In the book industry, traditional printing was first disrupted by new photocomposition machines, with lower costs. Text and image processing began to be handed over to desktop publishing and graphic art studios. Impression costs went on decreasing with photocopiers, color photocopiers and digital printing. Digitization speeded up the editorial process, which used to be sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the image editor and the layout staff to work at the same time on the same book. In the press industry, journalists and editors could now type in their articles online. These articles went directly from text to layout, without being keyed in anymore by the production staff. # Some contributions One of the participants of the symposium, Peter Leisink, an associate professor of labor studies at the Utrecht University, Netherlands, explained: "A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self- employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work." Another participant, Michel Muller, secretary-general of the French Federation of Book, Paper and Communication Industry (FILPAC: Fédération des Industries du Livre, du Papier et de la Communication), stated that, in France, jobs in this industry fell from 110,000 to 90,000 in ten years, from 1987 to 1996, with expensive social plans to re-train and re-employ the 20,000 people who lost their jobs. He explained that, "if the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these matters."