With just a few weeks remaining in the year, volunteers are nearing their goal, set in July, of completely converting another 30 Pathfinder books to a print-ready electronic format.

That's an average of six books per month over that period--a substantial increase from the pace of the previous year and a half.

"It will be a push," said Tom Tomasko, a member of the steering committee for the Pathfinder Reprint Project, "but with only eight more titles to go, I'm confident we are going to make it."

Building on their successes, the volunteers have also begun taking on additional aspects of the production of Pathfinder books: the formatting and proofreading of new books as well as reprints; more of the quality checks to make sure files are ready for the presses; and preparation of newly digitized reprints going back to press for a second or third time.

This effort by the Pathfinder Reprint Project will converge with an 11-day volunteer project being organized in New York City to transfer all of the inventory and financial records for Pathfinder, the publisher's printshop, and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial to an easy-to-use Internet-based accounting program. The move will streamline business operations and register another advance for the publishing efforts of the communist movement.

This important project will be carried out by teams of up to 20 volunteers, with special mobilizations over the December 16-17 and December 23-24 weekends and ongoing efforts during the intervening five days. Volunteers are coming from cities across North America especially--and many more are needed. Some are laid-off or are taking time off from work or school. Volunteers from New York and New Jersey will shoulder the biggest load, with many joining in teams before or after work.

On the two weekends, the New York and New Jersey units of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists--which will host the volunteers from other areas--are organizing classes on Marxism, evening public forums, and social events.  
 
National Committee meeting
These efforts will coincide with the December 16-18 meeting of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee in New York. The meeting will address the political need for a round of regional public conferences at the opening of next year to discuss several strategic and theoretical questions of importance to the communist movement and other vanguard workers and farmers.

The SWP leadership will assess the deeper social and political roots of the seemingly accidental events surrounding the extraordinarily close 2000 U.S. presidential election. Party leaders will propose that each of the regional conferences feature a talk on "Factionalism and Polarization in U.S. Politics: The Changing Struggle for a Proletarian Party."

Two other questions posed by the deepening polarization throughout the capitalist world will be discussed as central presentations at the proposed conferences.

One is the Jewish question--the structure and character of an oppressed people on a world scale, and the concrete nature of the state of Israel as an oppressor nation. These talks would address the assimilationist illusions that arise among broad layers of the Jewish population during periods of extended imperialist economic expansion and working-class retreat, as well as the weight and place of combating Jew-hatred in the proletarian struggle for a socialist revolution in the United States and elsewhere.

The other presentation would focus on the historic change in the family structure--the sharp rise in households headed by "single women"--in the imperialist world (outside Japan) and the implications of this process for the character of coming political and social conflicts. These effects are registered in the sharpening battle over the social wage ("welfare," Social Security, etc.), the fight for women's liberation, and on many fronts of the so-called cultural war.

The SWP National Committee will settle the dates and locations of the conferences. Gatherings in four regions--the South, Northeast, Midwest, and Western United States--are currently under discussion, over the New Year's and Martin Luther King extended weekends, or perhaps others in January. Speakers will include SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters, Norton Sandler, Dave Prince, Jack Willey, James Harris, and other central party leaders.  
 
Campaign by reprint project volunteers
Inspired by the growing opportunities for the communist movement to get revolutionary books into the hands of workers and youth involved in struggles, more than 200 volunteers have been busy scanning, proofreading, formatting, and recreating graphics for 350 Pathfinder titles since the early part of 1998. About 140 volunteers were active in the project during November.

As a result of this work over the past two years, 111 books from the communist political arsenal have been reproduced in more attractive and readable format, with less time and labor needed to turn them around in Pathfinder's printshop.

At the Active Workers Conference held in Oberlin, Ohio, in July, steering committee member Ruth Cheney announced to the 450 people in attendance that the volunteers had set themselves some ambitious goals--30 more books by the end of the year, and 50 percent of Pathfinder's titles fully digitized by May 1, 2001. The volunteers' production web site, where the workflow is organized, has been counting off every book as it is produced.

Since July an impressive collection of reprinted titles, which offer workers and farmers the lessons of the class struggle and a Marxist explanation of today's world, has been completed. These include: Labor's Giant Step, by Art Preis; Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, by Leon Trotsky; Lenin's Final Fight; Nelson Mandela Speaks; Palestine and the Arabs' Fight for Liberation; issue no. 2 of Nueva Internacional; Fidel Castro's Political Strategy; the Spanish-language edition of The Second Declaration of Havana, and many others. Books that are in the home stretch of preparation include Out Now! by Fred Halstead, Maurice Bishop Speaks; The Jewish Question by Abram Leon; and Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara.

The volunteers are registering advances in their work as they drive to meet their goals. By last New Year's, every Pathfinder book had been scanned. A year later, only 25 titles out of the 350 remain on the list to go through a first proofread. Ruth Cheney reports that only 70 books still need to be proofread a second time.

"We really have to report the progress on indexing," Cheney said. "That used to be a bottleneck, but now the indexers are really up there producing five books a month." Almost 40 volunteers are now working to bring the books' existing indexes into line with their new pagination. The formatting of books is also getting a boost from new volunteers. Jerry Gardner, another steering committee member, reports that at least eight new people have joined the formatting team in the past month or so.

With the redeployment of forces--many proofreaders have moved to other areas of the project--and several new volunteers joining the effort every month, they plan to maintain their average of six titles a month and gradually raise it. According to Tomasko, the volunteers are ahead of schedule to have 50 percent of all Pathfinder titles in digital format by May Day.

Bobbi Sack, who organizes the graphics volunteers, reports that 11 new volunteers are working on this aspect of production as of December. "It's a big challenge to train so many people," she said, "but those of us who learned how to do it ourselves just a couple of months ago are busy passing along our skills."  
 
First new title
With the volunteers now taking on responsibility for formatting and proofreading new books, the first new title produced as a result of this labor has just come off the presses: Pathfinder was Born with the October Revolution in Spanish, with the English-language edition due by December 16. The printing of the Spanish-language edition was expeditiously prepared so volunteers staffing the Pathfinder booth at the recent Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico would have it on hand.

Quality checking is another stage of the production process now being taken on by the volunteers. Using diagnostic tools, they are checking every computer file in the print-ready Portable Document Format (PDF) to make sure all of the fonts are em bedded in the file, graphics have the right color combinations, and other elements of the book are correct, before sending the files to the printshop.

This work, previously done by the Pathfinder staff and the printshop itself, is a crucial part of the production pipeline. It ensures files can be loaded into the computer-to-plate machinery with no extra work.

Bobbi Sack noted that doing the quality checks is helping the volunteers learn how to do their jobs better. Catching some of their own errors in creating PDF files reduces the chance these same problems will recur.

In addition, supporters of the communist movement are also launching an organized effort to become volunteer sales representatives for Pathfinder, working to get its titles into bookstores, other retail outlets, and libraries. Their efforts will set the pace for expanded sales work by SWP and YS members and other workers and young people.

All of the work of the volunteers is self-financed. Nearly 100 members of the project give a monthly contribution to help defray costs for the maintenance of their web site, graphics material, shipping and phone expenses, and any special software needed for production. In all, nearly $30,000 has been contributed by the volunteers themselves to the project.  
 
December 14-24 volunteer effort
While the volunteers are heading toward their goals for the end of the year, and beyond, volunteers in the printshop that produce Pathfinder books and in Pathfinder's business and editorial offices are also organizing to complete a major project.

As of Jan. 1, 2001, all of the inventory records and accounting books for the publishing house, printshop, and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial will be transferred to an easy-to-use Internet-based accounting program. This change is directly tied to the efforts of members and supporters of the communist movement to expand the distribution of revolutionary books and pamphlets worldwide.

Among the central jobs of the volunteers during the 11-day effort, for example, will be entering necessary information on each of the 700 paperback and hard-cover titles either published or distributed by Pathfinder, so orders can be filled in an accurate and timely way.

Volunteers will also enter information about some 700 retail bookstores, wholesalers, and libraries that are the most regular Pathfinder customers in recent years--a list the publishing house and its supporters are working hard to expand.

The move will allow those responsible for keeping the books to work--through a simple web browser--on different aspects of the bookkeeping, and immediately take advantage of upgrades in bookkeeping software as it is delivered from the Internet, rather than with software installed on numerous individual computers.

Five stand-alone computers--not part of the network system--used solely to run an accounting program will be eliminated as a result of the switchover.

The simplification of accounting software and record keeping through the use of an Internet program follows a number of steps taken in recent months to streamline the production process for Pathfinder books and other work going through the printshop. Beginning in October, a number of decisions were made to eliminate work that was draining resources and making it increasingly difficult to maintain the production apparatus for Pathfinder books. As of mid-October the printshop now only accepts print-ready PDF files, so that its modern computer-to-plate machinery can be used efficiently.

The switch to print-ready-only files has reduced dramatically what has to be done to get a job into production. It has made it possible to eliminate numerous computers whose main function was to run complicated graphics applications needed to fix up files. Six computers were eliminated right after the decision to accept only print-ready PDF files for shop work.

In addition to the other five machines that will be eliminated by bringing on-line the Internet accounting package, another two computers that run proprietary software for subscription fulfillment and two machines used primarily for scanning will be eliminated by January 1.

These steps will further reduce costs by simplifying the computer network that serves as a production tool for the printshop, Pathfinder, and the Militant.

Except for the computers that directly run the computer-to-plate machinery, only two stand-alone computers will remain--to handle graphics work, and the scanning of high-resolution images. All the rest of the computers are network machines drawing their applications, files, printing, and Internet services from a few central servers.

Substantial cost savings in administration and maintenance--the biggest expense of computers by far--are possible through this setup. All upgrades of software are done only once for all machines on the network, and most problems are solved on one server machine rather than on dozens of individual workstations.

The move to Internet accounting is being organized between December 14 and December 24. Large teams of volunteers for data entry work are needed for the December 16-17 weekend and the December 23-24 weekend. A smaller crew of 8 to 10 volunteers is needed for the weekdays of December 18-22.

Local branches of the SWP together with the Young Socialists will host a big Christmas-eve dinner to celebrate the completion of the project and plans to expand the circulation of revolutionary literature in the New Year.

If you are interested in joining the effort, please contact organizers at one of the phone numbers listed in the ad on the front page.
 
 
Related articles:
'Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution' will be available in English
Pathfinder titles draw interest of thousands at Mexico book fair  
 
 
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