If you are reading this book, you have surely decided to use a new software called Scribus. I would like to congratulate you on your choice. However, what I find more interesting is to understand why you opted to use Scribus.
You might be fully interested in free software, may be running Linux or any other system except Apple Mac OS or Microsoft Windows, and in this case, you don't have much choice except for Scribus, Scribus, or Scribus. This is mostly because proprietary equivalent software such as Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress is not available for Linux-based platforms.
If you are not interested in "free" software, the first piece of advice I would give you would be to take a look at its principles. Scribus is licensed as General Public License and a lot of software that you use everyday is certainly based on such a license. But again, why Scribus? Is it because you don't need to spend a penny for what InDesign is worth based on a human month of work? Is it because you were looking for software that would let you explore your creativity? Or is it just because you've heard of it as a good application?
The answer to all of these, and many other questions, will give good reasons. In fact, to be honest, Scribus is not as complete as InDesign or Xpress. The latter is nearly twenty years old and mature, and the first is made by the most important company in the printing world that is at the center of each step of the printing process. However, Scribus will provide you with all you need to be productive at creating nice documents (which will print perfectly) and some things that you may find in other software too.
What Scribus mainly does is to simply:
Be respectful to century-old habits of the print world
Be as accessible as possible to new users
Give a perfect print result
That's the point. As I travel a lot to teach Scribus, I'm always surprised at how many people show me documents that were already created using Scribus, and that I didn't even think could be. When I began using Scribus six years ago, at the very beginning, it was hard to imagine that it would become so popular. At that time Inkscape appeared too, and they have both completely changed the free software world—even if not the graphic world yet.
Laying out with Scribus will mean that you will create brochures, catalogs, business cards, books, magazines, or newsletters—in a way any kind of document with which one can communicate. A layout design job generally takes information from different sources, and places them on a page in a way that will improve readability as well as be a pleasure to look at—sometimes it also improves efficiency. Laying out is the process of arranging elements with respect to some rules on various types of content that can be single or multi column, with or without pictures, and printed in black, color, or varnished. Well, a layout is a creation that helps the reader read by adapting itself to the content. This is particularly true in magazines where the layout changes very often in a single issue—and always gives the best printed result to the reader, of course. To be honest, how easy would it be to create an exact copy of your favorite magazine in a text processor? Just have a try, and you'll see that they will certainly not be optimal for the task.