Publishing Case Studies and Papers

Paper - Digitising the Editorial and Production Process

Martyn Daniels, VP Marketing, Media Publishing, VCIL

Delivered to 30th Editur International Supply Chain Conference, Frankfurt Book Fair , Frankfurt, 2008

Can we remember a week in publishing where we didn’t hear anything about digitisation and technology? Today we open our newspapers and turn on our TVs to hear about ebooks, online, widgets, podcasts, what sometimes appears to be a new ereader every month and a new mobile phone or development every week. But these are just the delivery mechanisms and the consumer devices.

Does it mean that we are digital? No. It merely means that we distribute and potentially sell digital content.

Digital publishing not just about what we may or may not sell its about how we acquire rights, develop them, market them, store them, render them into saleable product, distribute and profit from them. For this to happen we have to consider how Digital publishing becomes publishing.

When we started this digital journey, many publishers found that they didn’t even have their typesetter and printer files, merely the physical book. Wrestling back the typesetters’ PDF file was often at a prohibitive cost for not much gain. Many started to digitise their backlist, scanning and converting physical books to create digital content.

In addition to getting their files back from the typesetters and printers publishers began, where rights were cleared, to convert the typeset PDF to digital files. The fact was that publishers often only went digital only after the printed book was produced. The process from manuscript to finished physical product remained exactly the same analogue process.
As a result, many ebooks are mere digital reproductions of the physical book and for many purposes or requirements, this is perfectly acceptable.

However, as we have often said, publishing in not one industry but a number of sectors that were joined together by a common format – the book. As we explode that book spine, the differences become more marked. We see different sectors facing different issues and moving in sometimes different digital directions at different speeds. Importantly, some publishers now have to view digital content very differently. As a result they have had to look very hard at each of the editorial, production, marketing and development processes. This has forced publishers to rethink what they produce and how and when they produce it.

Moving the digital issue upstream into the editorial and production process is about increasing the publishing output options past print, delivering significant productivity benefit, providing greater control of assets and reducing costs.

This means change.

Today I want to introduce ten issues to consider when you look at supporting creativity or the heart of publishing. However, first I want to share with you some other thoughts about some the challenges in this area.

Store it once and render it many, is beyond a mere a battle cry for digital distribution - it is a sensible strategy right across the book’s lifecycle.

As we start to develop digital content we also need to understand digital context that is to say the metadata, marketing information and basic bibliographic record and its creation, management and relationship to content. Very importantly we now also need to understand Rights and their relationship to content.

It’s ironic for an industry that is about content and rights that we appear to separate the two at birth and manage them separately thereafter.

Publishers in recent years have moved to make their PDF files compatible with print on demand services and in doing so ‘keep them in print.’ Print on demand may have started as short cycle printing, but is now becoming a demand driven model and viable for most backlist titles. Print on demand offers much but it is still just another production print process and output. We still await the flip from print books and distribute books, to distribute files and print books. But that’s another story

Let’s look at the different content, complexities and inputs and outputs that must be supported.

There is ‘living content’ such as dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Here, the currency of the information is important and therefore the online or digital product often has greater value than the printed one, which is perpetually becoming out of date. Publishers in sectors such as education often wish to generate multiple renditions from the same content source and generate the likes of course notes, students’ notes, teacher’s notes, assessments etc. Children’s and reference book publishers may wish to incorporate animation and other media in one rendition whilst maintaining the more static print rendition. Reference, Academic and STM Publishers are among those who need to manage collaborative works with many contributors, editors and where the content itself is often managed as individual fragments. Others just want to manage the various degrees of complexity such as found in textural works and academic monographs.

The point is that there are many different outputs, inputs and processes in publishing.

The first approach to moving upstream has been with us some 5 years. It involved converting the book to XML before typesetting. This ‘XML First’ approach effectively converted the publisher’s typeset-ready copy into XML, which could then be rendered to print and also many digital formats.
For complex typesetting that could not be achieved via templates the XML could be flowed into publishing typesetting tools such as Indesign.

XML First was a short term solution and although it reduced production and conversion costs, these were marginal. Principally it was still dealing with finished print based content and still presented challenges in providing effective Workflow, enabling late changes, and providing materials such as metadata and marketing.

As I have already said I would propose that there are ten areas that you need to be consider in digitising the development process and content. If there is nothing else you take away from this presentation it should be these ten considerations.

First, there is the basic process.

Although we may add or modify the steps, we can all relate to the step chart. The reality is that there is not one process. We may start with a template but whether we are talking about paperbacks, or highly illustrated works, childrens’ books, tabular works, monographs, or anything and everything in-between, the one reality is, that the process will change. What is certain is that the process is at best reiterative, and at worst, what some may call chaotic, and others, creative in its nature.

This is not a problem, if you build content systems to accommodate this dynamic workflow perspective and tolerance.

Second, let’s consider the editorial development tools required.

Editors need tools that fully support document creation, review and annotation, cross-referencing, indexing, tracking of all changes, version control, rollback and forward revisions management.

However Editing tools by themselves are not the answer but only part of the answer.

Third, the development team is that a team who need to communicate.

They may be Project Managers, Editors, Agents, Authors, Production, Rights, Marketing, Legal, Sales. They may be in different buildings, companies, countries and even time zones. They will all have different roles and responsibilities and will communicate not just on the content itself but via others tools such as email, phone, post it notes etc.

They all need to communicate, and what is important is that all this communication is captured and is part of the solution. All too often the communication and decisions are captured in other systems and not against the content itself. They lie within email silos and are not tagged to the work.

It makes sense to exploit the capabilities of these systems and ‘post them’ to the content for future reference.

Fourth, some works may be collaborative in their nature with several creators, editors etc each responsible for individual fragments. This extension of the team is often very complex and demands tighter alignment of roles, responsibilities and permissions.

Collaborative works can often extend the team even outside the enterprise.

Fifth, there is often now a real need to break away from this ‘digitise last and only when the physical book has been produced’ approach to content.

An editor working at any stage of the process should be capable of rendering the content to multiple formats, Print PDF, ebooks, ONIX, XML, HTML web pages, Flash, preview chapters, blurbs, widgets, syndication portals, whatever.

This enables them to see the different look and feel of the content within different templates. It also enables them to generate pre production inspection copies, reviews, widgets, web copy, marketing copy, Advanced Information sheets, catalogues, whatever.

Digital opportunities should not be an afterthought, restricted to content
or tethered to physical production.

Six, reporting and information isn’t just about financial control. These are important, but the process is about content development and its workflow and providing a real-time dash board or control panel.

Seven, Project Management needs to be able to manage in real time and by exception and not be bogged down in the detail and yesterday’s status reports from other systems.

Eight, people’s knowledge is a risk. Projects can often be long. People change roles, move on and therefore institutionalising their knowledge is an important factor in mitigating risk.

Nine, I would like you to consider another important element about supporting Editors and creative people. We have built transactional systems to manage transactions and many have tried to shoehorn these into the editorial space with varying degrees of success.

A number of years ago, I was part of a research programme looking into supporting creative publishing functions. With Mark Bide or Mike Shazkin, I saw a system in a major trade publisher in New York. It was obviously not going to make the grade. I can’t remember if it was Mark or Mike who commented that, in asking editors to perform basic data entry for others, they were on a mission destined to fail.

My take was that its user interface was written like a transaction system and was clearly disliked by many editors. I said that if a customer service clerk refused to use a system, you sacked them. if the editor refused, you sacked the system.

Intuitive, friendly screens and tools that enable Editors to work smarter are vital. Importantly we now need to deploy content systems not transactional ones.

Finally, Ten, this framework is dependant on an underlying XML database that underpins all. To do this we have to understand that there are many different ways to view a database.

It’s just like looking into a house through different windows and seeing different rooms. Same house different perspectives.

I take my hat off to Mike Shatzkin in his mission to raise the bar with his ‘Start with XML’ research. We have already given our input into this research programme and fully support its principles.

When we start with XML we must however also consider how we get there.

‘Ingestion’ appears to be a new word and one I personally hate but it says what it does on the can so maybe I’ll succumb. Although I couldn’t help laughing when I saw that Amazon’s Kindle programme has an ‘Ingestion Manager’. Imagine being at a party and asking someone what their job was to be told ‘Ingestion Manager’.

How do we create XML?

Many publishers have created automated front end processes that take the manuscript and through a series of word macros perform a pre-copyedit decomposition process, converting it to the house template, tagging the document, checking references, indexing graphics, illustrations etc and presenting the copyeditor with text.

Once edited, this can be rolled back into a process which recomposes the file for typesetting, indexing, corrections and often conversion into the likes of Adobe’s Indesign publishing toolset.

One major academic publisher using this approach has already saved significant costs through this automation and better still has dramatically shrunk time schedules and improved their quality control.

Word macros may tag elements and although they are not really the answer long term, but they do offer a potential quick conversion, or should I say ingestion into XML.

You may ask, ‘So what?’ Is this theory or reality?

Time doesn’t permit me to demonstrate nor is it appropriate to do so in this forum but a number of projects have already been achieved using this new platform and others are in various stages of development.

One involved a dictionary which was developed in the UK by one publisher and then enriched by a different publisher in the US and translated into different languages. This joint project was complex both in its construct, the fact that the dictionary development by both publishers was on-going, and the obvious extended relationships and different tools used. A solution was implemented for the US publisher within weeks and has been delivered, along with other benefits - an 80% plus cost saving.

Another project involved ELT content where interactive course assessment content was created to dynamically enrich the student experience.

Other projects have involved exploding content to create localised editions for different markets and embedding audio, images and video for online, whilst also generating different print and CDRom renditions.

Elsewhere it is being used to fully integrate complex works into InDesign render to Flash, render to ebooks, create marketing copy on the fly, support multiple XML schemas and manage more traditional publishing workflows.

We have just started a project to ingest manuscripts through word macros to XML, thereafter provide the total platform to deliver media neutral content and context for a major publishing programme.

Savings in excess of 25% of overall editorial and production costs are perfectly feasible and that is without the softer benefits associated with digital workflow, project management, quality, asset management and productivity.

Finally we now are now at the stage when Digital Publishing does become Publishing and in doing so perhaps we are entering a stage where the content development platforms should not only support digital content but also digital context and digital rights.

Once we break down the transactional mindset that once separated them and look to fully support the creative people and processes we truly do explode the spine that has straight-jacketed us all for so many years.

Publishing will then be Digital.