Behind the Curtain on Cross Platform Production

Look at the publishing news these days and you'll read as much about devices as you do about books. There are new families of Kindles, Kobos and Nooks on the block; Google's Nexus 7 is outselling the Kindle Fire; Microsoft is betting big on its Surface tablet; oh, and maybe you've heard about an iPad mini coming 'round the bend? And let's not even get into the wild world of smartphones. Point is, while the printed book was once a platform unto itself, now the ways people read "books," and the devices they read on, are expanding.

At the Publishing Business Virtual Conference and Expo in September, a panel of publishing vets convened to discuss strategies meeting this challenge head on.

John Shaw, Executive Director of Publishing Technologies for SAGE, took a peek inside SAGE's online content repository, key to the publisher's XML-first process.

Andrew Brenneman, Founder of Finitiv, discussed the benefits of cloud-based delivery systems to deliver content to different platforms.

And Brian O'Leary, Principal at Magellan Media Consulting Partners, discussed strategies for balancing the "three gears" necessary to cross-platform production: tools, people and process.

The discussion focused on designing cross-platform strategies that allow publishers to prepare a single document that can be easily output to all channels: ebooks, mobile apps, web platforms and even print. Also discussed were the importance of avoiding costly, after-the-fact conversion, paying close attention to metadata and the sales importance of well-managed and -tagged content.

For more information, listen to the entire session online by logging in to the virtual show website.