Rowland Lorimer Rowland Lorimer ........................................................................................................................ 1 Central Canada publishing and West Coast publishing ...................................................... 1 The Simon Fraser University Publishing Programme ........................................................ 2 ONIX and PEXOD .............................................................................................................. 3 The Literary Press Group qq ............................................................................................... 4 Automating the Creation of Catalogue Content .................................................................. 5 Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research. According to the SFU website, the OJS Features are the following : ............................................................................................................................... 6 Developing Software for the Small Sector ......................................................................... 6 Providing the Next Generation of Publishers to Canada .................................................... 7 Trafford Publishing ............................................................................................................. 8 “What I see our role to be is to help the industry transform” ............................................. 9 The Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing (CCPS) ..................................................... 9 Central Canada publishing and West Coast publishing C.E.: Is there a major difference between central Canada publishing and West Coast publishing? R.L.: In philosophy, I would say that there was, although West Coast publishers probably don’t see themselves as philosophically any different from Ontario publishers. Having said that, I think they are much more grounded in West Coast reality. It is a really a distinct area of the country. Previous to the 1970s, there was virtually nobody writing and publishing very much on the West Coast, except anthropological studies. There were a couple of people. Gray Campbell published local history. In fact, there is material on that – there is a journalist named Alan Twigg who wrote about the early publishing that went on in British Columbia. It was mostly describing the geography and the native people – the regular type of settlement society authoring, you know stories from around the place and so on, so there was a little bit of that. But only here and there as opposed to everywhere. There’s a website called abcbookworld1, where you will find author biography – as many as Alan Twigg was able to collect. Certainly his company was based in the region but they are trying to be national. Douglas and McIntyre is arguably the biggest Canadian publisher now, M&S being on the wane. You know, M&S has been partly taken over by Random House. It’s hard to know whether they will survive well or whether they will just gradually get integrated into Random House. C.E.: Is there the same sort of fighting spirit against American domination on the West Coast? R.L.: Yes, I think it’s the same – although maybe it’s a little different. The publishers out here are certainly part of that fight against American domination – they’ve played their part in all 1 The site is a subsidiary of B.C. BookWorld, the quarterly newspaper about books and authors of British Columbia, established in 1987 (distribution to 700 outlets, see www.bcbookworld.com). We don't publish on the internet. www.abcbookworld.com is a public service project to help spread awareness of the literary activity in BC. The site gives authors the opportunity to submit information. 1 the government policy developments and played their part as the president of the ACP etc. Karl Seigler, who is based here in Powell River, is a drama and literary publisher and he played a big part in the evolution of publishing policy. His publishing house is called Talon Books – he published Michel Tremblay and so on… Actually, if you look at his list you could say: this publisher could be anywhere in Canada. Because he’s published a lot of plays wherever they are and literary books all over Canada. C.E.: And not much BC-based material? R.L.: Well, there are a fair number of books that he’s done that are BC-based. But the other element is that publishers outside of Ontario have 3% of the Ontario market. 97% of the Ontario market is served by Ontario publishers – foreign and domestically-owned. So there is that reality everyone knows about. And so there is a different kind of attitude in BC – much more collaborative. If you ask anybody in Canada, there is much more collaboration amongst BC publishers. They are all at the edge of the frontier trying to make it in the market. So it’s a different aspect although equally Canadian and nationalistic. The Simon Fraser University Publishing Programme C.E.: Now tell me about the Simon Fraser University (SFU) publishing programme that you have here in Vancouver. It’s a rather unique programme in Canada, isn’t it? R.L.: We’re the only people doing actual research. There are a couple of colleges in Toronto – Ryerson, Humber, and Centennial. They are staffed by members of the profession teaching how to be publishers – they’re not doing research. But they are professionals teaching young people how to enter the industry. C.E.: The SFU programme does both: research on the industry and teach young students how to enter the industry? R.L.: That’s right. And our programme is the only full graduate programme. The other programmes are diploma programme either before or after a BA. C.E.: What sort of job opportunities do your graduate students go to after having finished your graduate programme? R.L.: They go into book publishing, magazine publishing and web publishing: somewhat less than two thirds in the book publishing, somewhat less than one third in the magazine publishing and a few in web publishing etc. When we started out we had immediate employment for everybody. I’d say that, now, about 80% of the students within the first year of graduation are into one of these areas. We’ve had people also who’ve gone into policy. We have one person now in the government at Ottawa, in the book publishing development programme, one person in the Canada Council, at least one person in the Ontario government and in national libraries – so allied institutions to the industry. C.E.: You mentioned web publishing. Does that include print on demand? R.L.: No. Mainly website developments. For a while we had someone setting up a bibliographic data system… Do you know ONIX? 2 ONIX and PEXOD C.E.: Yes, I’ve read about it. R.L.: Well, we developed some software called PEXOD (Publishers’ Extensible Online Database) that is based on ONIX (Online Information Exchange) to allow small publishers to communicate with Chapters-Indigo, Ingram etc. Originally we started out developing it as a database for a dynamic website so that publishers could put all their title information. Let’s say they wanted to change the price of a book. They would change it in the database and then all the other instances of the price on the website are changed as opposed to changing this information over and over again. That’s what we started with. But before we finished, people had become less admiring of websites – it’s growing again but it’s in a downturn. That said, what we knew when we started was that if publishers entered data into a database, then they could do all manner of things: communicate with purchasers, run a website, be a central authoritative source for everybody in the firm. We have a programmer who’s setting that up in firms around the country and we’re quite strong on technology. We’re also in the process of developing another software package for a cultural magazine publisher that is going to make their life a lot easier. C.E.: Do you have any training in computer science in order to deal with PEXOD or did you hire somebody to deal with the technical aspects? R.L.: We hired somebody. When I was editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication we took the journal online. I had a colleague, Richard Smith, who was very keen to undertake the online management. I don’t know about the ins and outs of technology I learned what you can and can’t do. As a result of working on the online journal and after we hired John Maxwell, we started on the ONIX project. It was John Maxwell who was the technological brain for PEXOD and I’m the one who brings in partners. My job was to persuade the publishers and government that our project was worthwhile. C.E.: And how do you promote PEXOD? R.L.: PEXOD is now in a sort of sunset mode. We don’t go out and market it because we don’t see ourselves as marketers or vendors of software packages. What happened actually was that after we developed the software a certain number of commercial software developers saw the opportunity, and we could have fought for market share but instead we thought: Well we’ve done the research, we’ve shown everybody that this is important, we’ve done a lot of going-out-and-talking about it to groups. And the publishers that wanted our software came knocking and now about twelve publishers across the country are using it. But there are no industry standards for this type of software. Everybody went off in their own direction. That’s the case with every piece of software. So it’s a bit tricky. Anyway, we didn’t go out and market our product. We didn’t hire a sales force. We just did a lot of talking about it. C.E.: So now private businesses are getting involved and your experience has led the way for them to take over and help publishers get their act together in terms of database? R.L.: Yes. It led to a raise of awareness on the part of publishers that they could be using databases.