The new semester has begun!

Meh, classes started again on Monday. At 9 am with Research Methods (for our dissertations/major projects). It was very exciting to see everyone back together again though. I was ridiculously perky. It's that "first day of school" thing, I guess. I wouldn't know because this is the first time I'm experiencing this which, in my opinion, speaks volumes about how much I've been enjoying myself here.

We have 5 student from Paris X university over as ERASMUS exchanges. I started chatting with them. It feels so good to have someone to speak French to! They're quite nice too. Someone had the good idea to invite them to Jazz night yesterday, which I had completely forgot to tell them about. So we had a chat over the music. The Bullingdon (a.k.a. The Bully) has live jazz every tuesday in the backroom. The Bullingdon is right in front of Tesco on Cowley Road. It's something of a regular thing for a lot of the people on the course. It's very good. I meant to go more often but I'm a lazy bum who doesn't want to go walk down the hill to it (and then back up again).

We also had New Product Development on Monday. It's a class that brings together everything we learned last semester. It's a role-play class! We're "Buckley Publishing" and are divided into groups that are different division within the company. I'm in the Education division (meh). We each have to come up with a new product that will fit with our goals (slightly different per division according to our "profile"). It looks like it's going to be labor intensive and the groups are huge! 9 people! It was bad enough with 4-6 last semester! We're all going to end up hating each other!

We also handed in our dissertation registration forms. They're going to assign us to Research methods seminar groups that are relevant to our subjects. In the end, I've decided to go with Open Access and Free audiobooks. I wanted to work on an ecological topic but I couldn't come up with one especially interesting angle to work on (that's what happens when you have too much interest in something I guess) and I was going to touch on digital media anyway so now I'll do it the other way around. Incorporate some ecology into a digital dissertation. I'm quite excited about the subject now and looking forward to starting to work on it.

I have Digital Media class this afternoon where, get this, one of the assignments is to have a blog and update it regularly. I've got the blog part down, I'll need to work on the updating regularly thing though, heh. We'll also be graded on how we customize our blog which I don't know how to do yet but we'll be taught and on the research that goes into the posts. Yes, I can't use this blog for the class (*le sigh*) but at least I have some blogging experience and I'll be able to make this blog better too. I love it when things work out that way. We'll also be covering Photoshop and Dreamweaver, two programs I've used before and some other two things I can't remember and have never used.

Should be fun, all in all.

Dissertation or Major Project Subject

*Sigh*

The time is coming soon when I have to tell the lecturers what the subject of my dissertation or major project will be. I think I want to work on an environment and publishing subject but I need to narrow it down to something. I can't think of any one particular subject I want to concentrate on.

I'm also interested in Open access, YA, fanfiction, podcasts and blogs. If I could just find a subject that joins at least a couple of these interests, it would be great. I wish I had something I was really into then at least, no matter how bad an idea, I'd know what I want to do. There's a girl in the course who wants to do hers on Twilight, which I think is stupid (not the books, as a topic for postgrad work in publishing) but at least she knows what she wants.

I'm starting to get worried. There really isn't that much time to pick a subject for work that will take months to do and will determine whether I get my M.A. or not.

New Year! Wooot!

Happy New Year everyone!

I get ridiculously excited with the New Year. It's the only holiday I care about (after Hallowe'en). It's 2009, that's one year away from the geektacular year, 2010. I've only made one resolution for this year that I think I can stick to. That's to keep on losing weight and reach my target this year. Should be okay, it's only 30lbs to go. I've already lost around 70 so...easy...

Sorry I haven't posted more often but I'm still recovering from semester one. That was a lot of learning. I'm also stressing a bit because I need to come up with a dissertation/major project topic this month and to be honest, I have no idea what I want to work on. The dissertation/mp is the single most important bit in getting the M.A. Either you do the dissertation, a long written piece or the major project which is more hands-on (some people produce a book, some run projects bringing literature to some disadvantaged area (one girl wrote and produced a book which she went and distributed in South Africa bringing chick lit to the poor) etc.)

There are a lot of very interesting topics. I'd love to do something children's and/or environment related. I had a crazy really good idea but the more I think about it, the less I think I can do it. It's very complex. I'd also like to research this whole thing of podcasting stories and novels for free which I find very intriguing from a publishing point of view (not just as a wannabe writer).

I've been talking to one of the lecturers about the possibility of starting my own podcast within the frame of his Digital Media class. He said he'd be happy to show me how to go about it and host the podcast although it wouldn't be graded because it wouldn't be fair to the others that I get to make up my own assessments. So, there might be a Publishing U. podcast sometime in the future. I don't know exactly how to go about keeping a 'cast, Gods know it's hard enough to keep track of a blog and find something to write semi-regularly. What am I going to talk about?

Still, I've wanted a podcast for ages. It'll be a good learning experience if nothing else.

Reader response to the Green publishing post

Going through my spam infested inbox today, I came across a response to a past post about the environment and publishing. I'm reposting it here in the hopes that we can have a discussion about the topic which interests me enough that I'll be doing my dissertation/major project on it.

----

Hi Chantal,
I've just been reading your blog and tried posting a reply, but being the non-blogging luddite that I am I decided that email was easier anyway!
I was also at that seminar (I was the one asking about the impact of ink and water usage). What struck me as surprising is the seeming acceptance of inaccurate print runs. In all my experience of publishing, including a few yeas of postgrad study in Australia, I've learned that getting your print runs right first time is a crucial factor to running an economically viable publishing business. In the old days of printing from film it used to be much cheaper to do a short print run and then do a reprint when your stock ran out. Nowadays with computer-to-plate (CTP) processes it costs much more to do a reprint because the plates have to be reproduced.
What we were taught in my postgrad program is that a smart publisher gets their print runs right first time - don't print too many or too few. Pulping also costs money, and is obviously a huge waste, and I'm quite surprised to hear that it may be common practice (maybe it is here in the UK more than Australia). If publishers want to be good, they have to do their research before they sign off on their final print run. Pulling numbers out of thin air is not good business practice. Researching the market and knowing that you can sell every single copy of your print run is good business practice.
Perhaps pulping should be more expensive, or perhaps should be penalised more. Perhaps publishers/editors who end up pulping their stock because they've printed too many should be penalised by having their performance bonuses reduced.
There are many things we can do to make a difference (even if it's only a small difference; it's better than sitting back complaining and doing nothing).

Good luck with your publishing career (and studies).

Cheers

------

Now that our classwork revolves around calculating costs, I understand what you mean about the cost of plates. It is pretty high and printing more seems to be almost always more economical than printing less. I think most people would rather just overestimate the number of copies they can sell rather than run the risk of missing out on sales when booksellers run out of stock.

I like the idea of coming up with some kind of punishment for waste although I don't know how it would be enforced fairly. Everyone will be trying to assign blame somewhere else, "the publisher overestimated the number", "the bookseller didn't do their part in the marketing process" etc. I think people won't try hard enough until they care about it for their own sake/conscience. I guess I'm still very naive :)

Dirty little marks, Publishing and the Environment

Last Tursday, I attended a talk on "Greening your Publishing". The presentation was supposed to be about how you can make publishing more eco-friendly. Let's face it, it's one of the worst industries that way. I'm all for being greener even if I'm often too lazy to separate my trash. I do buy organic as much as possible and avoid wasting energy and water. It's a first step. I'll get better.

Anyway, I and most of the classmates that showed up were pretty dissapointed. The presentations didn't really propose anything new and there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the already employed audience and presenters. I understand that publishing is a business and that books are absolutely necessary or I wouldn't be studying this but trying to be eco-friendly is good. Token gestures to be politically-correct or for good PR is pointless. Basically what they were saying is "try to buy recycled paper or from legal wood farms but if it's too expensive, whatever, the buyers aren't going to care anyway".

We did learn a few interesting things though.

We had no idea just how much paper was involved in the publishing business. Obviously we knew it was a lot, duh, but what goes in books is only part of it. Aside from the obvious waste of paper in offices (unnecessary photocopies, printing etc), the practice is to print about twice as long a run as is likely to sell which means that half of the books printed end up being pulped. The problem is, once pulped, that paper can't be recycled into book grade paper again.

What do they do with those books? Sell them for cheap to tissue/toilet paper companies. In the words of one of our presenters, "I happen to know for a fact that we are XXXX loo paper." So now you know, you're wiping your bottom with someone's deathless prose.

There are some publishers making more of an effort than others, Earthscan is the leading publisher on all things environmental and apparently they're doing their best to be carbon neutral, whatever that really means for the environment.

POD might help though. There really is no need for gigantic print runs when you can do several small runs fast and affordably. We touched a little on ink but not much. One of the things they didn't discuss until someone asked was about water. Lots of talk of paper but no water. This brought out the fact that the paper industry is TERRIBLE for water. They are finding ways now to use the toxic remains of making paper but from what was not said, I assume it's not going great. Plus, there's the social aspect. A lot of paper is bought from poor Asian countries where people are displaced so they can grow more trees, everywhere ancient forests are cut down, companies illegally cut down trees they are not supposed to touch etc.

There are organisations that research companies and vouch for their practices but the problem is that the paper is expensive. Also, the term "recycled" paper is used for virgin paper that's gone through the process again and some companies "recycle" their own paper just to put the label on it and get an automatic pass.

We also learned that the price of paper is going up all the time. The world basically runs on it, think about it. Paper is everywhere and in everything. It takes a long time for a tree to grow and there are almost not enough of them to keep up. Publishing relies on paper so the more expensive it becomes, the less careful we're going to be about where we're getting it. Depressing.

Books are a necessity but so is nature. I promise I'll be as eco-conscious a publisher as I can. Publishing isn't the whole guilty party though, paper is much more important to us than to many other industries. If they would please lower their consumption of it, maybe there'll be more of it (and the good kind) for the rest of us?