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I would add that you need to learn how to edit. Maybe you could do that in an internship but frankly, back in journalism school, I took courses. Things many editors need to know include: style (standard rules for word usage, punctuation, capitalization, etc.), organization (a must), a really good sense of grammar, how a book should be edited for particular audiences (seventh-grade-level readers, twelfth-grade level readers, etc.), and a course on book design wouldn't hurt, either.
A lot of these things you can learn from taking the right kind of writing classes: not creative writing so much as science or technical writing, nonfiction writing, and so on.
All that said, if you _can_ get an internship, that would be best. No better place to learn than on the job. But these are the type of things you'd need to learn or know.
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