BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Cuba for Beginners, the fifth book to be electronically
formatted by volunteers this year, was being prepared to go
on press in Pathfinder's print shop September 23. A week
earlier, Bobbi and Greg Sack had sent the book to Pathfinder
on CD-ROM.
The Sacks, who are supporters of the communist movement in Cincinnati, scanned and adjusted the 153 pages of cartoons at their home computer to make up this title. "The digitized pages of illustrations were error free," said Mike Baumann, a Pathfinder editor. The Sacks also assembled the electronic files of the book's cover - which was digitized by two other supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, Robbie Scherr and Sybil Perkins, in Seattle - along with the body of the book on CD, and checked the quality before sending the final product to Pathfinder.
Bobbi Sack and Mike Shur in New York organize a team of 15 volunteers who are putting into electronic format the covers and internal graphics of 350 titles in Pathfinder's arsenal. Their work is supervised by the Pathfinder Volunteer Steering Committee based in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is organizing nearly 150 supporters of the communist movement around the world digitizing Pathfinder books. Their work is making it possible for Pathfinder to keep its back list in print - books necessary in building a communist movement in the United States and internationally - with a substantially smaller print shop and at a lower cost for short runs.
Most of the volunteers organized by the Bay Area-steering committee are working on scanning, proofreading, and formatting the text of the books in final electronic page layouts. Getting the graphics team going is the latest accomplishment, and challenge, of the volunteer organizers.
"It took me and Greg nearly a month, working several hours per day, sometimes up to ten hours between the two of us, to digitize the internal illustrations of the book," said Bobbi Sack in a telephone interview from her home in Cincinnati September 23. This is the first book that each page had to be scanned as a graphic, since it consists of hand-drawn sketches by Mexican cartoonist Rius [Eduardo del Río]. "One of our major accomplishments as a result of this labor- intensive process was compiling an information sheet of procedures on how to do this work, so we can train other volunteers."
Work to digitize the cover and internal photos of the team's first project, Malcolm X on Afro-American History, was completed in about a week. The graphics for the other three titles put into electronic format by volunteers - The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky, Sexism and Science by Evelyn Reed, and Rosa Luxembourg Speaks - were digitized by workers in Pathfinder's print shop. In July, the Bay Area-steering committee decided to take on this task as well.
One of the bottlenecks in organizing this work - preparing film and other materials to be sent from the print shop to those digitizing graphics - was solved through a volunteer mobilization over a "Red Weekend" September 6-7 at the building in New York that houses Pathfinder's editorial facilities and printing factory. Over 120 members and supporters of the communist movement from a dozen U.S. cities, Canada, and New Zealand disassembled film containing graphics from flats and cleaned it, carefully packaged it, and catalogued it.
Materials needed for most of the book covers were also prepared. A smaller crew finished off this task September 13. During the Red Weekend, all film flats that contained text were discarded. (Film flats are used to burn printing plates for the presses; they had been assembled in the past in Pathfinder's print shop through manual stripping, a labor intensive and highly skilled process that is bypassed with the use of modern computer technology.) With this step, Pathfinder can only keep its back list in print using the electronic files sent by volunteers.
"One of our main challenges now is training and involving everyone in the work," Sack said. Only half of the 15 volunteers on the graphics team have assignments thus far. They are working on the illustrations of five books. "Our goal is to increase that number from seven to nine in the next two weeks and get everyone working simultaneously over the next month."
The next two titles the Bay Area-steering committee has set a deadline for delivery to Pathfinder - October 7 - are Women and the Cuban Revolution, edited by Elizabeth Stone, and the pamphlet Leon Trotsky on the Jewish Question.
Production of digitized reprints increased from one book per month during the June-August period to two in September - still far from the 10 titles per month needed to keep Pathfinder's back list in print at the current level of sales. To face the challenge and decide on the next steps in taking a qualitative leap in production, an expanded meeting of the Pathfinder digitization steering committee will take place in Detroit September 26-27.