publishing) much easier and more affordable.
On-demand publishing has allowed publishers, by
avoiding the high costs of warehousing, to keep low-selling books in print rather than declaring them
out of print.
Contemporary publishing
Presently, books are often produced by a publishing company for the sake of being put on the market
by distributors and bookstores. The company negotiates with authors in order to reach a formal legal
agreement to obtain the copyright to works, then arranges for them to be produced and sold. The
major steps of the publishing process are: editing and proofreading the work to be published;
designing the printed book; manufacturing the books; and selling the book, including marketing and
promotion. Each of these steps is usually taken on by third-party companies paid by the publisher.[1]
This is in contrast to self-publishing, where an author arranges to publish their work without the
involvement of a publishing company.[38]
English-language publishing is currently dominated by the so-called "Big Five" publishers: Penguin
Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan
Publishers. They were estimated to make up almost 60 percent of the market for general-readership
books in 2021.[39]
Design
Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various
components and elements of a book into a coherent unit.[40] In the words of renowned typographer
Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), book design, "though largely forgotten today, [relies upon] methods and
rules upon which it is impossible to improve, [and which] have been developed over centuries. To
produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied".[41] Richard Hendel
describes book design as "an arcane subject", and refers to the need for a context to understand what
that means.[42]
Layout
Modern books are organized according to a particular format called the book's layout. Although there
is great variation in layout, modern books tend to adhere to a set of rules with regard to what the parts
of the layout are and what their content usually includes. A basic layout will include a front cover, a
back cover and the book's content which is called its body copy or content pages. The front cover
often bears the book's title (and subtitle, if any) and the name of its author or editor(s). The inside
front cover page is usually left blank in both hardcover and paperback books. The next section, if
present, is the book's front matter, which includes all textual material after the front cover but not
part of the book's content such as a foreword, a dedication, a table of contents and publisher data such
as the book's edition or printing number and place of publication. Between the body copy and the
back cover goes the end matter which would include any indices, sets of tables, diagrams, glossaries
or lists of cited works (though an edited book with several authors usually places cited works at the
end of each authored chapter). The inside back cover page, like that inside the front cover, is usually
