First Real* Job!

I just accepted my first real job, to start January 4. Hooray!

I'll be working as an editor with A K Peters, a small publisher of college textbooks. They publish a lot of mathematics and physics books and are the leading publisher of computer game designing books. Don't worry: I don't have to check the math. Scholars do that. So you can all rest assured that none of your computer games will start spouting staticky Shakespeare anytime soon.

I am really excited about the job. In a numbered list, here's why:

1. It's in Natick. I get to stay in Boston!
2. It will be an editing position! What could be better?
3. I like everyone in the company. (It's quite small.) They are some of the nicest people I've met.
   
4. Because the company is small, I'll get to have a broad range of experience. When I was choosing a major a zillion years ago (that's an exact mathematical quantity) two specific things tipped the scale in my choice to go into English and editing. One was the day I spent job shadowing the editor of a radiology journal. She was working at a very small company where she got to work with manuscripts at all stages of publication. Her work sounded fantastic. And she had a very cool pantsuit. Ever since I've been hoping for a similar sort of opportunity: to lend my writing expertise to those who are experts in their subject matter, and to get to be involved in all parts of a project.

So I'm having a very merry Christmas looking forward to a working new year.

*By "real" job I mean no offense to any of my previous jobs, which have turned out to be really good experience (even if they didn't seem like it at the time) but really short term and really not a real career. Dion's, nannying, Sandia internships, research assistant, teaching assistant, data enterer, freelance editor, Friend intern, teacher. And of course all the really good experiences (too many to list) that were really valuable and that really didn't pay me so they didn't count as real careers either.

Presses Large and Small

Last week my roommate Camber (also an editor) and I walked all over Manhattan looking at publishing houses. Well, peering in the front windows really. We set out to find Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins, and along the way also saw a number of the non-trade publishers—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and half a dozen news corporations, and walked past the so-influential New York Public Library. I knew publishing was all in New York (which had the historical good fortune of a great harbor that gave quick access to book shipments from England), but I had no idea they were so close together. We gazed at the impressive book display in the lobby at Random House and for lunch chose a café with windows that looked directly onto HarperCollins.

Last week I glimpsed this most impressive collection of corporate trade publishing; yesterday I stopped in at the Harvard Book Store (no affiliation with Harvard except proximity, I’m told) to admire their brand new Paige M. Gutenborg: a print on demand machine that Jason Epstein predicts will be the future face of book publishing. This enhanced laser printer prints from electronic files (at this point mostly scanned books on GoogleBooks) and wraps them up in a quick perfectbind to create your paperback in a matter of minutes. I watched one print job go through the process and paged through some others on display. The binding is sure to fall apart as any cheap paperback will, and the print quality varied widely, depending on the quality of the electronic file, from very fuzzy to nearly indistinguishable from offset. This emerging technology is the book equivalent of an iPod: instead of choosing from among the CDs offered at your local music store or ordering one you especially like, you can choose the music you like most, even songs performed by groups who sing to such niche markets it wouldn’t be profitable to print CDs, and download it immediately. The technology is going to take some refining, but I won’t be surprised to see many more of these sorts of printers rising to supplement the large print runs of books coming out of the New York houses.