At Out of House Publishing we’re used to operating an XML first workflow which we use to output XML, HTML and various ebook formats at almost any stage in the production cycle. That so many publishers are still converting back list is baffling to me, so I thought I’d highlight four big advantages of running a combined digital and print workflow, rather than converting post-production:

1. Evolving digital products alongside print helps publishers build in greater interactivity and linking to their digital files, and most importantly gives them more time to check and validate these features. Our copy-editors help us check linked cross references to make sure we hit maximum accuracy.

2. Even the very best conversions throw up some errors, be it with hyphenation turnovers, placement of figures or scrambling of special characters. Again, running digital production with print helps publishers iron out these things early on and avoids conversion errors creeping in under the radar post-production.

3. Authors, editors, marketeers and almost anyone else can be involved in digital product development. Seeing digital products emerge iteratively helps us all identify new opportunities for enhanced features, additional content and marketing ideas. These opportunities are not typically afforded to publishers converting back list titles in large batches.

4. Time to market can be faster. Simultaneously output digital and print files and publishers can have digital product out in the marketplace weeks before printed books. And with evidence that digital products help drive print sales this can drive revenue across the piece.

Don’t get me wrong, ebook conversion continues to do wonders for our industry – helping bring backlist to life and improving revenue in a tightening market. I just think there’s a better way for handling new content.

What other advantages do you see from running digital files alongside print? Are you relying on back list conversion and find it works for you – what are the major advantages over XML first?

Put simply, open access publications provide content that is free for consumers to access. The concept of open access is one that is fast making headway, particularly in scholarly journal publishing, where research funders are forcing more content to be made freely available. This content is not free, of course. New models are emerging for paying for the costs of production – some involve packaging publishing costs into research budgets, others require authors to pay a one off fee to have their article or book published.

Open access is less advanced in the world of book publishing, but there are already several large publishers, and some new entrants, experimenting with open access books. Of note are Open Book Publishers and Bloomsbury Academic,  both of whom provide full-text of their books online. Readers can still pay for more user friendly formats – ePub, Kindle, Adobe ebook and even print.

Why is open access happening now and why is it such a big deal?

Consumers and institutions are demanding more free content; there has been outrage in recent years at the perceived profiteering by many of the large scholarly publishers. We all know that well crafted content isn’t free to produce, but with budgets everywhere under pressure, scrutiny of the business models of scholarly publishers will continue. Critically, research founders are now demanding that the research findings they support are available for free, at least for a limited period. The Welcome Trust has been at the forefront of this, and has even helped fund new life sciences journal publisher eLife.

Although this trend will wreak most disruption on journal publishers, it would be naive to think that the world of books is immune. As the research community continues to work up an appetite for “free”, pressure will mount for content of all kinds to be open in some form. Indeed, publishers may find that open access in some user unfriendly format like HTML drives sales of more popular formats like ePub and print. This ‘try before you buy’ approach is similar to the ‘look inside’ feature from Amazon, and enables publishers to simulate bookstore browsing online. Such an approach will do wonders for discoverability and SEO (surely a monograph delivers keywords in droves).

So, whilst many in the publishing industry see open access as a major threat, there are opportunities on the horizon. New entrants will pop up, experimenting with new funding models, new workflows for production and new methods for disseminating content.  Revenues for the incumbent big publishers may well be under threat, but there are opportunities here for publishers to embrace degrees of openness, and in so doing to open up new markets.

Out of House Publishing is well placed to support moves towards open access publishing. Our XML first workflows facilitate simultaneous multi-channel publication, and our broad editorial expertise across the full range of scholarly subjects helps us respond to the diverse needs of the academic community.

The UK Government recently announced plans to scrap GCSE examinations for core subjects in England and to replace them with a new English Baccalaureate Certificate. The first core subjects to switch will be English, maths and science, with pupils starting the new courses in 2015 for examination in 2017.

With the key sales period for school textbooks kicking off in March 2015, examimation boards and publishers need to act fast to deliver quality content in time for this major change. There are three key questions this poses:

1. When will the syllabus for each of the new subjects be released? Only then can publishers finalise authoring teams and develop content.

2. Will this major change accelerate the shift from printed textbooks to digital content?

3. Are new entrants poised to take advantage of the disruption and muscle in on the dominance of the big publishers?

There are undoubtedly opportunities to be seized upon with such a huge revamp to the education system in Britain, but many uncertains remain about how this will work, who will take the initiative and what the precise timeline will be.

Do you have answers to the questions above?

In the publishing industry we pay people to index our content. It’s a practice that probably dates back to the Greek and Roman times (Gary Forsyth writes more on this for the American Society for Indexing here). Now that we’re reading more digital content than ever, publishers are starting to question the value of the index. An ereader can search the book right? Readers can use the search box to find any term they want. Well yes, but does that really offer the same value as an index crafted by hand or algorithm? Are the results relevant and accurate, in other words do they take the reader where they want to go? A simple word search of a book on the orchestra might bring up tens of occurences of the word “violin”, hundreds even. But how many point to the really pertinent stuff – the places in the content where the author describes the violoin, defines its role in the orchestra and its history? Maybe half a dozen at most.

My own view is that producing ebooks with smart indexes – taking the reader right to the point in the text where their query is discussed – enriches our content and sets the publishing world apart from other content providers.

As the Google Guide says “PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank”. To make book content, particularly non-fiction, truly accessible to readers we need a similar system in every book. We have it in fact – it’s called the index. Until we have really smart algorithms and tools for intellgient search installed on our devices my bet is on the trusty indexer continuing to guide us through to the content we actually need, when we need it.

At Out of House we understand XML workflows and use them to produce a smart hpyerlinked index in the back of many of the books we produce. Contact us to find out more.

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The challenge with inserting page numbers is that most readers want reflowable text in their ebooks, rather than the fixed layouts enforced by strict pagination.

The beauty of the ebook is the ability to tailor the layout to the reader’s needs, e.g. re-sizing text, and losing that would be seen as a step backwards. Searchable text and embedded indexing present good ways around this page number problem, but perhaps we need to be thinking of other ways of sharing and citing text, using an anchoring system that moves us away from the printed page?

The epub logo from IDPF

EPUB is the open access, device independent ebook format being widely adopted across the publishing world. Here are three things you might not already know about EPUB files:

1. Under the bonnet an EPUB file is a  ZIP file containing mostly XHTML along with image, metadata and indexing files that draw everything together. Copy your EPUB, rename it as a a ZIP and take a look inside. You might think of an EPUB file as being a bit like an InDesign package: there’s a single index bringing all of the constituent parts together. If you’ve converted your backlist content to EPUB then remember that in your ZIP file will be all the constituent parts of your book that (rights permitting) you can store in your Digital Asset Management system for reuse elsewhere.
2. You can open EPUB files in a standard browser. It is just HTML after all. I use EPUBReader for Firefox.
3. EPUB files carry their own metadata. This enables retailers and aggregators to read, catalogue and index content without the need for additional data from the publisher. An EPUB is a neat little package with everything it needs to get your content out to the market.

Out of House Publishing provides an excellent backlist to EPUB conversion service. More importantly, we understand the value in adopting structured content early on in the production process. Our XML first workflows mean that EPUB, XML and other digital outputs are delivered seamlessly along with print files.

Why continue converting print to digital when you can run both together? Contact us to find out more.

These tools all require digital content of course, and properly structured content has to be the key to really take advantage of the opportunities of digital publishing. Converting your backlist to structured content like XML and EPUB can really help you unleash the value sitting in your PDF and paper assets. And there are plenty of other platforms and formats out there – EPUB is still very much alive and well.

Use XML to future proof your content and you’ll be ready for the next big publishing announcement!

Contact us now to go digital!