updating hard copy manuals (longish)

[Irene Wong <wongword -at- OZEMAIL -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Tom's comment on pilots using updated manuals also applies to legal
publishing.

Legal and accounting loose leaf publishing has survived for 100 years
plus. Lawyers and acountants have subscribed to metres and metres of
loose leaf binders. These are expensive publications frequently costing
$1000 per year for updates.

The major publishers in this world, eg Thompsons, all have *very*
profitable legal and financial publishing arms in many countries. They
employ thousands of editors and writers. Many of them run high quality
in-house training programs which I suspect would be the envy of many
subscribers to this list. The publishers are highly competitive. I note
that we rarely hear a squeak out of any of their employees on this list.
Are you out there lurking but afraid to contribute?

Legal firms have been totally reliant on these volumes for the latest
information on tax, corporate, superannuation, industrial relations,
immigration etc etc law and expert opinion. Legal firms have ensured
that qualified librarians or office assistants have kept these essential
daily resources up to date. (Even if governments make raw material
available, users still want information which is massaged and put into
some accessible form.)

Of course the difference with these types of publications and, for
example, computer manuals is that the legal publication is the product
itself. A computer manual is only the source of help for a computer
manual and therefore the incentive to maintain it is less, I suppose.

I'm not suggesting that everything these publishers do is "best
practice". Quite the opposite, I consider they are very old fashioned
and backward in many aspects of communications. However, the fact is
that they exist, are profitable, and have commitments to accuracy and
speed. If you are writing loose leaf publcations for this market then
maybe you can safely (relatively speaking) go ahead with update pages.

To overcome the problem of inserting extra pages, these legal publishers
leave large page gaps. The page before a gap says "The next page is page
123" so that you know pages are "missing". You can use this gapping
technique when you take pages out. Each page has an indication in the
header or footer of when the page was changed. These publishers maintain
active phone lines for subscribers who have filing queries.

Not surprisingly the trend for these types of publications is to publish
on CD. The advantages just from the updating point of view are immense.
Companies can be sure they are using the most current version. Unless
the CD has been written to stop this, legal firms can open an old CD and
find out exactly what the law was at any particular time in the past.
They need to know this for litigation etc. Loose leaf pages which were
thrown away mean the law at a particular time is lost.

Incidentally Folio views software, which is probably going to be the
standard for world legal publishing, is owned by one of the publishers
with a large legal arm (Butterworths).

Regards
Irene Wong
Senior editor
Australian Securities Commission

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