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If you walked into a production lab of just about any small- to medium-sized publisher, you'd find pretty much the same tools: Photoshop for raster graphics; Illustrator, Freehand, and Corel Draw for vector graphics; InDesign and Xpress for page layout; and Acrobat for creating camera-ready output. Together these programs cost well over a thousand dollars, and any publisher who wants to play has to pony up. The book buyer pays at the point of sale.

What makes book production expensive isn't just the cost of software. Proprietary publishing tools run on proprietary operating systems -- Mac OS and Windows. They require high-powered hardware. They might even have intrusive product activation "features" or draconian licensing restrictions. In short, publishing is like most other markets -- it's very close to a D-Day invasion by open source forces.

Linux lubbers

John Bartlett owns and operates Bartlett Publishing, which puts out approximately four titles per year in programming, business, and ... religion. Huh? Those don't go together, do they? This is the strength of small publishing, to bring together the disparate genres that make up a particular publisher's passion.

Bartlett is a true believer, in God and Linux. He chose open source tools because he "believes in free information." He uses the DocBook DTD, running the manuscript through OpenJade with a heavily customized version of Norman Walsh's stylesheets. "Using OpenJade and Norman Walsh's stylesheets to typeset gives me a huge advantage in both costs to produce a book and time to market. In particular, with DocBook, an index is amazingly easy to produce," says Bartlett. Post-processing of the PDF is done with Perl's Text::PDF module and Adobe Acrobat for complex work. A professional graphic artist produces the cover and Bartlett does post-processing with the GIMP. Finally he uploads the finished materials to CafePress or LightningSource.

Bartlett's recommendation of the open source tools he uses is unequivocating. "DocBook makes your book look professional with very little effort. The combination of DocBook and a good cover artist gives you very professional results with a minimum of time and money."

John Culleton of Able Typesetters and Indexers provides services for small- and self-publishers with a completely Linux-based workflow using variants of TeX. First, he keys in and corrects the source text in Gvim. Culleton compiles the text to PDF with ConTeXt or pdfTeX and views the output in Xpdf. He also uses various other bits and pieces: grep; the Ghostscript ps2ascii translator; pfaedit (FontForge); PSUtils for brochures, makeindex for indices, and some custom macros and scripts. He does image processing in the GIMP and has recently begun using Scribus for book covers because it can handle ICC profiles and produce CMYK output.

Culleton makes two points about the strengths of open source software. First, "All of these tools are supported by active email lists. I don't have to call an underpaid clerk.... I get superior support from users and maintainers of the software." (Ask any XPress user about Quark's customer support. It's infamous.) Second, when Donald Knuth backed away from TeX, others picked up the torch. Development continued and TeX is still going strong. Meanwhile, in the proprietary world, PageMaker is dying a slow and painful death and is no longer the behemoth of book production; FrameMaker has been losing ground as well. Adobe now pushes InDesign. QuarkXpress went years between updates on the Mac, still the dominant desktop publishing platform. With proprietary software, Culleton says, "[You] face the potential discontinuance of the product, just like users of the once excellent WordPerfect have found their own purgatory -- the Curse of Corel."

Mac-o-philes

The work flow is a bit rougher in the Mac world. Mac-based senior editor Kevin Walzer of WordTech Communications LLC produces 50 poetry and literary criticism books each year. In the recent past, WordTech used all proprietary software for its workflow. But Microsoft Word is giving way to OpenOffice.org and LaTeX. They're replacing InDesign with Scribus, and Corel PhotoPaint with the GIMP.

Most of the open source offerings are not Aqua-based, but run under Fink. "The Fink packagers and Apple have done a brilliant job in bringing this software over to OS X," says Walzer. "But it seems to run a bit more slowly and certainly doesn't integrate as cleanly into the Aqua environment as native software.... We see a huge difference in the interface between Microsoft Word for OS X and OpenOffice.org that isn't there on Windows."

But in general, Walzer is satisfied with his open source tools. "Scribus was a bit rough when we first used it for cover layout but ... version 1.1.6 supports color mixing, better text editing," says Walzer. "Gimp has proven to be a very able tool. We're still using Word for most of our manuscript formatting. We are planning to experiment with OpenOffice.org and AbiWord (now in a native OS X-Cocoa build) and see if these are compatible or offer improvements." LaTeX is a powerful tool but has a very steep learning curve, and thus WordTech is moving slowly on that front. Vector graphics are a more of a challenge; WordTech hasn't found any of the open source vector-editing programs, such as SodiPodi, to be equivalent in power to Corel Draw. "We are still using CD for vector art development."

Windows on open source publishing

Many of the same open source tools that run on Linux have been ported to Windows. Whil Hentzen of Hentzenwerke Publishing Inc. runs a cross-platform shop. About two-thirds of his mostly freelance staff is on Windows, and the other third is on Linux. "We start in Word 97 or OpenOffice.org, whichever the author or editor is comfortable with," says Hentzen. "We have fairly unsophisticated needs -- text, figures, a few tables. The neat thing is that it's transparent. I was using Word on Windows and then OpenOffice.org on Linux. No one knew I'd changed. OpenOffice.org plays well with others."

PDFs created in OpenOffice.org go straight to Hentzenwerke's offset printer and right into their machines. Once the printer figured out exactly the right settings, it was less work than when Hentzenwerke used Adobe Acrobat and Distiller. Perhaps the best aspect? Hentzen doesn't need heavy duty hardware, "Our computers were getting creaky running the Windows stuff. They run the Linux programs just fine."

The future

It is harder than ever to "get published" by the big guys in New York. There are now only five big publishing conglomerates increasingly focused on double-digit profits in a shrinking market. Big New York Publishers (BNYPs) no longer put out books because they are good, or important, or of lasting literary value. BNYPs see, at most, 35% of the cover price of any given book and about half of that goes to printing costs. They want -- and can afford -- only blockbusters.

Anything that brings down the cost of production makes it possible for large publishers to take a few more chances on a few more books. Open source tools mean more opportunity for authors of all stripes. Open source tools lower the barriers to entry. More self-publishers and more small publishers in business -- and profitable because of lower costs -- widens the market for books of all kinds. This is an increase to freedom of expression across the board. Instead of just the same old same old King, Jordan, and Roberts, new voices get heard.

If you like to write -- or read -- that is very exciting.

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