http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/28785878

Writers, Editors, and Computer

It's easy to dream about how marvelous the future will be for publishers, writers, and editors; it's usually quite a different matter to make those dreams come true. Occasionally others will say to me, 'It must be paradise working in a research environment with in-house computer experts who can solve your problems.' Actually, I have the same difficulty the rest of you do. My frustration level may be even higher, because I am indeed surrounded by brilliant computer scientists, but solving publication production problems just isn't very high on their priority list. Along with everyone else, I'm faced with meeting daily deadlines with resources that are completely operational today; there is usually quite a gap between reality and our dreams. I've spent some time recently trying to get information on the way computers and new technologies are affecting the writing and editing processes. There are data available on newspaper reporters who use terminals instead of typewriters, and there are, of course, plenty of statistics on how computers have aided the composition process. But I couldn't find anything about the ways in which book and journal authors and editors are using computers to make their lives easier. Thus, this presentation reflects only my own experiences at The Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Some of you may be doing things in a far more sophisticated manner than we are, but for those of you who are not yet staring at screens instead of typewriters, this discussion may provide an overview of both the problems and the promise of computerized publishing. (Author).

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