BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
"By June 28 we will deliver to Pathfinder Sexism and Science in digital form," said Ruth Cheney in a June 18 telephone interview from her home in Oakland, California.

Cheney heads a steering committee of four supporters of the communist movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. The committee organizes volunteers from around the world to put into electronic format the entire back list of some 350 titles that Pathfinder Press publishes or is responsible for keeping in print and distributing.

On June 13 the first joint product of volunteers and Pathfinder's print shop came into fruition. The Revolution Betrayed by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky was delivered for sale that day. The body of the book was digitized by volunteers. The electronic files of the book were then used to produce printing plates through state-of-the-art computer- to-plate technology that the publisher's print shop will soon acquire. The internal design of the book was redone in the process of converting the text into electronic files. As a result, the new reprint of this title (the eleventh printing of the fifth edition) has larger and more readable type. All previous printings had maintained the original typography from the first edition in 1937, which was set by hot-lead type.

The six-color cover of this title was put into electronic format through "copydot scanning." Shop workers organized the digitizing of the cover using a company that does this kind of high quality scanning in New York - a process that in the future can be organized by volunteers as well.

The use of computer-to-plate technology will enable Pathfinder to keep its entire arsenal in print with a smaller and less complex print shop and at a lower cost for small runs. This is needed to meet the growing interest in revolutionary literature among working people who are increasingly standing up to the demands for sacrifice by the employers.

Militant business manager Maurice Williams reports that bundle orders for the socialist newsweekly are 16 percent higher on average than a year ago. In a June 12 note to the Militant, typical of many recent reports, Jane Harris, a member of the United Transportation Union in Newark who works at New Jersey Transit, said she sold 16 copies of the paper the previous week to fellow workers there. "The night the issue featuring the Philadelphia SEPTA strike came out, a team of socialists who have been selling regularly about one paper per week to workers outside my work site sold four copies. During the week I sold 16."

In Los Angeles, socialist workers have been selling the Militant and Pathfinder books regularly outside the Longshore pay office on Fridays, reported Craig Honts, another rail worker there. "On May 29, two teams sold 52 Militants, 3 Militant subscriptions, and $135 worth of Pathfinder titles. These sales teams have been selling 40 to 70 copies of the paper each time we've been down there since the events began unfolding with the Maritime Union of Australia," whose members recently pushed back an attack on their union.

About 100 volunteers are part of the international project to digitize Pathfinder books. They are organized into three departments, according to skill and regardless of where they live around the world - scanning, proofreading, and formatting.

"Twenty-nine volunteers are now qualified to scan books and turn them into digital files," said Cheney, "up from 15 a month ago." After the digitized manuscripts are stripped of most errors by "massaging," they are sent back to the organizing center in the Bay Area, which assigns them to proofreaders. More than 50 volunteers are doing the first read of the books and the initial correction of errors. Only a handful, though, are qualified to do the second and final proofreading. "That's still the biggest challenge and bottleneck we face in getting a production line going," Cheney said.

Progress has been registered in training volunteers to format the digital files of books, the final stage in preparing electronic page layouts that can be used directly to produce printing plates. "We now have six formatters, compared to two a month ago."

The steering committee insists on taking time to find and train those who can maintain the high standards for accuracy and quality that Pathfinder is known for, Cheney said. At the same time, rapidly training more volunteers in each skill, especially quality proofreading, is essential to pick up the pace of digitizing books, which is needed to meet the demand for these titles. Days after completing Sexism and Science by Evelyn Reed, the Bay Area volunteer organizers are planning to finish putting Rosa Luxemburg Speaks into electronic format. Another four titles are scheduled to be completed in July.

Those who would like to join any aspect of the project can contact Cheney at rcheney3@compuserve.com

To facilitate communication, the Bay Area steering committee has set up a web site, where proofreading and scanning instructions are posted, as well as articles on the project. These include the talk by Mary-Alice Waters "Transforming Pathfinder book production as we respond to workers resistance" from the June 1 Militant. The site can be accessed at www.pfvolcenter.com  
 
 
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