“Our job was to make the little boxes on the side of the page with the blue tinting, or lay out a pile of equations in Precalculus for Beginners,” David Silverman writes of his job typesetting books for educational publishers, in an article for Salon (adapted from his new book, Typo) that charts his company’s brutally quick downfall, which forces him to transform “from benevolent capitalist to chain-saw management in less than a year and a half.” Cheap overseas competition certainly didn’t help him any, but Silverman says that wasn’t really the problem: “We offered to charge [publishers] as little as the Indian firms did, but most of them wouldn’t even let us bid, preferring to squeeze as much profit as possible out of typesetting.”
Things we learn: Being told the day you come out of rehab that your $3 million client is dropping you as a vendor? Doesn’t really help your recovery so much.