Editor’s Note: the following article is written by Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of Aptara. The results of the media survey published just below seem to corroborate Dev’s comments about content consumers. PB
Today’s content consumers are voracious digital omnivores, desiring to feed on all types of electronic content — from Twitter tweets to YouTube videos, from iPhone apps to Facebook updates, from mp3s to eBooks. Yet traditional publishers, particularly trade book publishers, are not prepared to serve digitally savvy audiences the variety of electronic products they demand. That’s because their production processes are traditionally rooted in outdated print publishing practices that are severely inadequate for tackling today’s publishing challenges.
In order to profit – literally – from the new digital markets, publishers must rethink the way they create, manage, publish, and deliver content. They must re-engineer their processes to create more flexibility and guarantee a sustainable and certain future. They must re-imagine a production process that frees their content to be transformed — on-demand — into whatever new formats, devices, and uses consumers require, now and for the future.
Continuing to retrofit existing print-based content workflows is not only impractical, overly expensive, error-prone, and unnecessarily complicated, it’s also not an efficient, flexible, or sustainable business practice. Fred Ciporen, former publisher of Publishers Weekly, recently echoed similar sentiments to an industry group preparing for the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference.
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To become lean and robust, publishers have to recognize the shortcomings of undertaking each new publishing challenge from scratch. For example, considering eBook creation as a project at the end of the print publishing lifecycle artificially and exponentially increases production costs. Continuing such practices misses the essential benefits of digitalization. It condemns the company to the past, forgoing the future while ignoring consumer demand.
Freeing content from formatting and making it possible to easily deliver content to any device on any platform in any format—print, web, or mobile—is not a new idea. Organizations have been doing it for years through leveraging the power of XML.
It’s time for traditional publishers to follow suit − with a content-centered XML-first publishing approach. Getting there is not the difficult or disruptive process that many publishing executives have assumed. For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word. (XML is an open content standard that drastically reduces the effort required of publishing houses to create eBooks — and every other type of content. XML is designed to help publishers break the dependency of content on proprietary formats and specific devices. XML content can be easily repurposed, reused, shared, sorted, aggregated with other content, and automatically processed, published, and delivered, often on-demand.)
“Fortune 1000 companies have been adopting XML publishing not because it’s cool and trendy, but because doing so saves them millions of dollars and provides measurable benefits,” says content management guru Ann Rockley. “It’s seen as a competitive advantage; an approach designed to help publishers respond quickly to both new business opportunities and threats from competitors.”
Technical communications departments in the aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, life sciences, financial, and publishing industries use a content-first XML publishing approach to create, publish, and deliver their own version of books: product-specific user guides, product manuals, support Web sites, and online help systems from a single repository of content, thanks to XML. Corporate training departments and universities use the same methods to create role-specific XML-based training and eLearning content. Some publishers may be surprised to learn that their own organizations are already using this approach to create in-house documentation and training materials.
Though there are few examples of Trade publishers adopting XML-first workflows, below are two examples of Educational publishing houses that are thinking creatively and benefiting:
John Wiley & Sons has re-engineered their approach to publishing with the advent of Wiley Custom Select (http://customselect.wiley.com), an online portal that provides educators with the ability to create their own custom text books. Teachers select content they desire from any of the products in the Wiley library, arrange it in the order they desire, upload their own content (should they desire to do so), and, with a few clicks, automatically format, publish, and deliver the content into a custom eBook. All of this is made possible using XML.
O’Reilly Media and the Pearson Technology Group joined forces to create Safari Books Online (http://www.safaribooksonline.com/Corporate/Index). The premise was simple: compile the best technology books from the leading authors and publishers into an on-demand digital library that technology, digital media, and creative professionals could quickly and easily search for reliable, definitive answers to mission-critical questions. Content downloaded from Safari Books Online is optimized for mobile devices, computers, or other reading devices, and many titles are available as eBooks. All of this is also made possible through XML.
“It’s both surprising and ironic that trade publishers, in particular, have yet to adopt XML-first or XML-centric workflows,” said Fred Ciporen. “Surprising, because they have the most to gain from re-engineering their publishing approaches, and ironic because their titles and products are more ideally suited for such workflows than most other types of publications.” The benefits to the publisher — and the reader — are many, including:
Faster time-to-market
Indefinite extension of products’ shelf-life
Greater and more nimble responsiveness to competitive threats and new business opportunities
Cost savings through more efficient utilization of human and financial resources
Ability to automatically combine and deliver various types of content on-demand
Flexibility in preparing content in new formats (Web, mobile, social media, eBook) for inclusion in fast-growing third party eBook distribution networks like Amazon.com, iTunes, app stores
Ability to quickly develop enhanced and engaging interactive reading experiences that are not possible with print-based products
Regardless of publisher type, there’s no avoiding today’s bottom line: in order to compete in the digital age, publishers must design a process that allows them to sustainably profit from digital content distribution.
Although eBook challenges may be new, thankfully their solution already exists. The Trade industry is well armed with proven multi-channel, content-centered publishing approaches that deliver sizable, real cost savings and increased margins.
It’s time for Trade publishers to take a fresh look at XML-first workflows. It is the best and only content strategy designed for the present and the future – while establishing a solid foundation on which to profitably operate a publishing business in the digital economy.
Yes! I work at a legal and regulatory publisher, and we faced all these issues decade ago. In fact, our system is SGML-based because it predates XML. You left out a primary benefit if single-source publishing– corrections! If your data (and books ARE data) reside in a secure XML repository, any corrections need to be done only once and can then flow out to all outputs. Believe me, we learned this one the hard way. XML or SGML in a secure database is the way to go!
I could not agree more, BUT I seriously doubt this will happen any time soon, mainly because those who actually do editorial production at most trade publishers are undertrained and underpaid. Hiring XML experts costs a lot more than print-centric editors and designers who will work for peanuts. In the short run it’s too disruptive and will actually be more time-consuming than continuing with legacy systems and legacy staff. Bringing up O’Reilly and Wiley as examples says nothing about how the big six run their operations. At least one still routinely works with paper manuscripts — Track Changes is seen as the big innovation over there.
Another benefit of an XML-based workflow is the ease of making content accessible to readers with disabilities. Structured content in the repository is virtually required to make good accessible content for the reader.
I find this article fascinating — not because of its content but because of who wrote it. Aptara recently sought experienced U.S.-based STM (Science, Technical, Medical) editors to do copyediting and proofreading under a noncompete agreement and specifying high-quality editing. So far, so good. But then came Aptara’s kicker: for copyeditng they would pay 80 cents a page; for proofreading 50 cents a page. Now add XML to the requirement. What will Aptara pay and editor to edit and code in XML? Based on what it offered for STM (and high quality STM editing means a rate of 3 to 5 pages an hour, or $2.40 to $4.00 an hour on Aptara’s fee schedule), I would guess little more, if anything more. Aptara’s fee schedule is a good example of what ails U.S. publishing.
I’m so tired of hearing publishers talk about why they aren’t, shouldn’t, can’t adopt XML. The embarrassing fact is that many of the largest ones are already using it internally for all of the reasons Dev points out.
Technical writers, trainers, and others have been doing it for years. A quick search of a few top XML content management consultants web sites yield client lists that include major publishing houses. Each one of the case studies documents how and why each publisher moved to XML.
It’s really time to stop whining and start doing. As someone who has worked on these projects to shift the paradigm from old-school desktop publishing to XML-enabled writing in life sciences, medical, manufacturing, retail, and high tech firms (as well as government agencies and non-profit agencies) it’s particularly ironic that publishers aren’t the first to move to XML. It’s the same “excuses” disguised as “reasons” many of my clients had: ‘We’ve always done it this way here,’ or “We’ve never done it that way here’. Both are lame and do nothing to provide a positive return on investment to shareholders.
For publicly-held publishing houses, this is a wake up call you need to pay attention to. It won’t be long before the cat is out-of-the-bag and your shareholders realize you are wasting their investment dollars by failing to optimize your processes.
XML publishing is about process optimization — which is about profit, plain and simple. Sure, there are many other benefits — especially to readers — but the main reason to make this move should be to stop wasting money and move into the 21st century. Not doing so is doing a horrible disservice to your shareholder and investors — and your employees, who cannot benefit from the extra money you’d have to give raises if you stopped spending it unwisely.
This type of content creation, management, and delivery approach is not new. For 20 years the technical documentation industry has been doing all the hard lifting … making mistakes and learning lessons, developing best practices, case studies, conference presentations, journal articles, books, research papers, guiding software vendors and creating standards. All publishers need to do is follow their lead.
As I mentioned earlier, most often they need only look down the hall in their own building for the answer.
If you are interested in learning more, read Ann Rockley’s book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy”. You’ll be guaranteed to have an a-ha moment!
http://www.managingenterprisecontent.com
Couldn’t agree more re the need to implement XML.
Could you please give some examples of “innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word.” I’m aware of the companies that offer such tools in a separate system, but are there single tools that one can recommend to smaller publishers who want to develop skills inhouse rather than outsource them?