It's 'Primis Time Live' for McGraw-Hill - book-publishing software Primis made user-friendly - Update

Book publishing beginning to look more like magazine publishing every day. After only two years in the marketplace, McGraw-Hill's custom-publishing effort, Primis, is being redesigned to make it more "comfortable and user-friendly," according to Robert Lynch, vice president and director of Primis. The corporate design firm of Carbone Smolan Associates in New York was used to modify the software, giving the customized books a more elegant and consistent look, and making them easier to read, as well.

The system, a sophisticated proprietary software program jointly developed by McGraw-Hill and Eastman Kodak, allows college professors to specify the contents of textbooks from a database created from McGraw-Hill-owned editorial. The first book can be created in a day and, once it has been signed off, thousands can be manufactured and delivered in less than a week.

The system has been closely watched by the magazine industry because of the implications for periodical publishing and as an alternative or supplement to selective binding technology. Lynch insists that while McGraw-Hill's magazine side is kept abreast of developments at Primis, there are no plans to extend the technology to the company's magazines.

Currently, Primis has more than 200 accounts with universities where professors select the make-up of McGraw-Hill texts in accounting, mathematics, chemistry, marketing and political science. The custom books are printed by R.R. Donnelley at its Harrisonburg, Virginia, facility and shipped direct to the college bookstores.

Primis has just licensed its first off-site printing facility at the University of California at San Diego bookstore and plans to add another at USC.

Using Primis software, the university's graphics department downloads the requested chapters and other supplemental texts from McGraw-Hill's remote database. The material is output on a printer that churns out 30 copies of a 200-page book an hour--all with course title and professor's name on the cover.

Lynch thinks that magazines have limited opportunities in custom publishing. "It will be used for scholarly and technical publishing," he says. "A big part of magazines is their serendipity. It would be too difficult to program a database to respond to that kind of information need."

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