Despite all that has been said and done, full monetization of intellectual property (IP) continues to be a stumbling block for publishers. “A new trend highlighting this issue is the outgrowth of new publishing universes, which is best exemplified by the growing power of fan fiction,” observes executive v-p for business development Jane Tappuni of Publishing Technology.
Thinking Beyond the End Product
For Tappuni, fan fiction is “a huge and vastly under-reported segment of the content industries. Some estimates suggest that a third of all content posted on Tumblr and Wattpad, for instance, is fan fiction. It is a parallel universe, where fans themselves take the brands, characters and stories they love, and remix them for themselves and their fan communities. It is also a sector that pays scant attention to copyright laws, apart from the kind of licensed fan fiction that Amazon has tried to kickstart with Kindle Worlds.”
The way fan fiction takes a piece of IP, chops it up, plays with it, and distributes it over multiple networks and media, “is the kind of creative approach to content exploitation that we have been talking about with publishers for a very long time,” says Tappuni. “The possibilities opened up by digital media mean that the book is often only the beginning of the commercial life of a piece of IP. Yet it still remains the only focus of many publishers, who find it conceptually and practically difficult to unbundle the book and sell it as chapters, or a serial, for instance. Our stance at Publishing Technology is that the book should be treated as the starting product of the publishing process, and not the end result.”
Securing Content and Future-Proofing Software
But prior to leveraging and disseminating content, one must make sure it is secure. For now, the publishing industry has embraced e-book watermarking as a better alternative to traditional DRM, says founder and manager Huub van de Pol of Icontact, the developer of leading watermarking and personalization delivery platform BooXtream. “This is a trend that is gathering traction not just in the Netherlands, where we are based. Basically, end users have been demanding for a friendlier DRM alternative to Amazon’s Kindle for a while now. And since Kindle is not available everywhere in the world, publishers do need to support ePub-based e-books and offer some kind of content protection. Our watermarking technology offers these publishers a simple yet enriched solution.”
Software also needs to be future-proofed in terms of functionality and technology. Says founder and CEO Knut Nicholas Krause of KNK Business Software, “The structure of modern publishing software systems needs not only to be suitable for current demands but must also be highly adaptable to future changes in publishing paradigms.” Given that publishing markets are becoming more niche-oriented, Krause finds that “the number of media formats to be served has increased exponentially. Productivity and process optimization is therefore crucial. On the other hand, CRM systems are in high demand as direct customer relationships become increasingly important. Support for digital subscription-based business models and streaming content, for instance, is getting a lot of attention, and this has impacted all areas of the business including rights and royalties.”
Krause points out that consumers are now requesting products that can be bundled together based on their preferences and then made available instantly at point of purchase. “So the interaction between publishing software system and e-commerce platform needs to be seamlessly efficient. This has publishers rethinking their software and platform needs and solutions.”
Embracing and Enhancing E-learning
Meanwhile, digital education courses, platforms, and applications for mobile devices are becoming mainstream, observes CEO Kuba Pancewicz of Young Digital Planet. “In fact, technology has become education’s ‘daily bread’. What’s crucial in today’s education is the ability to measure learning outcomes and increase efficiency in teaching, and that has been made possible by new technologies and specialized analytical modules.”
Pancwicz adds: “Moreover, modern education is not about theory but about putting knowledge into practice. It is about relevancy with more emphasis on social skills—collaboration, teamwork, responsibility, and communication—as well as self–awareness and digital literacy. It is also about the methodologies such as project-, problem-, and inquiry-based learning, problem solving, critical thinking, and student-centred approach.”
For Uday Majithia, assistant v-p for marketing and presales at Impelsys, “more publishers are looking into becoming educators.” He adds: “This applies to professional medical associations as well as STM publishers, who clearly have the right content, learning modules and CME [continuing medical education] courses. Many have successfully built new product lines from existing content to offer online courses. I am also seeing increased interest in big data and adaptive learning, where publishers with mature digital strategies are moving ahead with initiatives in these areas.”
Juggling Investments and Returns
However, publishers do require sizable investment in migrating their content to newer technologies, standards, and solutions, adds Majithia of Impelsys, pointing out that “the technology adoption and utilization gap between tech-savvy publishers and the smaller, not-so-digital publishers is growing bigger, and this makes it a challenge for traditional print publishers to make their mark in the digital world.”
Publishers also want to save costs without sacrificing beautiful and interactive content, and they want the ability to do this easily and quickly in-house, says business development director Achille Coenegracht of France-based Aquafadas. “They also want tools to market their content, improve SEO of their apps, and create viral content. Publishers are looking to make their digital textbook content interactive, add content to existing app quickly and easily, follow student progress within the app, distribute content easily, and create content automatically and modify it in real time.”
The following pages highlight what some companies are offering in the digital space, and include further thoughts on market trends.
Aquafadas
With a complete publishing system that rivals that of Adobe, Aquafadas’s automated solutions, user-friendly enrichment tools, and innovative app templates have powered thousands of native mobile apps that reached over 15 million end-users worldwide. A part of Rakuten, Aquafadas has more than 12,000 publishers using its tools for content creation, distribution, and management, including Mondadori, Flammarion, Shueisha, Hong Kong Open University, and the University of Shanghai.
Bayard’s J’aime Lire Store, for instance, uses Aquafadas’ next-generation e-storefront, which collects and promotes Bayard’s digital content in one place, and offers customizable banners, categories, user accounts, and in-app purchases. “Bayard now has the most innovative and successful app to encourage kids to read. The results speak for themselves: for every single book sold in the stores, Bayard sells 10 through the app; 25% of its buyers purchase through the app, accounting for 70% of its total sales; and 65% of Bayard sales is from books featured in the app,” says business development director Achille Coenegracht, adding that the Bayard team can create enriched children’s books without any coding knowledge through a click of a button.
Meanwhile, Spain’s Edinumen uses Aquafadas tools to create digital workspace Hola Mundo. “Teachers can share interactive e-textbooks with their students, work on it in the classroom, and track student progress in real time. Students can easily access the e-textbooks on PC, Mac, mobile or tablet, and work on the e-textbooks themselves using the tools available in the reader, such as bookmarks, clipping, comments, and notes”, adds Coenegracht, pointing out that Edinumen team can create the interactive content in-house, set up digital stores for different platforms, and even reproduce the content to sell as a white-label service.
For Sesame Street S’More app, the Sesame Street team uses the 50-plus innovative enrichments provided in Aquafadas’ InDesign plug-in to create sophisticated e-learning content. It was the first mobile app produced inhouse by Sesame Street, and it has interactive plays, games, stories, puzzles, rhymes, read-aloud narration, music, and videos.
The education enrichments, says Coenegracht, are compatible with Tin Can xAPI, and enable a multitude of interactive quizzes and tests as well as functionalities that allow note-making, annotation, bookmarking, clipping, and hyperlinking directly within the digital book.
Visit Aquafadas booth B79 in Hall 4.2 for more information, or attend the following talks on October 14: “How the Learning Experience is Evolving with Digital” with a case study on Edinumen/Cambridge University Press at 10 a.m. in Hall 4.2’s Hot Spot Education, and “How Publishers Integrate Apps into Their Business Strategy” with a look at French publishing giant Eyrolles, in Hall 4.0’s Hot Spot Publishing Services at 1:15 p.m.
DiTech Process Solutions
A business partner of Typefi Systems since 2013, DiTech is always about helping clients to have the fastest turnaround using the latest technologies, says founder and CEO Nizam Ahmed. “Take Typefi: it generates both print PDF and ePub files with just a click of a button using inputs such as Word, Google Docs, CMS databases and XML files. This super-fast process allows us to produce more typeset and ePub pages than ever before, and such efficiency has attracted several leading publishers to work with us.”
Better and faster networks coupled with newer mobile devices have upped the ante for publishers and digital solutions providers. “A shorter turnaround time at a reduced cost with no compromise on quality is something that publishers demand from solutions providers. If a 500-page book previously took seven to 10 days for typesetting, the demand is now for the same output quality within four days. So we have to employ the latest technologies—or partner with those with the right technologies—to improve productivity and reduce production costs while delivering high quality standards,” explains Ahmed, whose team also offers fixed layout ePub, read-aloud conversion and interactive ePub processes besides conventional solutions.
Ahmed adds: “We work on restoring or retaining old hard copies as well turning them into PDFs or ePubs for posterity. We also cover niche areas such as converting text into Braille for the visually impaired. We are a one-stop shop for publishers big and small.”
For one German publisher, for instance, his team converted 27,000 pages of German and Dutch within two weeks. “The pages with Greek characters and MathML images were challenging but our team developed inhouse automated tools to speed up the process. We are now generating 40,000 to 50,000 pages in the same two-week period while maintaining the high quality output,” adds Ahmed, whose team converted more than 200 old videocassettes containing educational materials into DVDs for an Australian university. “The clinical clean-up of the old videocassettes was tedious as most of the quality was bad.”
In another project, this time for a U.K.-based publisher, the challenge involved converting its existing eight exam series into interactive ePub format. “The fill-in-the-blank, true-or-false, multiple choices, drag-and-drop, and all sorts of quizzes had to be made interactive and user-friendly. With the new format, students are now able to work on the series on iOS and Readium, and check their performance immediately,” explains Ahmed, who is at booth E5 in Hall 4.0 to provide more case studies and information about DiTech.
Enthrill
Enthrill has been quietly working away at its goal of creating a new sales channel for publishers. In 2014, it rolled out Walmart’s first e-book program, and Enthrill has been adding retailers to its distribution through its unique e-book gift card program since then.
“Enthrill is now distributed in over 3,100 retail stores in Canada, including Shoppers Drug Mart, Safeway, Sears, and of course, Walmart. Contracts are already in place to double that number in 2016, and we are actually working on expanding into 90,000 retail stores by the end of 2016,” says co-founder and CEO Kevin Franco, adding that his team has learned a lot about what customers are looking for in a e-book gift card product, and “has fine-tuned our offerings after several iterations and improvements to Enthrill services.”
Since Enthrill delivers to any reading device regardless of its platform, it is able to work with various loyalty programs to offer their members e-books in exchange for points or miles. “We are working with programs such as Air Miles, whereby their members can redeem for gift cards in the Enthrill system, and download the e-book to any device they choose,” adds Franco.
Customers look at Enthrill program for giving e-books, and not to purchase for themselves, says Franco. “This means that title-specific e-book gift cards do not resonate with the purchaser. They would much rather purchase a specified amount of gift card, and let the card recipients choose the titles for themselves,” says Franco, adding that “since giving a book is the best gift of all, we make it possible to give e-books without worrying if it will work on the recipient’s device—ours work on every device that is available out there.”
Challenge-wise, Franco says, “we are constantly at war with the clock. As a physical consumer product, it takes us six months to iterate our product, which means that a significant investment is required just to operate while we learn something, act on it, and get it into market.”
Proliferating the distribution of e-books and giving publishers alternate paths to the market, remains the biggest goal at Enthrill. “Publishers that are interested in expanding their reach and sales should be working with us as Enthrill has proven to be effective in increasing the number of customers redeeming gift cards for e-books on our platforms,” says Franco, who will be at Frankfurt to provide additional information on Enthrill. Do email him at kevin.franco@enthrill.com to schedule an appointment.
Icontact
New tools and add-ons are making BooXtream even more attractive for a wider audience. “In Frankfurt, we will introduce two ready-to-run plug-ins for WordPress/WooCommerce and Shopify, two of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms. With these plug-ins, clients can easily use the platforms without having to incur software development costs,” says Icontact founder and manager Huub van de Pol, who will be at booth D40 in Hall 6.2 to provide the plug-in demos.
“These plug-ins provide a big step forward in expanding our already large customer base,” adds van de Pol, whose company developed flagship product BooXtream five years ago. This summer, the BooXtream Web service watermarked millions of e-books in only a couple of weeks, with sometimes more than six transactions per second. “Our scalable platform with distributed servers around the globe handles such volume perfectly. From our perspective, e-book sales are still rising and not plateauing at all.”
Installations of BooXtream and its tools have been taking place much further than Amsterdam, where Icontact is located. Black Inc Book, which won the 2015 Australian Book Industry Award, for instance, integrated BooXtream in their Drupal-based e-bookstore in just a couple of days. “Our free API [application programming interface], the software samples, and free test account made the implementation easy, not to mention affordable,” adds van de Pol.
Another client, the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation, which is the global tax expert, uses BooXtream not only for their e-bookstore, but also for the KPMG Corporate Tax Handbook that they publish and produce annually. BooXtream batch mode is used to watermark and personalize all copies of the handbook, thus giving the freely distributed corporate publication a unique feature.
Several independent e-bookstores such as PeruBookstore, Tienda Books, Verso Books, and eLibris use BooXtream technology not only to watermark every e-book transacted through their sites but also as a repository, distribution, and downloading platform.
“Keeping up with the expanding ePub standard is a priority. BooXtream must be able to process any e-book, regardless of the type of tools used to create it. We also need to cater to the needs of new consumers such as self-publishing authors with simple and ready-to-run solutions. And, as one of the pioneers in the e-book watermarking industry, we have to offer the best value and technology so that builders of e-commerce platforms will choose to adopt BooXtream rather than build their own system,” says van de Pol, who will present “The Benefits of E-book Watermarking over DRM” on October 15 at 11:30 a.m. in Hall 6.2’s Hot Spot Digital Innovation.
Impelsys
Today’s readers “expect content that they can rely on for all their learning needs, with embedded ancillaries, interactive exercises, simulations, and assessments,” says assistant v-p for marketing and presales Uday Majithia. “Content has evolved, and e-books offer more than a linear reading experience. This convergence of reading and learning has given publishers tremendous opportunities to build new product lines focused on learning delivery. Our flagship product, iPublishCentral, has also evolved to support publishers—and their users—with an engaging learning experience through all-inclusive smart content on a single platform.”
iPublishCentral 6.0 now offers mobile-adaptive portal design templates with improved usability, and smoother interface for online and offline access. It fully supports ePub3 to enable embedded interactive ancillaries, media files, quizzes, animation and much more. At the same time, it provides geo-restriction of sales to go with geo-pricing, multilanguage portal support, and language localization on apps. Impelsys’s engineering and R&D team also added R2L (right-to-left) language support for content and user interface.
Another new feature of iPublishCentral is its cloud-based services. Explains Majithia: “Some of our publishing clients have been asking for features to extend their existing solutions, and so we have made several modules within iPublishCentral and KnowledgePlatform—our content and learning delivery platform—accessible through APIs. Basically, this cloud-based service-oriented architecture allows publishers to plug in, use, and integrate individual modules that we offer, from Readers to DRM to Analytics.”
KnowledgePlatform continues to offer rich XML-driven content while supporting both PDF and ePub readers. “With the cloud services, we have seamlessly combined CMS and LMS solutions under a single platform to align KnowledgePlatform to our emerging philosophy where reading and learning go hand-in-hand,” says Majithia, who has seen 15 publishers from South America—a new market for Impelsys—signing up for iPublishCentral.
“We have added four adopters from East Asia while strengthening our presence in North America and Europe. Our platform is becoming a truly global solution,” adds Majithia, whose team recently replaced an aging platform used by a leading South American STM publisher with an adaptive and scalable solution based on iPublishCentral to support changing user demands.
The team also built a next-generation learning solution using KnowledgePlatform for a medical association. “We designed and created specifications for their HTML-compliant SCORM courses to offer adaptive learning experience online and offline,” says Majithia, who is at booth J55 in Hall 4.2 to provide more case studies as well as demos of iPublishCentral and KnowledgePlatform.
Inkubate
Version 2.0 of Inkubate has arrived! For writers, there is tweet-like PitchIts to advertise their works to agents, editors, and publishers (AEPs) within the Inkubate network. “A writer can send a PitchIt message with attached profile, excerpt, and synopsis of their unpublished manuscript, which is stored within the Inkubate platform,” explains chief marketing officer David Bass. “A PitchIt message is mapped to AEPs who have similar genre interests to the writer who is creating the message. So there is a high degree of correlation on the subject matter between the two sides.”
For AEPs, the newly launched predictive analytics tool MarkIt can be used to “determining which titles they are looking at acquiring could sell well by comparing their bestselling titles with our database of Nielsen BookScan’s top 100 list over a 12-month period,” explains Bass, adding that publishers are very excited about the predictive outcomes from MarkIt “because we are confirming one additional level of data for them about the content they have either acquired or looking to acquire.”
Facilitating communication between the two user communities—AEPs who are discovering new writers, and interacting with them—is the biggest challenge, adds Bass. “We want both sets of users to have the best tools for collaborating with each other based upon search-and-content analytics outcomes that are presented to them. So we want to continue improving the tools to locate unique content from the writers. On the other side, we want to make sure authors are able to know that AEPs are looking at their profiles and titles.” Fostering this type of discovery, collaboration and content analytics, Bass says, “has motivated Inkubate to keep improving its platform.”
Another goal is to ensure that everyone who uses Inkubate recognizes that it is not a “display site” even though it enables authors to upload and display their content. Bass says: “We are much more about solving the management of content once it is discovered and considered to be valuable to the AEPs. We want to make the slush pile process less of a hassle, and provide AEPs with different ways to organize and communicate with authors they want to acquire rights from, and with their publishing colleagues about it.”
Discover more about Inkubate 2.0 at its booth H31 in Hall 4.0. Or visit inkubate.com to use the platform at any time, or to schedule a meeting for demo on its software and tools at the fair.
KNK Business Software
The only Microsoft-certified publishing software in the world, KNK Publishing from KNK Business Software offers full publishing functionality for print, online, and mobile publishers. Its customizable and scalable modules cover areas such as asset management, multichannel publishing, order-to-cash, e-commerce, subscription, logistics and warehousing, rights and royalties, cash flow management and business intelligence. Currently, some 150 publishers in North America, Europe and Asia use KNK Publishing.
“One of the modules, KNK integration platform, is a middleware that easily connects with online bookstores, distributors, aggregators, and other third-party products and suppliers that support old technologies—iSeries/AS400 software, for instance—as well as those utilizing the most modern Web-based services,” says founder and CEO Knut Nicholas Krause, whose company is headquartered in Kiel, Germany. “The platform’s high-end solution is Microsoft BizTalk, which is most appropriate for publishers with small IT departments.”
KNK Publishing, explains Krause, has a different architecture compared to products from competitors such as Klopotek and SAP. “Our solution offers publishers a content-based architecture with flexible metadata management that can be easily customized for any new media product type and format. It also allows a new contract structure that supports innovative paid content models, and analyzes the economic success of new leads and existing customers.”
Royalty contracts on KNK Publishing, for instance, are generated through a single-source content platform. “This means that the publisher can sell different and complex bundles, and yet easily create annual royalty accounting for different media types and formats,” says Krause, whose team recently installed KNK Publishing at Florida-based A Beka Book and Montreal-based French language publisher TC Media Livres (formerly, Cheneliere). Last December, Royal Boom Publishers, one of the biggest educational players in the Netherlands, became the country’s first publisher to install KNK Publishing.
For TC Media Livres, the team also installed two additional modules: KNK Workflow (to support complex authorization processes within the company) and Jet Reports (a tool to create business intelligence reports for inhouse data-crunching and analysis).
As for Condé Nast Japan, modules such as business management, financial accounting, bulk sales, and group reporting were installed. At Bastei Lubbe, Germany’s third-largest trade book publisher, where its editorial and production departments have already used KNK Publishing, a new CRM module was recently added to enable direct connection with their readers.
Visit booth F1 in Hall 4.0 for more information on KNK Publishing, or register at knkpublishingsoftware.com to attend a 20-minute software presentation, which will be held at 10 a.m. on the first three days of the fair.
LearningMate
Helping clients to fast track their product development and reduce their upfront investment has led LearningMate to build ACE (Assessment and Content Engine), QuAD (Question Authoring and Assessment Delivery Tool), GoClass, and Frost. “Clients use our tools for a fraction of the cost it would take them to build their own or license from a third-party vendor,” says CEO Samudra Sen, adding that the tools are “enablers” or “accelerators” to maintain client’s competitive advantage.
A midsize nursing and health sciences publisher, which urgently needs an adaptive platform allowing personalized learning experiences, for instance, turns to ACE. “The entire development and time-to-market took less than a year, and today, 30,000 students are using the publisher’s ACE platform, which has extensive reporting with powerful dashboards and analytics to drive better student learning outcomes,” explains Sen, adding that the highly flexible and scalable ACE allows the publisher to roll out multiple products simultaneously.
As for QuAD, it has already been used by some of the biggest publishing houses in the world to generate more than a million questions. Prior to implementing QuAD at one major K–12 and higher education publisher, the LearningMate team took on a consulting exercise to understand the business needs, develop the roadmap, evaluate the application landscape, and finalize accessibility guidelines. “We developed more than 6,500 interactive test items in disciplines such as language arts, mathematics, geography, and English. In order to fast track the development process, we also developed over 200 templates. We are currently authoring another 40,000 test items to add to the existing 100,000,” says Sen.
GoClass, which won the platinum award at the 2013 IMS Conference, on the other hand, is a mobile teaching app that redefines the boundaries of computing in the classroom. A year ago, one K–12 publisher selected GoClass as the engine for their flagship intervention product in Literacy, allowing instructors to teach on a one-to-one computing environment with differentiated instruction. GoClass is now used in 170 districts covering 356 schools and 24,000 students in the U.S.
As for Frost, it allows content authoring and previewing on the fly, thus providing the ability to quickly create innovative and flexible interactive teaching materials. Two major publishers are currently beta-testing Frost, which supports both drag-and-drop and XML edit modes.
Attend “From Educational Analytics to Innovations in Print” session on October 16 at 12 p.m. in Hall 4.0’s Forum Production in Publishing, where v-p for enterprise solutions Amit Soman will provide even more case studies on learning and analytics. Or visit booth C78 in Hall 4.2 for more information.
MPS Limited
The need to enable faster time-to-market through automation and efficient workflows has seen MPS adding many features to its flagship DigiCore platform. The DigiComp automated composition engine, for instance, now supports InDesign Server while its configurable QA tool has been rolled out for automated output validation in exception-based routing. Its XML review and editing tool DigiEdit, on the other hand, has additional math editing GUI and enhanced functionalities for copy editors. “We have also rolled out a Rights and Permissions Management module within DigiCore for managing permissions for text and images,” says senior v-p for technology Narendra Kumar.
As for cloud-based MPSTrak, it now offers reminders and notifications management, user personalization, audit trail management, mail processing from external servers, and integration with the Rights and Permissions module.
MPSTrak is gaining momentum and maturity with each implementation. At a leading STM society, where a 12-year-old desktop-based system had functioned as the main production tracking and management tool, MPSTrak is now implemented to manage the 70-plus journals that are available online and in print. “An XML Editor now offers authors online proofing capabilities while custom-built Web-based APIs provide real-time integration between internal and external systems such as those at their aggregators and online bookstores,” adds Kumar.
With a leading medical publisher, the implementation of MPSTrak with features such as scheduling, work task tracking, reporting, and online content editing, is about “reducing operational costs and production lead-time while increasing process transparency to stakeholders and authors,” explains Kumar, whose team also implemented MPSTrak and DigiCore at an Australian publisher to facilitate seamless online, mobile, and offline product channels.
Publishers are striving to enhance their viability during these uncertain times of shifting business models, and are seeking more than just lower costs from their suppliers. For CEO Rahul Arora, the fundamentals of the MPS business are no longer driven by wage arbitrage, but are balanced by its contribution towards the revenue side of the publishing. “Today, we have deeper collaboration with publishers in the areas of product development, platform improvement, and richer analytics. Also, our vision is to have our entire services business be managed through MPS platforms that are either integrated with existing publisher systems and/or used by publishers through a ‘Platform as a Service’ model. We possess technology capabilities to not only address the conventional segment, but also to create technology-intensive platforms for smaller publishers”.
Arora and his team will be at booth N10 in Hall 4.2 to provide more information and demos on MPS’ suite of platforms and services.
OKS Group
The focus of OKS Group, says founder and CEO Vinit Khanna, is on “helping clients to expand and monetize their digital offerings, from e-books and journals to digital classroom products.”
And this is where the group’s cloud-based workflow platform e2e comes into the picture. “The updated e2e actively solves client challenges, namely in eliminating the cumbersome, single-threaded process of file transfer, typesetting, and corrections. It offers the efficiencies of true collaboration and online communication, and more autonomy for authors, thus resulting in greater speed and accuracy,” says Khanna, adding that “from a collaboration and cost standpoint, e2e is ideal for Open Access publishers, and incredibly helpful for the others”.
Among the advantages of e2e are: platform independence (requiring no local software installation); an integrated math editor; customized client rules defined upfront; zero reliance on conventional typesetting to generate structured content, create pages, and incorporate corrections; and the ability to realize significant cost savings while taking advantage of parallel product deliveries in XML, HTML, PDF, and ePub3.
Flexibility, says Khanna, “is a key feature. The bottom line is that e2e is a single platform that can easily support multiple outputs. It streamlines workflow with lower risk of introducing errors, which means a higher quality result at reduced cost and faster turnaround times to the publisher.”
OKS Group is well positioned to work with European customers offering digital classroom as well as traditional print products, Khanna says. “We are proud of our translation capabilities, and our ability to serve clients in their local language. We are especially happy to be in Frankfurt because of our strong teams supporting the German, Dutch and Swedish speaking markets. We give each client the customized solution they need, from compliance with their platform specifications—for Bookshelf in the Netherlands, for instance—to project management and client support in their language.”
While STM has always been among the group’s strengths due to its ability to handle complex formulas and layouts, there are many other services that the team can provide. “Our staff is trained to find sellers of pirated content. We offer graphic, editorial, and data services. We work with clients to identify opportunities to repurpose, digitize and monetize older content. We research rights and permissions. Our clients understand that the way to succeed is to have a comprehensive strategy and the ability to execute it, and we have the tools, experience, and knowledgeable resources to deliver exactly that.”
Contact marketing@oksgroup.com to fix an appointment to discuss your projects with OKS Group team members from Germany, Sweden, and India.
Publishing Technology
Last month, Publishing Technology launched a midtier solution IngentaDrive for publishers who are looking to host their own branded site using standardized technology but without the considerable investment in time and bespoke software development. “IngentaDrive offers the best of our specialized solutions such as user-tested templates, self-service management system, modern responsive design, and standard third-party integration,” says marketing manager Mike Groth, whose team will provide daily demos on IngentaDrive and Ingentaconnect services at 11 a.m. from its booth with PCG (Publishers Communication Group), a division of Publishing Technology, in Hall 4.2 L35.
The well-established Ingentaconnect platform, says Groth, recently added 5,400 new titles from the British Library, available via its Document Supply service. “With Ingentaconnect’s user base of over 25,000 registered institutions in 170 countries along with a built-in network of library discovery partnerships, this increases the discoverability of British Library content to a new global audience,” says Groth, whose team has just implemented a new publishing platform for the Society of General Microbiology, the largest such society in Europe. It brings together 55,000 articles from six journals, and employs the best features of Pub2web technology and third-party integrations such as Figshare. Meanwhile, PCG has partnered with Japanese publisher Meteo to bring its database of otherwise inaccessible medical content to America’s academic and medical institutions.
At Frankfurt, Publishing Technology will unveil a cloud version of Product Manager title management solution, which is a part of the advance enterprise system. Initially configured for one of the world’s largest trade publishers to manage their IP globally, the app enables easy aggregating, bundling and monetization of print and digital assets by applying flexible business models. The SaaS version of Product Manager, adds Groth, “removes barriers between different business functions, ensuring everyone in a publishing organization is editing and using the same data.” Daily demos on this cloud version are held at 12 p.m. at its Hall 4.2 booth as well as from Publishing Technology’s main booth in Hall 6.2 B28.
PCG managing director Melissanne Scheld will chair “What Is a Publisher Now? Lessons from the Classroom” roundtable at 2 p.m. on October 14 in Hall 4.2’s Hot Spot Professional and Scientific Information. Then at 4 p.m. in Hall 6.2’s Hot Spot Digital Innovation, executive v-p for business development Jane Tappuni will speak at “Mickey Mouse to Minecraft: Licensing Children’s Brands”. On the following day, executive v-p for product strategy Randy Petway and Helen Sun, CEO of Publishing Technology China, will be discussing about “Open Access: The Next Wave” in Hall 4.C’s Concorde Room at 9 a.m.
SourceHOV and Rule 14
SourceHOV will launch two new products at Frankfurt this year. One of them is known as Jet, which is an automated metadata extraction for academic publishers. “By applying machine learning, natural language processing, and mathematical modeling to content, manual intervention is completely removed,” says senior director of editorial services John Sollami. “This provides immense speed for the publisher to go to market, and does away with vendor dependency. The results are time, cost, and quality benefits.”
Machine learning, natural language processing, and mathematical modeling “are crucial for anyone publishing content and wanting to utilize it fully,” Solami adds. “Every publisher must accurately identify various essential elements in their content in order to utilize it. The question is how to do so without incurring the time, cost, and accuracy issues of manual intervention. More publishers are now recognizing the great benefits of automating this process, and are clamoring for a solution. Our solution for these publishers is Jet.”
The chief developer of Jet and manager of Rule 14, an affiliate company of SourceHOV, Shao-Shao Cheng, will deliver a talk on “Automated Metadata Extraction Using ML-NLP-Mathematical Modeling” at 3:15 p.m. on October 16 in Hall 4.0’s Hot Spot Publishing Services.
The second product, BoxOffice, provides a range of cloud-based enterprise information management services that enable organizations to ingest, extract, and store key data from documents. “It empowers business units with actionable and trackable intelligence,” says Nakul Parashar, v-p for enterprise content management, adding that “cloud-based BoxOffice offers greater security, a drastic reduction in paper handling, and allows role-based access for seamless retrieval in most formats.”
For Parashar, publishers as clients have always been looking at reducing costs, but for most, cost reductions have now become critical to survival. “Publishers are looking at achieving high quality, better project management, and faster turnaround times at much lower costs, which are all major challenges to solutions providers like us. They also want to repurpose their content. At SourceHOV, we took these challenges as our guiding spirit to achieve our objective, which is to help publishers.”
Adds Parashar, “We already have a number of proven technologies and workflows in place, and now we have added BoxOffice and Jet, which are new products that use forward-thinking content extraction and classification techniques. Our products are deployed at a number of large organizations as enterprise-wide solutions, and have been proven successful in helping publishers.”
For more information on SourceHOV and Rule 14 products and solutions, visit booth L54 in Hall 4.2.
Stison Publishing Solutions
Getting the metadata right from the start takes the center stage at Stison. “We understand that metadata is not ‘glamorous’. But getting the right systems and technology in place to handle bibliographic and other data means publishers can do away with many of those mundane and repetitive jobs around numbers and records—and get on with the creative things they do so well. Consider it as an investment, and that metadata control is not just for the big boys,” says managing director Alex Murphy.
Stison’s cloud-based scalable publishing management solution gives publishers, distributors, and rights agents control of their data so that they can simply send it where they want to. So driven is Stison about the importance of metadata that it offers its core Title Manager module free for publishers with less than 200 publications.
Adds Murphy: “It is our aim to avoid tech-speak and the complications traditionally associated with software installations. Our publishing solution with its different modules is designed to be simple and intuitive; no lengthy training course or a thick tome of instruction manual required. You can just log on and run it in no time. The modules—covering royalties, e-book, Web, production, rights, and title management—enable all information to be stored in a single platform for quick access wherever you are.”
Over the last 12 months, the team has been busy installing rights and royalty management modules at various publishing houses. “Aside from being able to import sales data from any number of sources quickly—and painlessly—the module offers the ability to generate royalty statements on the fly, and bulk send those statements via email.” During one installation process, an error report and the ensuing investigation led Murphy and his team to uncover the fact that the publisher had been overpaying some of their authors. “But with the new module, cross-checking will ensure such error does not recur.”
Ultimately, good practice is about accuracy of data, and “that is why Stison believes in getting it right from the start. One client went from an accuracy of just under 50% to around 90% after installing our title management module,” says Murphy, pointing out that with the technology changing so fast, using a system like Stison “ensures that data can be managed, transferred, sent and distributed any where at any time easily. Having your data in a smart, tagged database ensures that you are planning for the future as well as today.” Visit booth J94 in Hall 4.2 to get more information and case studies on Stison.
Young Digital Planet
With “Your Partner in 21st Century Education” as its Frankfurt theme, Polish firm Young Digital Planet (YDP) is all about empowering teachers, engaging students, and improving learning outcomes. Established in Gdansk in 1990, and staffed by a group of education specialists and technology professionals, YDP is a part of Sanoma Learning, one of Europe’s leading educational companies. It offers digital solutions for K–12 and preschool education, and delivery platforms and technologies for the publishing industry. Its products have been used in more than 45 countries, with its digital courses localized accordingly.
“We believe that efficacy in education is achieved by focusing on individual needs. So we have adopted a personalized approach that allows students to choose their learning path and style, and unlock their potential,” says CEO Kuba Pancewicz, adding that “more freedom in learning boosts self-motivations, which is the best way to achieve true engagement.” This philosophy and its innovative solutions have seen the company winning various awards including Poland’s New Technology Leader Award, Top Quality—Quality International (QI) Laureate title and the gold prize, and Ambassador of the Polish Economy award.
One of its big projects revolves around providing content and content development technologies to People’s Education Press, China’s K–12 publishing house. “We also collaborate with Hong Kong Education City Limited, which is under the aegis of the territory’s ministry of education. Our Digital Books and Media Solution, or DBMS, for instance, is used to digitize the Hong Kong and Macao educational sectors,” says Pancewicz.
During Frankfurt, YDP’s booth (C67 in Hall 4.2) will offer presentations on various topics including gamifying books, perfect blended learning for kindergarten, supporting teachers in their digital journey, the special role of math and science in today’s education, 21st-century learning and teaching skills, and creation of truly interactive books. Presentations start at 10 a.m. daily from October 14 to 16. Head of YDP think tank Jolanta Galecka will focus on “Textbook Digitization in Germany: Lessons Learned” at 11 a.m. on October 16 at Hall 4.2’s Hot Spot Education. Online and mobile solutions product manager Marcin Skrabka, on the other hand, will explore the topic, “Gamifying Books and Content on Mobile Devices”, at 12:30 p.m. on the same day over at Hall 6.2’s Hot Spot Digital Innovation.
Free copies of “The Book of Trends in Education 2.0,” a comprehensive 334-page report on 51 of the most recent trends in education by 22 YDP experts and renowned specialists in the field, are available from its booth and website (ydp.eu).
