A. BACKGROUND

One of the Cardinal objectives of the Bible Society of Nigeria is the publishing of Scriptures, both in required foreign languages and various Nigerian languages, in format that will appeal to the target audience. The Bible Society of Nigeria, over the years has tried in several ways, in meeting up with this particular objective. Scripture publishing in Nigeria started with the British and Foreign Bible Society, our parent Society. Many Bibles, Testaments, and portions were published by the BFBS to meet the needs of Christian evangelism in Nigeria. When the Bible Society of Nigeria was founded in 1966, the struggle to have as many complete Bibles and New Testaments in local languages continued.

Over the years, the Bible Society of Nigeria has made great efforts to satisfy the Scripture needs of the Church in Nigeria. To some extent this is being achieved, but not to the fullest. For a very long time, the BSN published Bibles using same format over and over, without variety. The Society remained more of a distributor than a publisher which it ought to be.

Printing of Scriptures right from the inception of the BSN has always been done outside Nigeria in countries like Britain, China, Korea, etc

In order to make the BSN a truly publishing Society, which would make her relevant to the Church through the publishing of Bibles in different formats and sizes, the BSN took steps toward setting up a unit to be in charge of publishing operations called Publication Unit in 1999 and later changed it to Computer Assisted Publishing unit in 2002. The unit became a full fledged Publishing Department in the year 2003.

With the take-off of the department, BSN has been able to develop new products and improve on existing ones through reformatting and re-processing. Now, BSN has variety of products, flexibility in the area of size and shapes, cost effectiveness and reduced time of production. The BSN is today, more of a publishing Society than a distributing one it used to be years back.

Within the time of starting as a full fledge department, the department has typeset the following whole Bibles, New Testament and scripture portions:

• Yoruba Iroyin Bible
• Isekiri Bible
• Igede New Testament
• Ika John Portion
• Izon John Portion
And various jobs for other Christian organizations and churches.

B. OBJECTIVES OF BSN PUBLISHING

The overall objective of establishing this Department is to take scripture text from manuscript level to Portable Document Format (PDF) stage for production through the following processes:

i. Keyboarding/putting scripture text into electronic format (EF)
ii. Editing and revising of scripture text
iii. Typesetting of scripture text
iv. Computer Graphic Design: for scripture covers, adverts, promotional/sales materials, etc.
v. Relate with production centres in the area of print proofs

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