With content being ever-consumed across multiple mediums and formats (print, e-books, audio books etc.), many digital publishers today find it increasingly challenging to scale quality content without affecting production time and cost.
The quest for a solution to the perennial challenges in digital publishing has benefited from technology in the guise of AI, automation, and cloud platforms. Here we have highlighted some extremely relevant challenges faced by digital publishers today and the effective ways technology can help.
The quality challenge : Some of the quality challenges confronting publishers are obtaining an error free page composition, data conversion with accuracy and integrity, maintaining publisher specific XML structure throughout the workflow , processing complex data such as tables or equations, accessibility issues, maintaining audit trial of edits and so on.
Solution: Automation in combination with AI and NLP is gaining prevalence and seen as the silver bullet to enhance quality. Smart pre-editing tools that use automation to prepare content for editing by performing cleanups including imposition of appropriate aspects of editorial style can help to reduce workload and errors. Composition tools to enhance page layout contribute towards delivering first proofs right. Centralized editing interface with version control can help to effectively track the changes made to content. Built-in support to typeset tables, equations, formulae along with a robust and standard equation editor based on MathML can make processing complex data simpler and accurate. Enriching the content using descriptive metadata at all stages of publishing cycle increases accessibility.
The schedule challenge: Continually shrinking publishing schedule and delays by authors, copyeditors and others can impact timelines in different ways.
Solution: This calls for the right level of tracking and diligent oversight. Cloud-based solutions provide the capability to track usage, results, and KPIs while smart editing tools that accommodate collaborative working and provide real time alert notifications to editors and authors can speed up the editorial workflow.
The profitability challenge: Digital Publishers wish to reduce operational costs through concurrent print and digital production. Other challenges include using obsolescence-proof publishing methods and re-purposing of content at a granular level.
Solution: An XML-first workflow supports simultaneous delivery of products print and digital while providing an archival, “future-proof” file format for the publication assets. A digital asset management (DAM) is the key enabler for an organization to reuse and repurpose content. With metadata being tagged in a consistent manner, content can be identified and retrieved to develop new products.
The Platform challenge: Publishers prefer a platform that is lightweight & intuitive, easy to customize and integrates with third party systems that they may like to continue with.
Solution: A light weight platform in terms of software or hardware with a familiar word-like editor interface provides an optimal user experience across the content publishing journey. The key ingredients of publishing strategy should encompass a robust suite of APIs that allows extending functionality to third party systems.
How XEditPro can end these Digital Publishing challenges
XEditPro is a technology-driven solution pioneered by diacriTech to streamline high-quality content production for books, journals, and periodicals. Cloud-based AI and intelligent automation together have a seemingly limitless number of use cases for addressing the above challenges and have been leveraged successfully in XEditPro. XEditPro has it all: effective implementation of technology, all the tools, and standards required for meeting the goals of contemporary publishers in one platform while keeping challenges to a minimum.
Ever since its inception, XEditPro has been significantly expediting publication turnaround time, increasing efficiency and saving costs for industry leading publishers.
Learn how XEditPro can resolve your publishing challenges by contacting marketing@diacritech.com.