a look at the Microsoft Encarta
encyclopedia, just released recently. It even supports keyword categories like
you need. Of course it's purely a Windows product, and you haven't said what
platforms you need to publish for.
As far as the software residing on the CD-ROM itself: you almost always ship
the software to access the data on the same CD-ROM. Your "install" program
might, however, copy various things, including the access software, to the
user's hard disk, in order to make it perform better.
— Samuel
Sanjay,
I have a few opinions on the topic you've brought up. While it is possible to
simply scan an image file onto the CD and use software such as Frame Maker or
Folio to view those images as pages, that is most likely not the best solution.
The value of the material increases when you increase the ability to search
thru the documents for specific material. I'd suggest a conversion using
either re-keying the text or OCR with checking of the text. Once done, key
words, authors, phases, topics, etc. can all be made searchable.
Our company is a CD-ROM publishing company. If you'd like to discuss this in
more detail, drop me an E-Mail message. We can help out to pretty much any
degree you'd wish. If you like, you can do the research and let us make the
conversion to text, and CD-ROM. This would allow you to concentrate on the
research and the marketing of the product.
As I said, E-Mail me if you want to discuss this further.
Jerry Warner
CD Solutions, Inc.
In answer to your first question, there may be two possible solutions.
1) The pages of the articles could be stored as images instead of text.
2) There exists software used with a scanning device to read the text as
an image and convert it to text. This way, without having to enter the
text manually, you can get the articles stored as text.
For the second question, There may already be software available that will
access the articles in the desired way. You could license it for your disc.
If not, you could hire a programmer to write the software for you.
Dave