Specialized Book Production Workflow for Columbia University Press

Background

Columbia University Press (CUP) advances knowledge about our world through essential writing and research focusing on the global, the urban, and the contemporary. For more than 125 years, the Press’s widely reviewed and award-winning books have brought new ideas and foundational understanding to students, academics across different disciplines, policymakers, and general readers around the world. Through its publishing program, the Press embodies its parent institution’s educational and research mission as well as its international reputation.

Challenge

CUP needed a vendor capable of handling a very broad spectrum of both mainstream and highly specialized titles with complicated illustrations, multiple languages, mathematics notation, and other advanced services, along with a way to track the production of the entire program.

Solution

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) has been working with CUP for more than a decade, and the team has put its expertise to work in all facets of book production. With project management and editorial services in the US and production and typesetting offshore, KGL has packaged 80-100 titles per year across a broad range of disciplines for CUP. Because CUP publishes both mainstream titles and areas not always covered thoroughly by other university presses or by trade publishers, KGL has been challenged to provide specialized services to work in support of the publisher’s editorial vision: to publish “a universe of knowledge for readers worldwide.”

Titles worked on have ranged from archeology (from ancient China to New York City), botany (including a 600+ volume on botanical plants of interest to beer brewers), business, and critical theory to paleontology, politics, and zoology. Because its publishing spectrum is so broad, CUP needed a way to track all of its titles in one place, so KGL adapted its Smart Track® management and reporting system for CUP, where the production staff can access summary dashboards, individual projects, and detailed schedule information. KGL’s project management team consists of specialized project managers who draw on hundreds of skilled North American copyeditors, proofreaders, and indexers. The production team handles composition in InDesign and, for specialized mathematics and economics titles, LaTeX. The KGL team also handles the majority of the art programs for the CUP workflow, from simple relabels and conversion projects to complex illustrations.

How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese

CUP partnered with KGL to produce a 10-volume series with text in Chinese and English, extensive scholarly commentary and annotations. How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese presents more than forty prose works, either excerpts or in full, from antiquity through the Qing dynasty. While teaching readers how to appreciate the rich tradition of Chinese prose in its original form, the book uses these texts to introduce classical Chinese to advanced learners, helping them develop reading comprehension and vocabulary.The first three titles are already in print; the remaining seven have been or will be managed by KGL.

Travels with Trilobites

In Travels with Trilobites, Andy Secher invites readers to come along in search of the fossilized remains of these ancient arthropods. He explores breathtaking paleontological hot spots around the world—including Alnif, Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara Desert; the Sakha Republic, deep in the Siberian wilderness; and Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia and offers a behind-the-scenes look at museums, fossil shows, and life on the collectors’ circuit. The book features hundreds of photographs of unique specimens drawn from Secher’s private collection, showcasing stunning fossil finds that highlight the diversity, complexity, and beauty of trilobites. Entertaining and informative, Travels with Trilobites combines key scientific information about these captivating creatures with wry, colorful observations and inside stories from one of the world’s most prolific collectors.