Professional services in publishing educational literature: on new activities of editing and publishing departments

The message of the article is in the systematic approach to the description of the publishing house activity, when it is important to determine whether the organization's operations focus on the "input" or on the "output". The input refers to events, causal relationships, requirements - all that precedes the preproduction of the edition. The output is the target as an image of the result which the editing and publishing department (EPD) wants to achieve. The focus on inputs leads to an increase in the number of external requirements for the authors: those requirements hinder changes in the activity of EPD. Due to the focus on the input requirements EPD activities are typologically close to the manufacturing process. Production efficiency is determined by the number of unit costs: the lower the cost, the higher the efficiency. Hence, the goal is to reduce all costs except those that can not be avoided. As part of the customer-oriented service the publishing house focuses attention on the output, and above all - on the change of the level of their competence, as only due to these changes the quality of services improves. Trends in the development of modern education allow to reasonably believe that the transition to the customer-oriented service is the future of the university EPD. Professional services are congenial to the trend of development of teaching materials. The essence of the trend is that teaching materials are most closely related to the individualization of educational programs, and, accordingly, will be offered in the complex of educational services. Economically, the cost of textbooks in this case is not only and not so much a part of the costs, as the factor of reallocation of resources for teaching materials help to free the teacher's time, and good educational publications save time of students. From the point of view of traditional notions textbooks will become the second largest capital of the organization after the human capital. If EPD really plans to grant professional services, the main challenge will be to reduce the strain placed on the author. This can only be done if the textbook will be divided not compositionally or logically, but technologically. The key task of providing high-quality service is the division of publications into technologically independent parts that can be handled separately from each other, and then providing automated assembly and transformation of the original model of the textbook. Therefore, professional services of EPD should include the creation of databases (textbook fragments bases) and the technology of fast output of different versions of publications on request. Thus, if the activities of traditional EPD aim to "build" the publication, the work of the editing and publishing department, provider of professional services, is focused on the decomposition of the publication and on the development of technologies that provide the most rapid and low-cost reprint of textbooks.

Keywords

Authors

References