Workflow

I had the pleasure of hosting terrific webinar last week, featuring HarperCollins senior director of global digital operations Leslie Padgett and content solutions architect at RSI Content Solutions Eliot Kimber. They did a great job of articulating how HarperCollins has begun to transition from legacy print production to a system that is automated and truly multichannel.

HarperCollins Publishers has undertaken a publishing automation program to accelerate book production. Come hear what they learned.

There is still time to register for Thursday's free webinar "Facts, fantasy, and realities of automating EPUB3 production at HarperCollins Publishers." Senior director of global digital operations at HarperCollins Leslie Padgett and senior solutions architect at RSI Content Solutions Eliot Kimber will take a deep dive into HarperCollins EPUB3 automation efforts and explain how the publisher is bringing digital production in-house.

Few publishers are developing digital content alone. Partnerships are key for publishers to transition from print-centric production cycles to truly multi-channel production. Partnership may be as minimal as shipping print PDFs to a conversion service to create EPUB files or as involved as hiring an expert to implement a new production workflow.

Depending on your point of view, digital technology has either undermined or enabled the book publishing industry. Either way, there's no denying that digital technology has changed publishing. Change is constant, inevitable, and often irreversible. So it goes.

CURIOUS strollers in early-16th-century Venice might have paused by the shop of the great printer Aldus Manutius only to be scared off by a stern warning posted over the door. "Whoever you are, Aldus asks you again and again what it is you want from him," it read. "State your business briefly, and then immediately go away." To state the current business at hand briefly, Aldus is the subject of a new exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of his death - and the birth of reading as we know it.

This week IMS Global released the 2014 Learning Impact Report which summarizes trends we are seeing in the ed tech sector based on the current year and historical winners of IMS's annual Learning Impact competition. Many thanks to those that participated in the competition from around the world and, of course, the evaluators and editorial panel! Ed tech researchers or leaders interested in helping with the Learning Impact work in the future please contact us!

The publishing value chain has been completely transformed by technology. Speakers discuss some of the biggest issues to consider.

Publishers are reassessing tried-and-true workflows in the digital age because what we are now producing is not print books, but content. Content that must be available for export to any format-print, ebook, web-and that must not be locked within any one of those formats. Here at F+W, we are launching our content management system (CMS) to do just that. We have partnered with Librios, a company that allows us to customize their CMS for our own workflows.

Here are three takeaways that became apparent early in the process of building our own CMS.

What is the value of a book cover if fewer and fewer people shop at bookstores? I used to browse St. Mark's Bookshop looking for covers that caught my eye. It was an exciting way to discover new authors, and design played a huge role. Now, one increasingly encounters books through social media or online recommendations, and the role of the designer might, at first glance, seem diminished. As I look at the inspired creativity on display among the books published in 2014, however, design feels as relevant as ever.