The publishing industry has come a long way since some early caveman scribbled his first word on scrolls made by flattening the stems of the papyrus tree, while his cousin in another part of the world was doing the same thing on the calf or deerskin.
It would take time till 1454 when Johannes Gutenburg would publish the ‘Gutenberg Bible’ the first-ever mechanically printed book. This book not only used the first-ever moving typesets but was also portable. It set the ball rolling for future innovations in the world of publishing. Navigating its way through two decades of disruption, innovation has been at the heart of the publishing industry. Successful enterprises have shifted away from adopting innovation for the sake of it and moved towards a more measured, strategic approach
Right since then the publishing world has been at the crossroads of the debate on whether book publishing is a cultural mission aimed at disseminating or preserving knowledge, or, is it a business endeavor where a book is just a commodity like any other.
Regardless of whether we perceive the publishing industry as just a facilitator to disseminating the information and knowledge it cannot be denied that publishing is a business like any other, that provides readers with printed or electronic books that educate, inform, and entertain its customers.
And like any business, the publishing industry needs to re-invent itself, with cutting-edge innovation, to not only stay afloat against self-published digital content, but also to stay competitive.
Ahead of the Technology Curve
Impelsys with its leadership at the intersection of knowledge, technology, and eCommerce has positioned itself as a digital transformation partner of choice for the publishing industry.
We understand that the digital transformation of a publishing business goes beyond replicating its offline operational processes to an online workflow. Our innovation initiatives not only include enriching existing ebooks to modern file formats like Enhanced EPUB or EPUB 3 but also include providing a dedicated digital platform to reach out to the right audience at the right time. These innovations are also aimed towards enticing your target audience to subscribe or purchase digital assets. Unlike waiting for a trade publication to publish their annual data on industry trends, the publishers can harness the potential of the ‘Big Data, and AI/ML to analyse the trends of their publications across demographics and time zones in real-time and make proactive informed decisions.
At Impelsys we have a well-defined roadmap to transition our customers in the publishing industry to create their digital avatar that harnesses the power of disruptive technologies.
The irony of the publishing industry is that although digitalization has helped in increasing the readership of online content with geometric progression, at the same time the traditional publishing companies have not benefited proportionally with the surge in readership.
To a certain extent the fact that print books still dominate in revenue share, tends to draw a curtain over the fact that the ecosystem of the publishing industry has changed itself.
While the print books may continue to hold their fort for times to come, a digital publishing platform allows publishers to juggle with the variety of formats and package them per the business needs. Going through the detailed process of publishing a book, establishing sales channels, and having a grand book launch, may still not guarantee the success of a book. And many a time the unsold copies may have to be sent for paper recycling.
Make your Business Futureproof with Scholar 2.0
Impelsys has assuaged the pains of publishers with its Centralized Content Management System (CMS) integrated with the Scholar 2.0 platform. Now you have a centralized digital warehouse that stores all your digitals assets – eBooks, Journals, Audiobooks, Videos, and Courses. This acts as a feeder to your multiple portals catering to your geographically distributed audience. All maintenance is centralized ensuring a single source of truth for all your digital content. This leads to immense savings of time and a repository of content that is consistent across all your channels.
So do the print books lose out? Not really.
You can now Print-on-Demand (PoD) the physical books in the right quantities and the right geographical location. The dollar savings and operational efficiency are tremendous.
All-in-One Digital Platform for Publishers
A direct benefit of this centralized content management is that it makes your content ‘agile’. Your content agility powered by Impelsys makes it a lot easier for your content to be reused and repurposed across multiple formats and channels. Not only that, you have the option to sell these formats independently or you can package them together in different proportions to create your own ‘collections’ and have a separate pricing structure for the same.
OK…so now creating a collection of books, audios, and videos on Fairy Tales, while pricing the collection at a discount, may not be a thing of Fairy Tales after all!
Additionally, our platform allows you to have Military-grade DRM controls at micro levels if you were to chunk your content to granular levels (from books to chapters to individual pages) and package them per your business requirements.
At Impelsys we have a state-of-the-art Content Engineering team that injects life into your traditional content by converting them to modern formats like EPUB, Enhanced EPUB, EPUB 3 that allows you to add detailed illustrations, interactive graphs and mathematical formulas, video, sound, and animations to your text-based contents.
Unlock Your Digital Potential with Our Start-of-the-art Digital Solutions:
Yet another area where the innovation at Impelsys has touched the lives of the publishers is by helping them keep pace with the ever-evolving world of Metadata management. Most clients from the publishing industry have so far been oblivious of the close relationship between well-defined Metadata and the corresponding impact on increased sales. Well-defined metadata helps in the discoverability of your content easier and also helps in recommending the right options for your customers who may be away from your sight. Our SaaS-based platform provides a fully automated workflow for tagging your digital content with the right set of metadata. We follow the ONIX Metadata standards.
Several times we have faced our publisher friends who are wary of distancing themselves from their audience if they are leaving them online “all by themselves”. Their apprehensions are justified because in the traditional book outlets – books and learning media are organized in a strategically laid out retail floor-plan. The products are systematically displayed so that the customers are not only able to find what they are looking for but also the store can place the products like ‘New Releases’, ‘Trending’, ‘Special Offers’ strategically to capture the eyeballs of the customers. In addition to that, you have your staff to guide the customers in making informed purchase decisions.
What if we told you that our platform is capable of all this and much more in your virtual store?
Our advanced recommendation system derives the best of the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (AI/ML) to make individualized recommendations to your readers based on the usage data at both macro-level (across all audience or within similar demographics and peer groups) and micro levels ( your customer’s profile, usage and search history).
Additionally, your customers can quickly find their way across what they are looking for with the help of our advanced search capabilities. So we are happy to assure you that your customers are in safe hands!
You can utilize the time saved in strategizing the business model that is more profitable for a particular demographic profile. After all, your audience in Japan may have preferences different from your audience in Europe or Latin America for the same age, gender, and professional profile. You may not prefer painting all your customers with the same brush when planning or budgeting for your promotional campaigns. We help you with automated and individualized promotions for your customers, driven by our recommendation engine.
Transforming Ideas into Cutting-Edge Technology Solutions
Our Innovation Lab boasts of a host of other tools specially crafted for the publishing industry that can be offered as built-in capabilities on our platform or be plugged in independently.
(IQ) is an intelligent question generator that can generate questions (and corresponding answers) in multiple formats from your learning content. You can easily generate quizzes or encourage your users to self-assess themselves.
(Text Summarization) is a tool that saves the time of the learners by summarizing the desired content that is meaningful while retaining the essence of the original content.
(Metadata Tag Extractor) is an AI/ML-powered service that can pick up insights from a given document and associate them with tags that provide additional information about the entity.
Every day the R&D Team at our Innovation Lab is churning out innovative tools powered by emerging technologies to make our customers’ business impactful, competitive, and profitable.
At Impelsys, we understand the needs of the publishing industry and our spirit of continuous improvement enables us to develop and deliver unique solutions. We have touched the lives of more than 50 Thousand institutions and more than 35 Million end-users to make their life, profession, and learning experiences easy. We invite you to be a part of this wonderful journey as a valuable partner and grow together. This is surely going to be a journey you will be proud of. Get in touch with our experts to know more about our unique features to create a seamless customer experience.
– Mahesh A Chikodi
VP, Products & Platform
