jdbb — Jenna Dixon, bookbuilder
I started typesetting in 1986, as the trade crossed from phototype to the desktop. I have been making books since, and now I run [jdbb] studio, where a book factory sets the print interior and the EPUB from the author's own manuscript, and the audiobook, from the author's own narration or a generated voice.
Work
In the fall of 1986 I was one of three people typesetting on Macs for a small educational publisher in California. Since then I have set type by hand at letterpress workshops and built pages with every tool in between.
Later I spent five years helping a small press convert to digital typesetting, through the whole arc from PageMaker to QuarkXPress to InDesign.
- Since
- 1986 Typesetting, design and production of books.
- Guild
- Bookbuilders of Boston, member, and for one year a judge of its book design awards. The guild ran from 1937 to 2022.
- Books
- Over 300, in 30 years.
[jdbb] studio
[jdbb] studio is a one-person book production studio. It typesets trade paperbacks, keeps a client portal for the presses it works with, and runs a book factory.
In the factory, the author fills in a one-page transmittal and writes in a template of thirteen named styles. The factory checks the file, then sets the print interior and the EPUB from that one source, using the studio's house typography and fonts licensed for print. A 250-page book builds in about nine seconds. For the audiobook, bring a recorded narration or have the factory generate one with a current text-to-speech voice; either way it syncs the audio to the EPUB so the text follows along. Generated narration is always labeled as such.
The idea behind it: most of book production is protocol, meaning decisions you can write down once and apply every time. The part worth paying a person for is a small remainder of craft judgment that can be named. The factory handles the protocol and leaves the judgment to people.
More at studio.jdbb.net; the factory in detail, step by step, is at studio.jdbb.net/factory.
Writing and talks
- Talk
- Books are OG protocols Protocol Institute symposium, September 2026.
- Essays
- Field notes: language as protocol, with examples from the wild. Also Word-free, on why the template was never the protocol.
- Press
- “The other factory” in Venkatesh Rao's Protocolized column Have Your Factory Call My Factory (March 2026). Press kit and brand assets: studio.jdbb.net/press
Contact
Write to jenna@jdbb.net. Factory questions are welcome too.
Code: github.com/djinna