How an IT publishing company discovered a book about Kafka

Recently, it has begun to seem to some that such a “conservative” source of information as a book is starting to lose ground and is no longer relevant. And in vain: despite the fact that we already live in the digital era and generally work in IT, we love and respect books. Especially those who are not just a textbook on a specific technology, but a real source of general knowledge. Especially those who will not lose relevance six months later. Especially those written in good language, correctly translated and beautifully decorated.
And you know what turned out? There are no such books.

Either - or - or. But this beautiful book, which combines everything that a thinking and practicing specialist appreciates, does not have one.
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Therefore, we decided that it should be. And not one - there should be a lot of such books. They decided - and opened their own publishing house ITSumma Press: perhaps the first publishing house in Russia created by an IT company.

A lot of effort, time and money was spent. But a day before the Uptime day 4 conference, we received a pilot print run and held the first book we published in our hands (the entire print run was presented to the conference participants in the end). Incredible feeling! You never know in advance where your craving for beauty can lead you to. The first book, for obvious reasons, was a kind of trial ball. We needed to probe the whole process of publishing, to understand what we can bring right away, and what we need to think about again. And in the end we were very pleased with the result. This is an important thing that we want to continue and develop. And in this text I just want to tell you how it all began, how we argued about the name, how we entered into an agreement with O'Reilly themselves, and neither more nor less than how many editors should be spent before giving the text to the printing house.

"Mom, I'm an editor now."

In the second half of last year, we received an unusual letter: one large publishing house offered us, as experts in our field, to write an introductory word for a book about Kubernetes, which they were going to produce. We were flattered. But having looked through the working copy of the book, which was about to be prepared for printing, we were greatly and not very pleasantly surprised. The text was in a state very far from the release version. It was translated ... as if with the help of a Google translator. Complete confusion in terminology. Inaccuracies, factual and stylistic. And, finally, just full of seams with grammar and even spelling.

To be honest, we were not very comfortable subscribing to such unprepared text. On the one hand, there was immediately a desire to offer assistance with proofreading and editing, on the other - yes, many of our employees spoke at various industry conferences more than once, but still preparing a report and editing a book is not the same thing. However ... it was interesting for us to try ourselves in a new business and we decided on this small adventure.

So we got the text and got to work. A total of 3 readings were carried out - and in each one we found something uncorrected last time. The main conclusion we made on the basis of all this is no, not the need for multiple editing, but the fact that it is impossible to know for sure how many books in Russia are published without it. The fact is that low-quality translations work exactly against the goal for which books are generally published - to gain knowledge. No one would like to buy expired yogurt, and even with the incorrectly specified composition. What, in fact, the power of the mind is different from the power of the body? And how many such books, probably, fall on the shelves of shops and then on the tables of specialists, bringing them not new knowledge, but the need in practice to check the correctness of what has been stated? Making, perhaps, in this process, mistakes that could be avoided if the book were really of high quality.

Well, as they say, if you want to do something well - do it yourself.

Where to begin?

First of all, with honesty: we are not ready to write the books ourselves so far. But they are ready to make good quality translations of interesting foreign books and publish them in Russia. We ourselves are actively interested in the development of technology (which is not surprising), we read a lot of relevant literature, quite often in the format of paper publications (and this may surprise someone). And each of us has our own set of such books, which we would very much like to share with others. Therefore, we did not experience a lack of material.
What is important: we can focus not on books of wide demand, but on highly specialized, but interesting books that “big” domestic publishers will not be interested in translating and publishing.

The first book was chosen by one of those in the west published by O'Reilly: many of you, I am sure, have already read their books, and certainly all of them at least heard. Contacting them was not the easiest thing - but not as difficult as one would expect. We went to their Russian representative and talked about their idea. To our surprise, O'Reilly agreed to cooperate almost immediately (and we were in tune with months of negotiations and a number of transatlantic flights).

“Which book do you want to translate first?” Asked the Russian representative of the publishing house. And we already had an answer: since earlier we translated a series of articles on Kafka for this blog, we are following this technology. Just as for publications about her. Not so long ago, Western O'Reilly published a book by Ben Stopford on designing event-oriented systems using Apache Kafka. Here we decided to start with it.

Translator and "interpreter"

We decided to decide everything around the New Year. And they planned to release the first book by the Uptime Day spring conference. So it was necessary to hurry with the translation, to put it mildly. And not only with him: the production of the book includes editing, the work of the proofreader and illustrator, the layout of the layout and the very printing of the circulation. And these are several teams of contractors, some of which had to be pre-loaded in IT-subjects.

Since we have experience in translation, we decided to cope on our own. Well, at least try. Fortunately, our colleagues are versatile, and one of them, the head of the systems administration department, Dmitry Chumak ( 4umak ), is a linguist and translator by his first education, and he also develops his own Computer-Assisted Translation Tolmach service in his spare time. Another colleague, PR manager Anastasia Ovsyannikova ( Inshterga ), also a professional linguist and translator, lived abroad for several years and is fluent in the language.

However, 2 chapters later, it became clear that even with the help of Tolmach, the process takes so long that either Nastya and Dima need to change positions in the staffing table for “translators”, or you need to call someone for help: to fully work in the main direction and devoting 4-5 hours a day to transfer was unreal. Therefore, we attracted the main translator from the side (Vladimir Zhdanov wtigga , hello!), Retaining the editing and, in fact, the work of releasing the book itself.

Thousands of little things and the Red Cursor

We were so inspired by the idea of ​​promoting knowledge to the masses that we forgot and were not ready for many important trifles. It seemed to us - translated, folded, printed circulation, and everything - reap laurels.

For example, everyone knows that you need to get ISBN - we also knew and did it quickly and smoothly. But what about those small numbers next to the incomprehensible abbreviations UDC and BBK, which stand in the corner of all title pages? This is not a test of your vision, as at the reception at the oculist. These numbers are damn important: they help librarians to quickly find your book even in the darkest corners of the Lenin Library.

Copies of the book chambers : we knew that the book chamber of the Russian Federation requires a copy of each published book. But they did not know that in such quantities: 16 copies! From the side it may seem: a little. Knowing how many editors' sleepless nights and tears by the coder was worth the result, our chief editor asked me to convey that she couldn’t stay within the framework of the regulatory vocabulary when she was packing an 8 kilogram package to Moscow.

The regional book fund also needs to give copies for storage and accounting.
In general, few in the regions have enough resources to publish books: mostly they print in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And so in the book chamber of the Irkutsk region we were greeted with enthusiasm. Among the collections of fairy tales by local writers and legends about Lake Baikal, our scientific and technical publication looked ... quite unexpected. They even promised to nominate our book for the regional award “Book of the Year 2019”.

Fonts . The office turned into a battlefield when it came to how headlines in our book should look like. ITSumma divided into two camps. Those who are for "serious, but with such small tails on the tips" Museo. And those who are for the "ornate, with highlights" Minion. Our lawyer, who loves everything strict and official, ran with surprised eyes and offered, “Let's do everything in Times New Roman, let's start by looking.” In the end ... we chose both.

Logo . It was an epic battle: our creative director Vasily argued with executive director Ivan about the logo of our publishing house. Ivan, an avid lover of paper books, brought to the office 50 copies of various publishing houses and clearly demonstrated the importance of the size, color and, in sum, the concept of the logo on the spine. His expert arguments were so convincing that even a lawyer believed in the importance of beauty. Now our red cursor proudly looks up into perspective, and proves that knowledge is the main vector.

In print!

Well, that's all (c) The book is translated, read, written, proISBNena and given to the printing house. The pilot print, as I already wrote, we took to Uptime Day and presented the best questions to the speakers and authors. We received the first feedback, the request “write down the order form on the site already, we want to buy” and some set of thoughts, how, in our opinion, to make a good book even better.

Firstly, the following glossary will be drawn: as I have already said, unfortunately, publishers of books on IT topics do not maintain uniformity in terminology. The same concepts are translated in different books in completely different ways. We want to work on the standardization of professional vocabulary and on the fact that for the first time reading the incomprehensible terms there was no need to run into Google, but could be clarified simply by flipping to the end of our book.
Secondly, the terms are found and those that have not yet entered into common vocabulary. We will work on their translation and adaptation into Russian language with special care: new terms should be clearly, clearly, succinctly translated into Russian, and not just tracing / literature (like "retail", "user"). And you will definitely need to provide them with a link to the original English wording - for the period until localization becomes universally recognizable.

Thirdly, 2 and 3 editing is not enough. Now the fourth iteration is underway, and the new circulation will be even more verified and correct.

What is the result?

The main conclusion: everything is possible, if you really want it. And we want to make useful professional information available.

Creating a publisher and releasing the first book in just 3 months is difficult, but realistic. Do you know what was the most difficult in the process? - Come up with a name, more precisely, choose from a variety of creative options. We chose - perhaps the least creative, but the most suitable: ITSumma Press. I will not give here a long list of options, but among them were very funny.

The next book is already in the works. In the meantime, you can briefly read about our first book and, if you are interested in it, make a pre-order on the publisher’s page . If you have in mind some special book that Russian-speaking publishers have cheated on, then write about it in the comments: perhaps we will, as a result, come together in our views and translate and release it!