Digital

Solutions in
INDIA
SPECIAL REPORT 2018

The ever-increasing content demand for mobile/cloud computing,

accessibility, and AR/VR is driving India’s digital solutions industry
 Rolling with the Changes
And Chaos
Vendors in India are meeting new content
and publishing demands head on
By Teri Tan
T
urning roadblocks into building blocks—that, and
sheer determination—drives India’s digital solutions
industry, where obstacles to achieving speedier,
smarter, more secure, and seamless workflows to meet
publishing demands are many and varied. Making
challenges into solutions, embracing new technolo-
gies, upping the ante, and pushing the envelope are par for the
(obstacle) course.
For many in the industry, the adoption of artificial intelli-
gence, robotic process automation, statistical machine learning,
natural language processing, and rule-based or expert systems—
collectively known as cognitive technologies—has helped in
sifting through the large volume of incoming content, flagging
anomalies, and accelerating internal production processes. So
what’s not to like? Since time is money in the digital solutions
and publishing industries, AI is surely worth its weight in gold.
(And no, robot overlords have not taken over the world, and
global warming poses a far more immediate existential risk.)
Along the way, publishers are going “virtual” to achieve
realism. Whether it is augmented reality (AR), virtual reality
(VR), or mixed reality (MR), the fact is that learning and
user experience have never been more fun, fascinating, or
engaging. Again, what’s not to like? For digital solutions
providers used to the tedium of dealing with words and
tomes, the opportunity to work on AR/VR/MR projects is
like letting kids loose in a toy store. (See “Making AR and
VR Work in Publishing,” p. 22.)
And there is blockchain technology, now a hot topic around
office watercoolers and at book fairs and publishing events. Its
potential applications in publishing are still being debated and
contemplated. But transaction-based activities—tracking and
tracing IP ownership in rights contracts or enabling direct pay-
ments from readers to authors, say, in self-publishing—are the
likeliest early implementations of blockchain. For now, the
industry is buoyed by the buzz, hype, and hope surrounding
this new technology.
That brings us to existing implementations that still pose
challenges. Metadata—the data about data—is one of them.
The basic descriptors for a book, an article, or a journal remain
cover illustration © metamorworks/istock
inconsistent and, in
many cases, incomplete,
which means that con-
tent discoverability is
not optimized, and higher
sales are not realized. Metadata is really the backbone of the
book industry, and until this inconsistency is straightened
out, bringing blockchain into the mix is probably not a good
idea. (See “A Quick Check on Metadata,” p. 28.)
Accessibility is another pressing matter. While publishers
have been converting printed content into accessible formats,
efforts are lagging far behind for educational websites, online
ancillaries, and other materials residing in the digital realm. To
address this issue, digital solutions providers are pushing for
“born accessible” content, which is developed right from the
start alongside print and digital formats. The journey so far has
been bumpy and erratic, even as the calls for accessibility are
getting louder by the minute. (See “Next Steps Toward Digital
Accessibility,” p. 25.)
Despite the constant changes, chaos, and challenges, digital
solutions players have been frenetically reducing production
costs, shortening turnaround time, and increasing work efficien-
cies. They are also busy branding their solutions: nearly every
sizable outfit has at least one core solution or platform that is
being offered as a SaaS, a PaaS, or an aPaaS along with a tiered
subscription model. The goal is workflow standardization and
process integration—and, of course, enabling closer client-
vendor partnerships.
A never-say-die resilience and a can-do attitude have seen
these industry players navigate bumps, potholes, and road-
blocks on the way to success and higher efficiencies with dex-
terity and chutzpah. The multifaceted roles they play—tech
geek, content protector, creative maestro, device genius, dis-
tribution expert, to mention a few—are largely fueled by new
technologies and improved tools. But they can’t do all of this
by themselves: publishers have to share the responsibilities
(and costs) of transforming their eureka ideas into reality.
Together, solutions vendors and publishers must map the
future of publishing. ■
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 3
 Relentless Digital Momentum
India-based vendors gear up for continuous process
automation, product innovation, and technology adoption
By Teri Tan
M
aintaining the status quo is anathema to any
digital solutions player. Not only is the com-
petition always snapping at their heels but
the client base (i.e., the publishing industry)
constantly demands something new, unique,
and robust to keep the workflow energized,
audiences engaged, and content monetized.
Cloud-based systems are now the must-have functionality,
and “agnostic,” “interactive,” “intuitive,” and “seamless” are the
adjectives that fuel the ideation and development of workflow
solutions and platforms. Publishing clients expect no less than
optimal price points to go with turbo-charged efficiencies and
ever-shorter turnaround times, which means that exerting max-
imum control over production, content, and e-deliverables is
the order of the day.
Protecting Data and Privacy
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is proving to be
a distracting, if not disruptive, curveball to the digital pub-
lishing process. The European Union’s recent implementation
of GDPR to protect personal data and privacy “is set to affect
the future of the digital publishing business,” says Indira Rajan,
CEO of Lapiz Digital Services. “It is an important issue that
both sides—digital solutions providers and publishing cli-
ents—will need to assess and contend with.”
Restrictions on gathering reader information is inevitable. “If
readers refuse to share their details, then publishers will have
little to no analytical data, which may impact the overall imple-
mentation of new strategies,” says Subrat Mohanty, CEO of
Hurix Digital. “It will also influence retargeting advertise-
ments, which publishers rely on by capturing targeted reader
information. Some dip in programmatic advertisement spending
is highly likely, as publishers will not get a proper read on
whether a specific advertisement has led to a purchase.”
Vinit Khanna, the founder and CEO of OKS Group, finds that,
as an ISO-certified company, “the new rules that GDPR brings
to the table are not far from those already in place within our
group. But we do expect some degree of caution from EU pub-
lishing houses when they embark on new partnerships with us.”
The domino effect of globalization means that the GDPR
impact will go beyond Europe, says Saraswathi Herurmath,
4 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ J U LY 2 , 2 0 1 8
assistant v-p of quality management at Impelsys. “There are
significant changes in how data is acquired and managed under
GDPR,” Herurmath says. “For publishers, for whom data is an
intrinsic business tool, some hiccups at the initial stage are
expected, but this regulation opens up new opportunities to
consolidate data strategy, to streamline it, and to make it more
efficient. And with consent at every step of the way, the trust
between customers and businesses is duly fortified.”
Deploying Artificial Intelligence
The siren song of AI and natural language processing (NLP) is
real, “but publishers need to understand that not all content is
equal, and not all content and products lend themselves to
reaping the benefits of automation,” says Waseem Andrabi, v-p
of content services at Cenveo Publisher Services. If content can
be structured and consistent rules applied, Andrabi says, “then
automation will bring benefits in terms of speed to market,
quality, and consistency.”
For Andrabi, it is imperative that publishers work with part-
ners who are fluent with onboarding content into major systems
and identifying content styles and rules. “AI is great,” Andrabi
says, “but it takes human intelligence to tell a system what to do.”
While AI and NLP are already in use for content distribution,
their disruptive forces are now being explored for content cre-
ation, says Sriram Subramanya, the founder and CEO of Integra
Software Services. “Digital content publishing has moved from
centralized content creation to cloud-based solutions to enhanced
distribution and visibility throughout the publishing process. If
past trends are an indication, then tomorrow’s will revolve more
around content curation, inclusive publishing, and a very
engaging user experience—all aided by AI and NLP.”
AI is definitely the single most important development in
recent months for Maran Elancheran, president of Newgen
KnowledgeWorks. “Publishing, like other industries, will be
revolutionized by how we use AI to streamline content delivery,”
Elancheran says. “Once it matures, all workflows may be dif-
ferent, and tools will be re-envisioned. From content creation
to consumption, everything can potentially change, with AI
This supplement is published with the support of
the vendors covered in these articles.
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
bringing about a completely new paradigm to both the pub-
lishing and the digital solutions industries.”
At MPS, a cognitive production system that profiles content
and orchestrates the production process is already in place. “This
system is based on the principle of selective control and excep-
tion processing, whereby a machine algorithm determines the
nature and level of intervention based on content complexity,
and routes the content accordingly,” says CEO Rahul Arora.
Concepts of AI, machine learning, robotic process automa-
tion, and NLP are new to both the publishing and the digital
solutions industries. “But it is clear,” says Abhigyan Arun, CEO
of TNQ, “that the future of production technology is heading
that way, because it must become far more efficient while
retaining, or potentially increasing, the quality threshold. This
blurs the lines between the traditionally known ‘prepress’ ven-
dors and ‘technology’ suppliers. While prepress vendors always
have technology, the demand for technology awareness and
leadership is at a completely different level.”
Embracing the Old and the New
TNQ “straddles the two worlds of complex and nonstandard
requirements of a society publisher and the increasingly stan-
dard requirements of a traditional publisher,” Arun says. “Our
tools, workflows, and underlying architecture are designed to
handle both. While we take a futuristic view when designing
our technology, we also make sure it works with conventional
workflows.”
But how to integrate new technologies for better output and
improved user engagement remains a concern for the publishing
industry, says Mohanty of Hurix Digital. “The shift to aban-
doning age-old Flash technology for HTML5 is aimed at
achieving better user engagement. Now, the industry is
adopting AR, which, along with enhanced user experience, is
expected to bridge the gap between physical and digital books.
However, most publishers find this shift expensive, in addition
to being unsure of its long-term benefits to their audience—and
this poses a roadblock to further digitization and technology
development in the industry.”
Additionally, Mohanty finds that those who have already
made the switch to digital platforms are struggling to keep their
readers engaged. “The younger generation, with its short atten-
tion span, puts great pressure on the digital publishing industry
to innovate and improve the engagement levels of their e-books,”
Mohanty says. “AR is one solution. Another is to add reflowable
content, allowing users to read on their device of choice without
any disruption to the overall user experience.”
For Rajan, of Lapiz Digital, the fact remains that most of the
production workflows in the market are still not geared toward
mobile content. “Whether content can be mobile-first or
mobile-only is something that we will see very soon,” Rajan
says. “However, traditional workflows have certainly embraced
accessibility standards, turning them into ‘born accessible’
workflows—and this is really good for the industry as a whole.”
6 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ J U LY 2 , 2 0 1 8
How publishers adapt, and adhere, to recent regulations, such
as having alternate text to images, will also determine the
growth of accessible content and digitization, says Elancheran,
of Newgen KnowledgeWorks. “For the frontlist, which should
be born accessible, it is easy to ask the author, or add a clause in
the contract, to provide alternate text. But what about the back-
list? Do publishers take these titles down from their sites
because they are not WCAG-compliant? Or do they connect
with offshore vendors to start the accessibility process?”
At the same time, Elancheran wonders whether publisher web-
sites will be redeveloped to make them accessible. “In the U.S.,
there has been an increase in lawsuits against companies because
their websites are hard to navigate for people with impairment,”
Elancheran says. “Again, for publishers, the regulatory require-
ments for accessible content will translate into increased spending,
investment, and efforts. For the digital solutions industry, there
is an urgent need to build processes and change workflows to
cover accessibility while retaining competitive pricing.”
Talking Dollars and Sense
The cost of creating books and the ability to rely upon a partner
to help, says Tyler Carey, chief revenue officer at Westchester
Publishing Services, “are topics that affect us and likely every
vendor in the industry. Publishers are stuck in a scenario of
mutually conflicting and dependent circumstances. The all-in
cost to edit and typeset a book in-house—overheads, recruit-
ment of copy editors, review with authors, and so on—can be
staggering to many chief financial officers. At the same time,
the perceived risks or costs of losing control of IP by handing it
over to an outside firm to manage is nerve-racking to the pro-
duction director or managing editor. This creates a challenge
for all vendors: quality has to be constantly upheld by all of us,
or the bad performance of a few players damages everyone.”
While Carey and his team have benefited from several vendor
replacement exercises, he finds that, in many cases, “the decision
is triggered not by the need to pick a replacement vendor but
has more to do with evaluating the decision to bring the work
back in-house.” (Westchester published a white paper, “Prepress
Services for Publishers: In-house or Third Party,” through PW
in March.)
A funding crunch looms large. “It is straining scholarly pub-
lishing programs and research at universities and their presses,”
says Subramanya, of Integra Software Services. “It is certainly
impacting institutional subscription revenues for scholarly pub-
lishers, requiring them to find innovative revenue models
through direct access to end users. And this is where discover-
ability and relevancy comes in. As for the higher education
publishing segment, sliding enrollment due to sociopolitical
factors and employability challenges across the world continues
to roil revenue streams. ROI on digital products and digitiza-
tion is going to take longer than expected. Another challenge
is the availability of Open Education Resources, or OER, which
directly affects a publisher’s competency in curating and devel-
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
oping impactful content to facilitate learning.”
Vidur Bhogilal, vice chairman of Lumina Datamatics, is seeing
scholarly publishers consolidating the number of vendors they
use, working on services and solutions at optimized price points,
and seeking out vendors to invest in technology. “While these
publishers also expect innovation, they may not be too keen to
invest,” Bhogilal says. “These factors combined have resulted in
margin pressures for vendors, mostly due to rising production
costs and continuous expectations for price optimization.”
Not surprisingly, making publishing sustainable for society
publishers, university presses, and small and midsize publishers
with limited funding and resources is one major goal for Ravi
Venkataramani, the cofounder and CEO of Exeter Premedia
Services. “For these publishers,” Venkataramani says, “the
wherewithal required to constantly upskill their team to keep
pace with changing consumer needs and newer technologies
while consistently producing high-quality, high-impact publi-
cations without increasing the budget or resources is a big
hurdle.”
New print editions are down in the education space while
publishers are committed to having a larger presence in both
digital and rental markets, says Bhogilal, of Lumina Datamatics.
“Most publishers are also generating a major part of their rev-
enues from new editions that are executed through modular
workflows. They are looking more at unique products that pro-
vide meaningful learning outcomes, which means that their
needs for assessment, interactivity, and validation are growing.”
Content monetization remains problematic. “Publishers
often wonder if they will be able to monetize their content by
investing in digital technologies and, if yes, when the returns
will show,” says A.R.M. Gopinath, executive v-p at DiacriTech.
“Unfortunately, new technologies keep coming up, and there
is simply no straight answer to their question. The one thing
that publishers should remember is that content must be
future-ready and that this has to be done in a cost-effective
manner without compromising its enrichment and value. In
this evolving world of education and content dissemination,
there is no single perfect solution to content monetization.”
Pricing pressures continue to challenge everyone in the
market—content consumers, service providers, and publishers,
says Marianne Calilhanna, marketing director at Cenveo
Publisher Services. “The ubiquity of publishing tools and
content contributes to the false perception that publishers
provide little value,” Calilhanna says. “The Society for
Scholarly Publishing has a classic blog post—Kent Anderson’s
‘102 Things Journal Publishers Do’—that dives into details on
the values that publishers provide. While this list is specific
to the scholarly market, educational publishers and even trade
publishers will find parallels in the list.”
Ongoing Industry Transition
Publishers are trying to redefine themselves and searching for
the right business model, says Arun, of TNQ. “Elsevier, for
instance, is evolving into a data analytics company and ana-
lyzing everything differently from that angle—and this is an
exciting transition phase. Hindawi, PNAS, and eLife, on the
other hand, have changed the Open Access platform into a
mainstream output with very high-quality benchmarks and
efficient workflows. In fact, OA seems free of the inefficiencies
faced by conventional publishing workflows. Then you have
small society publishers who, having encountered difficulties
in sustaining their unique model, are merging with commer-
cial publishers.”
The publishing industry is going through a unique transition
right now, says Uday Majithia, assistant v-p of technology
services and presales at Impelsys. “We have seen that tech-
nology-enhanced content has the power to change how we
read and learn. While consumers are digitally savvy and want
access to content on the fly, in smaller bytes, and interlinked,
content creators have been playing catchup. This is partly
because consumers have constantly evolving usage patterns,
which requires that platforms also evolve easily. In the absence
of such platforms, publishers may not see the desired ROI.”
The growth of OERs in educational publishing has seen MPS
investing in talent—in instructional design and editorial man-
agement. “This investment is to enable the differentiation and
competitiveness of our clients as they develop their products
that are powered by us,” says Arora, of MPS.
The increased focus in life cycle management on the complete
user experience has prompted Arora to look into enhancing all
MPS platforms and to deliver top-quality author services (edito-
rial, creative, and marketing) to clients. “The acquisition of
THINK,” Arora says, “which covers everything from order
management to cash cycle, allows us to support our clients’
clients in their customer life cycle through technology and
dedicated customer support.”
And while the publishing industry has traditionally been
slow to digitize, in recent years there has been significant
adoption of various technologies, such as research collabora-
tion, production workflow tools, and discoverability. “The
challenge now lies in keeping pace with the changes in tech-
nology and in leveraging technology effectively,” says
Venkataramani, of Exeter Premedia Services. “In some cases,
there is a need to tackle the flip side of adopting multiple
technologies—for instance, the use of multiple systems and/or
services that are not smoothly interoperable.”
Addressing Digitization Hiccups
The question of how to frame an XML schema—and how to
achieve an XML-first workflow—has undermined many pub-
lishers’ digitization efforts, according to Khanna, of OKS
Group. “Publishers also have other concerns: immense pressure
on profit margins and production budgets, high demand for
interactive e-learning products, shorter time to market, and
intense competition to produce innovative methodologies
across all streams,” Khanna says. “All these exert an impact on
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 7
 Digital Solutions in India 2018

the funding of an XML migration strategy.” Publishers, Khanna
says, “need thorough groundwork before embarking on such a
strategy so that their content creation requirements are prop-
erly and adequately incorporated into the XML schema, which
will minimize the chances of their efforts and financial invest-
ments ending in vain.”
Even though his team is constantly improving automation
and making workflows more efficient, it “often has to work with
client platforms and methodologies that are not yet config-
ured with the latest technologies,” Khanna says. “This forces us
to downgrade the way we work, resulting in lower productivity
and longer lead times.”
Schools, districts, and professors are still slow in adopting
digital publishing, says Bhogilal, of Lumina Datamatics. “At
times, students themselves prefer the print product and strongly
influence school and teacher decisions. So the present market is
not homogenous, and the print book is the standardized
product with a generally accepted role in education.” With
digital education products being overwhelming in their
diversity and with the science on what works still nascent,
Bhogilal finds that “there is little market agreement on what is
best—and that has prevented further adoption and wider
consumption.”
The obstacles in digitization, says Carey, of Westchester
Publishing Services, are largely business driven. “In past years,
there was a high level of expectation for e-books, but with print
sales expanding and e-books cooling down, some publishers are
scaling back on their backlist conversion or delaying experi-
mental ePub projects,” Carey says. But the juvenile fiction seg-
ment “is seeing more activity, with publishers reprioritizing
fixed-layout projects that involve working with files and for-
mats that predate InDesign and therefore require more effort
and cost to resurrect from the archives.”
On the supplier side, fast-changing technologies mean that
the choice is to either innovate or be left behind, says Amit
Vohra, the founder and CEO of Continuum Content Solutions.
“Then there is the recruitment issue,” Vohra says. “A small or
medium-sized operation may not need a full-time HR division
for recruiting staff, but finding the right talent, and developing
the relevant skills and competencies, is key to a sustainable
future, especially during peak growth periods.”
As for the client side, Vohra observes that some publishers are
not willing to respond to or provide their views on time, which
causes unwarranted delays in the content digitization process.
“This plodding may be the result of their inability to assimilate
new workflows, which in turn fortifies their unwillingness to
move away from the traditional work process,” Vohra says. “So
it becomes a vicious cycle despite the urgent need to implement
new technologies and solutions to provide faster turnarounds
and shorter time to market.”
Building a system that is comprehensive but still malleable
enough to adapt to the different ways publishers work is one
major issue. “We provide an interface that is easy enough to be
used by every participant in the publishing process, including
writers, editors, designers, proofreaders, and partners,” says
Ashok Giri, CEO at PageMajik. “Another issue that we face
comes from the very nature of PageMajik itself. A lot of the work
we do is new and innovative, which means that there are no clear
guidelines for how we should proceed or mark progress. But we
have to deal with this, and the only way to move forward is to
keep delivering on the goals we set for ourselves.”
Skepticism from publishers about whether any single system
can fit their unique working style is widespread and understand-
able, Giri says. “We fight this by being scrupulously open about
our capabilities and by testing the system using files from pro-
spective clients themselves to show that we really can deal with
books and journals like theirs. We also run trials with prospec-
tive clients to demonstrate that our system can deliver what has
been promised. At the same time, we make the technology
transition less painful by making our entire CMS incredibly

Online Coverage of the Digital Solutions Industry

The following articles are available online in conjunction with this print report:
● Showcasing Their Expertise (features complex projects from various vendors)

Articles in the Expert Series, written by invited vendors, examine critical topics impacting both publishing and digital
solutions industries:
● Instructional Design for Digital Publishing by Sriram Subramanya, founder and CEO of Integra Software Services
● Content Acquisition to Knowledge Delivery by Uday Majithia, assistant v-p of technology services and presales at Impelsys
Related Reads from PW:
● AR/VR Innovation Dominates Bologna’s Digital Hall ● How to Build a Digital Classroom
● A (Block)Chain Reaction for Publishing ● ALA 2018 Spotlight: What’s Next for Digital Content in
● Books Meet Tech at PubTechConnect Libraries?

Visit publishersweekly.com/digitalsolutions2018 to read the full coverage, and publishersweekly.com/digital-

marketplace to find out more about the vendors featured in this report.

8 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ J U LY 2 , 2 0 1 8
 Continuing our
Longtime Reign
as a One-Stop
Partner in
Content

CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
SERVICES INTERACTIVE EBOOK
• E-Learning & Personalized Learning DEVELOPMENT
• Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality
• Gamification & Simulations APP DEVELOPMENT
• Video-based Learning & Microlearning SERVICES
• Content Curation & Creative Writing
www.lapizdigital.com

• Interactive Video-Based Learning TYPESETTING

SERVICES
GRAPHIC DESIGN SERVICES
• Advertising and Corporate Branding COPYEDITING
• Print Media Design & Web Design SERVICES
• Infographics & Moving Graphics
• Hand Drawn Illustrations CONVERSION
• Motion Graphics & 2D/3D Animation SERVICES
• Image & Video Editing/Enhancement
CMS | LMS
contact@lapizdigital.com
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
modular. This way, users are not forced to change anything they
do not want to about how they work.”
Meanwhile, engaging consumers who are, in turn, empowered
to create their own content and publish it for free is a challenge
of its own, says Gopinath of DiacriTech. “User-generated content
is now universal due to social media platforms,” Gopinath says.
“So it is mandatory for publishers and production companies to
embrace these new platforms in view of the fast-advancing pub-
lishing ecosystem. Unless the publisher is moving forward with
digital engagement as fast as the technology and platform are
evolving, there is going to be stagnation and opportunities lost
Cenveo Publisher Services
The application of AI and NLP is a key component of Smart
Suite 2.0 from Cenveo Publisher Services, a cloud-based eco-
system of publishing tools that streamlines high-quality con-
tent production. When a manuscript is first processed in Smart
Edit—a pre-edit, copyedit, and conversion module—AI runs an
automated content cleanup, normalization, and style-applica-
tion process. Next, NLP identifies content and scores the manu-
script’s quality based on a grading system. “Manuscripts then
flow to copyediting channels based on that score,” says Waseem
Andrabi, v-p of content services. “Some may go to a copy editor
for heavy editing, while others may go straight into composition
via Smart Compose and then on to the author via Smart Proof.”
The fully automated Smart Compose production engine
works with 3B2 and InDesign, and uses predefined styles to
guarantee consistent and high-quality layouts. Browser-based
Smart Proof provides authors and editors with a proofing tool
that captures changes and allows for valid XML round tripping.
Smart Track brings everything together in one easy UI that logs
all content transactions and presents a visual flow of content as
it moves through production stages.
“These four modules make up Smart Suite 2.0,” says mar-
keting director Marianne Calilhanna, “the next generation pub-
lishing engine that utilizes a combination of AI, natural lan-
guage processing, and system intelligence to significantly
reduce human intervention and achieve the goal of high-speed
publishing with editorial excellence.”
Earlier in the year, the Taylor & Francis Group acknowledged
Cenveo’s progress with a fivefold increase in full-service produc-
tion volume. The critical piece that convinced T&F to go with
Cenveo was its technology stack. “It supports our publishing
model and provides real-world, expedited publication turn-
around time using AI and NLP technology,” says Stewart
Gardiner, T&F’s global production director. “The organizational
and operational innovations that Cenveo proposed to support a
rapid production scale-up were capabilities we have not seen
from other providers and were clearly based on lessons learned
in previous ramp-ups.”
Cenveo’s digital and e-learning services continue to grow.
10 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
to the competition.”
Publishers must also realize that the future of the content
industry is going to be shaped by automation, AI, and Big Data,
Gopinath says. “Data will be of more value, and businesses will
revolve around the ability to adapt. Thus, the faster we evolve
and adopt new technologies, the better the profits will be.”
On the brighter side, Rajan, of Lapiz Digital Services, says
that “recent industry reports have implied that publishers who
separate their online and print businesses were twice as innova-
tive, with 60% higher market penetration than those that
remained integrated. That is definitely food for thought.”
“Every organization, not just publishers, requires some form of
e-learning offering to educate staff,” Calilhanna says, “whether
that means instructing employees on phishing, social engi-
neering email, or teaching best practices for file-sharing applica-
tions for its staff. This is where our new corporate learning
division, Cenveo Learning, set for launch this summer, comes
into the picture.”
Continuum Content Solutions
Significant upgrades have been made to ContinuumX, the com-
pany’s robust, agile, and seamless solution that is specifically
targeted at the newspaper and magazine segment. “It now com-
bines AI and NLP to process PDFs, allowing us to produce
content pages 60 to 90 minutes from the time the PDFs are
received from clients,” says Amit Vohra, founder and CEO.
Producing 8,000 to 9,000 XML pages daily from client-
supplied PDFs is nothing new at Continuum Content Solutions.
“ContinuumX now covers NDNP-based METS/ALTO file cre-
ation for archival newspaper, magazine, and journal content,”
Vohra says. “This means that the issuance, pagination, and
article-level metadata is automatically identified by the system
itself. And best of all, the system’s configuration file can be
modified to produce different PDFs and image files as required.”
Automatic file validation tools have also been added for several
ePub projects to allow the team to automate QA tasks.
“Publishers are now
focused on the Replica
Map file format,” Vohra
says. “This format com-
bines the rasterized ver-
sion of original print
layout with full-screen
images of each page and
reflowable representa-
tions of the text and
images from individual
articles. This means
Amit Vohra, founder and CEO of ContinuumX has to con-
Continuum Content Solutions tinually evolve to accom-
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
modate these changes while providing rapid turnaround time
and high-quality deliverables to bring about savings in produc-
tion costs and faster time-to-market for our clients.”
Continuum’s specialization in the newspaper and magazine
segment has differentiated it from others in the market, with
the team now working with media-monitoring companies,
aggregators, and content syndication companies for projects
ranging from XML file conversion to database product creation
based on digitized archival content.
The next 12 months, Vohra says, will be focused on media-
monitoring services. “For now, we provide digital file produc-
tion services to create daily, weekly, and monthly digital publi-
cations within a three-hour turnaround time,” Vohra says. “We
also publish content in multiple formats for different devices
using the ContinuumX solution.”
To meet new demands from this niche segment, Vohra is
looking at equipping ContinuumX with higher levels of auto-
mation and accuracy in addition to offering Latin and non-Latin
language capabilities. “The solution now offers a number of
built-in, for-export file formats that can be activated simultane-
ously for multiple delivery channels,” Vohra says. “Our experi-
enced technology team is on hand to tweak the workflow to fit
client requirements.”
DiacriTech
Eleven publishers have adopted XEditPro, DiacriTech’s com-
prehensive publishing suite based on machine learning and AI,
and the results have been positive. “The NLP and AI capabilities
have proven to help copy editors and editors identify spelling
and grammar issues while also ensuring that notes, images,
tables, and references are cited and cross-linked,” says executive
v-p A.R.M. Gopinath. “References are checked against standard
databases such as Crossref and PubMed, and parsed into their
constituent parts. Missing data is automatically added for the
copy editor to review.”
Using XEditPro, authors, copy editors, editors, and proof-
readers can make edits directly—and simultaneously—to the
copy, and their revisions are tracked. “Not only does XEditPro
assist in the collaborative authoring and editorial process,” says
executive v-p Mahesh Balakrishnan, “but it also generates print
PDFs, web PDFs, XML, Word, and ePub files instantaneously.
Such streamlining allows publishers to take control over the
revision stages and trim the schedule and costs significantly.”
Every feature and functionality that has been integrated into
XEditPro “comes from our two decades of knowledge and exper-
tise in publishing services,” Gopinath says. “Additional requests
coming from current adopters are helping us to build an even
more robust platform for the publishing community.”
Traditional work processes, Gopinath says, “should be
improved with viable, and sustainable, technology for pub-
lishers. A product such as XEditPro, for instance, adds value by
combining workflows in a customizable fashion that is also
easily integrated with existing systems; AI with human intu-
Mahesh Balakrishnan (l.) and Madhu Rajamani of DiacriTech
itiveness is a powerful way to decode any complexity. This is the
strategy we have used to launch other solutions such as InXML.”
Funding issues, he says, “are a major impediment to adopting
new solutions, but most publishers are keen to explore innova-
tive workflows and processes. They understand that traditional
workflows have to change and that digitization is the future.”
Aside from XEditPro and InXML, another new solution
coming from the DiacriTech team is Immersive Gaze, which
focuses on interactive technology solutions. “As an organization,
we have been steadily growing over the years, with services
evolving around advanced technologies,” Balakrishnan says.
“Our solutions are strategically prudent, and with Immersive
Gaze, we have now diversified into the AR/VR/MR realm. Two
major projects—an AR-based library and another using
HoloLens MR for the healthcare sector—have proven our exper-
tise in this new field.”
Exeter Premedia Services
To “deliver happy authors” is the promise (and slogan) of Kriya,
a cloud-based publishing platform from Exeter Premedia. “Books
typically have more complex workflows and longer cycle times
than journals and are likely to have more than one contributing
author,” says cofounder and CEO Ravi Venkataramani. “Kriya,
which means definitive action in Sanskrit, has specific functional-
ities that enable authors to work simultaneously on multiple
chapters in different stages of production, that offer automated
indexing, that handle versioning—or backups and tracking across
different articles, chapters, and users—and that provide secure
setup with role-based access. These capabilities are made possible
using an integrated CMS and configurable workflows.”
Kriya has a subscription-based pricing model for books and
journals, says COO Sowmya Mahadevan, “to enable our clients
to plan better, since their monthly costs are predictable and
fixed. Clients can choose a page- or project-based model or a
customized enterprise model that includes a cloud platform and
professional support. By enabling process streamlining, Kriya
injects a significant boost to productivity and output quality,
thus transforming production into a profit center.”
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 11
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
This 14-year-old company
developed Kriya after lis-
tening to clients’ pain points,
wish lists, and insights. “The
author-centric design and
streamlined XML-first work-
flow empowers authors to
directly edit and review, which
increases productivity while
reducing project turnaround
time,” Venkataramani says,
noting that a midsize U.K.-
based scholarly publisher
Ravi Venkataramani, cofounder using Kriya has halved its pro-
and CEO of Exeter Premedia duction cycle time. “At
Services
another scholarly journal pub-
lisher, one production editor reported a 75% savings in time
taken to proof, edit, update, and generate PDFs at every stage
of the process. These are just some of the testimonials on Kriya’s
effectiveness.”
A user new to Kriya can become adept at using the platform
in as little as 30 minutes, Venkataramani says. “There is virtu-
ally no learning curve, and it does not need an IT infrastructure
setup. It is inherently designed to integrate easily with any
third-party system. Its open, documented API can communi-
cate—or handshake—with other systems using SOAP and
REST APIs.” Kriya has out-of-the-box integration with fre-
quently used project management or workflow tracking sys-
tems, submission systems, and content aggregating or hosting
platforms such as Atypon, HighWire, and Ingenta,
Venkataramani says. “We continue to listen to clients and fur-
ther enhance Kriya to best serve the publishing community and
deliver happy authors.”
Hurix Digital
Kitaboo AR, launched in February, is about taking learning to
the next level, says Hurix Digital CEO Subrat Mohanty. “It
replicates the pages of a print book and adds versatile features
such as embedded multimedia, easy navigation and searching,
and links to breathe life into content,” Mohanty says. “By seam-
lessly bringing physical content and digital media together,
learning becomes more engaging and immersive.”
With Kitaboo AR, Mohanty says, publishers can easily upload
multiple digital assets—audio, video, or external links—to
overlay in their physical books. “Students can point an app-
enabled device at a physical page and discover digital content,
which is a simple point-and-play feature,” Mohanty says. “In the
back end, the app looks for the scanned page in the e-reader
application, and upon finding a possible match, it brings up the
page and showcases all the digital assets that the publisher has
linked to the page.” In brief, Kitaboo AR is designed for pub-
lishers to make the most of their digital presence, improve con-
tent engagement, and retain their readers.
12 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
Five months on, work on enhancing Kitaboo AR has continued
unabated. The latest upgrade enables readers to see the answer to
math or physics questions on their app. “Readers no longer have
to wait for the answers to be approved by their faculty,” Mohanty
says. “This adds immediacy to the equation. Most publishers
provide the answers on a separate page, which costs them addi-
tional time and effort. With Kitaboo AR, they can simply upload
the solved question pages together with their e-books and allow
readers to locate them.”
Kitaboo AR is based on Hurix’s flagship product, Kitaboo,
which has won a Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award for five
consecutive years. “Our understanding of the challenges pub-
lishers face in engaging
tech-savvy readers and
learners has led us to
Kitaboo AR,” Mohanty
says. “We are looking to
promote this platform,
which is now used by edu-
cational publishers, to
enterprises where it can
elevate the training and
development experience.”
The Hurix team is also
working on a reflowable
ePub 3 tool—in addition
Subrat Mohanty, CEO of Hurix to the existing fixed-layout
Digital tool—to allow publishers
to create device-agnostic content automatically. “A tech-savvy
audience is always on our mind,” Mohanty says, “and we work
with our publishing clients to develop and enhance products
and solutions that will engage this audience.”
Impelsys
The launch of iPublishCentral Scholar at last year’s Frankfurt Book
Fair generated profound interest from publishers, professional
associations, societies, and enterprises. “It was the major attraction
at our booth at the London Book Fair,” says Pandith Jantakahalli,
assistant v-p for product management. “Scholarly publishers are
lauding the technology; a few are implementing it.”
“Scholar,” Jantakahalli says, “is about helping publishers
avoid the cumbersome tasks of maintaining multiple plat-
forms for different content types—journals, e-books, videos,
continuing education courses, for instance—while increasing
operational efficiencies by interacting with just one vendor
for all their digital publishing requirements. It delivers a uni-
fied customer experience and valuable consumer analytics.”
Impelsys also offers iPublishCentral Health, an exclusive
aggregator platform for the delivery and management of health-
care learning and skills development resources. The beta version
went live at four participating hospitals at the end of June, and
the full version is set for release in September. “Asia is seeing a
massive growth in its healthcare industry,” Jantakahalli says.
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 Digital Solutions in India 2018
“In India alone, there will be
an additional three million
beds, 1.5 million physi-
cians, and 2.4 million nurses
by 2025. This growth cre-
ates a huge market for
quality service and compli-
ance, which in turn demands
enhanced learning resources
and technology for health-
care publishers. Our plat-
form connects the bur-
geoning Asian hospital
Pandith Jantakahalli, assistant v-p market with health educa-
for product management at Impelsys tors and global publishers of
health-care and medical sci-
ence content. It acts as a conduit to deliver authoritative content
to hospitals in Asia and, in turn, helps publishers expand to
newer markets.”
Impelsys is now deeply immersed in building vanguard prod-
ucts that leverage its technologies, such as iPublishCentral
Scholar and iPublishCentral Health, to provide solutions for
enterprise learning, health care, and point of care. “Machine
learning is used to enhance our learning solutions, such as ques-
tion-bank creation,” Jantakahalli says. “We are also working on
new solutions—Decision Support Tool and Enterprise
Assessment Repository, for instance—that take us beyond our
core interests in e-books and e-learning platforms.”
The company’s second software development and delivery
center in Mangalore is now fully operational; its first key ini-
tiative—the Impelsys Internship Program for third- and
fourth-year engineering students—is already showing positive
outcomes. “This huge pool of fresh talent with new ideas and
thinking will help us to expand our innovation efforts and the
number of projects in the pipeline,” Jantakahalli says.
Integra Software Services
The latest out of Integra is its NLP-enhanced iAuthor solution.
The NLP feature, says founder and CEO Sriram Subramanya,
“assists in copyediting decisions by deploying the appropriate
language editing tools, reduces project turnaround times, and
shortens speed-to-market—all of which provide the client with
significant cost savings derived from reduced cycle time and
minimal human intervention.”
Integra’s freelance management system, iLancer, on the other
hand, is enhanced to auto-analyze incoming projects to provide
project managers with optimal response times. “For publishers,
iLancer’s rapid response increases editorial productivity and
maximizes production resources, resulting in about 15% to
20% cost reduction,” Subramanya says. “It also helps freelancers
to better manage their work and helps them in productive task
management.”
Machine learning and content analytics have been widely inte-
14 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
grated into Integra’s workflow solutions and tools to improve pro-
duction efficiencies and enhance quality of deliverables. “Take our
workflow management software iWMS,” Subramanya says. “It is
a customizable, database-driven, and Windows-based multiuser
client-server application that uses Big Data analytics. It integrates
all production tools for processing files according to any prede-
termined workflow with analytics deployed to fully track tasks
across various processes via the system.” Subramanya says that
iWMS offers automatic file management, process adherence, tools
integration and management, and seamless integration with
production and report tracking.
Subramanya identifies “three specific problems faced by
the publishing community: market demand migration from
print to digital, market
competition from OERs
and MOOCs, and piracy
and the rental market.”
While most publishers
have made the transition
to digital content, “there is
more to it than simple
conversion of ex is ting
products for digital distri-
bution,” Subramanya says.
“Our team, for instance, is
developing specific solu-
Sriram Subramanya, founder and tions to help publishers to
CEO of Integra Software Services counter these problem
areas. Our e-comic learning initiative is one such solution
that provides edutainment through digital storytelling to
deliver better learning and instructional value to existing
content.” Smartphone-assisted instructor-led training
(SAILT), he says, is another offering that enables the develop-
ment of paperless classroom training materials for educators
and facilitators.
The development of a platform-agnostic content delivery
solution for maximizing the advantages offered by different
platforms without relying on platform-specific tools and func-
tionalities and the provision of security for digital content
without affecting user experience while accessing that content
are two major initiatives taking place at Integra right now.
Lapiz Digital Services
Automation, says CEO Indira Rajan, is crucial for survival.
“Whether it is for in-house workflow or directly applied to
publishers’ projects,” Rajan says, “we strive in every possible
manner to deploy automation to reduce turnaround time and
manual intervention.” The Lapiz team has been using custom-
ized automated QC tools to test all possible functionalities in
personalized e-learning courses being developed for both
internal and external clients.
VR projects for corporations in the areas of automobiles, indus-
trial machineries, and banking are no longer as rare. “Since the
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
technology is evolving rap-
idly,” Rajan says, “we have also
started stepping into MR to
combine the best of both vir-
tual and augmented reality
and to anchor virtual objects
to the real world. The medical
and educational sectors are our
starting point for MR services,
and our goal is to provide
better training and education
to students and health-care
professionals globally.”
V. Bharathram, president of Lapiz Analytics service is also
Digital Services expanding at Lapiz. “We have
partnered with one American company to provide analytics ser-
vice to clients from the manufacturing and e-commerce industry
verticals,” president V. Bharathram says. “We address specific
customer pain points using data; for instance, we use Tableau
software for performance data visualization, or Python libraries
such as PixieDust and Matplotlib for customer-based data visu-
alization. Our team has also developed proprietary software that
leverages Python machine learning libraries such as scikit-learn
and TensorFlow to identify anomalies in data entry, inventory
management, root-cause analysis, and categorization of customer
emails based on attributes. At the same time, our U.S. team is
capable of managing the entire data stack and other related ser-
vices, including sales forecasting.”
More publishers have become technology companies,
Bharathram says, “and now that the digital transition has
started in earnest, every digital solutions provider needs to keep
abreast with current technologies. Finding the right resources
is tough, as everyone is racing to get the best talent—and for
this, we are competing not just with our industry counterparts
but also with core technology or software companies. The use
of AI and robotics in publishing is set to pick up, and this is
going to be a game changer for early adopters.”
The next 12 months “will see more analytics and content
services offered to authors,” Bharathram says. “The work on
deploying automation-driven workflow for both traditional
and digital service offerings is ongoing.”
Lumina Datamatics
It was another year of double-digit growth and higher opera-
tional efficiencies for Lumina Datamatics. A new facility with
a capacity of 1,000 people has also been added to the
existing 700-seat Puducherry delivery center. Along the way,
the company won the 2018 Great Indian Workplace Award in
several categories, including best implementation of human
resource practice. Lumina Datamatics also took the Best
Employer Brand Award (in the HR Strategy in Line with
Business category) at the 26th World HRD Congress, held in
Mumbai in February.
16 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
In business, Lumina Datamatics has achieved significant trac-
tion with several key clients. “We have developed a strong part-
nership with Macmillan Learning,” says Vidur Bhogilal, vice
chairman of Lumina Datamatics, “and recently launched a new
HTML production workflow that produces its e-books and print
titles simultaneously.”
Bhogilal also launched Lumina Datamatics’s new Rights­
Platform Marketplace with John Wiley & Sons. “The vast collec-
tion of Wiley’s publishing assets—images, figures, and graphs,
for instance—on this platform will increase its discoverability
while empowering users to search, identify, and clear permis-
sions to reuse the most appropriate images for their needs,”
Bhogilal says. “RightsPlatform Marketplace is a user-friendly
e-commerce interface that enables seamless licensing transac-
tions and the delivery of high-resolution files.”
Meanwhile, education
publishers and educators are
calling on the team for item
and assessment analysis.
“Through our Smart Test
Technology, we can take user
response data coming from
disparate platforms and help
clients know whether an
assessment is accurately and
fairly measuring knowl-
edge,” Bhogilal says. “We are
also linking that under-
Vidur Bhogilal, vice chairman of standing with remediation
Lumina Datamatics content. In some cases,
schools come to us to perform a preadmission exam to test stu-
dents for job competencies. Our data helps schools understand
students’ existing strengths and weaknesses, and funnel them
into programs that will most efficiently remediate any shortfalls
in competency.”
The priority for the coming year “is a focused approach toward
higher levels of automation using AI and NLP so that these
intelligent and efficient workflows will keep us ahead of the
competition,” Bhogilal says. “We will continue to enhance
offerings across digital learning services, strengthen our journal
business, and leverage established platforms—CAPS,
ExpertSource, and RightsPlatform, for instance—to start
offering cloud-based solutions.”
MPS
The definitive agreement, announced in April, to acquire Tata
Interactive Systems (TIS) has firmly established MPS in the
enterprise learning solutions market. “TIS has pioneered innova-
tions in that space through high-end, custom e-learning delivery
that includes web-based learning, simulations, serious games,
custom apps, and micro-learning,” says CEO Rahul Arora. “The
company has partnered with more than 70 Fortune 500 compa-
nies and is recognized as an industry leader with more than 100
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 Digital Solutions in India 2018
global awards—including
46 Brandon Halls—for its
expert capabilities and
quality delivery.”
The TIS acquisition,
which covers three subsid-
iaries (in India, Germany,
and Switzerland), “provides
MPS with a global sales and
marketing engine that has a
rich background in scaling
business and will further
unlock combined value,”
Arora says. “MPS, with its
Rahul Arora, CEO of MPS
strong track record in
making publishing smarter through efficient workflows and
rich platform solutions, aims to bring this expertise to the enter-
prise learning space through TIS.” (While the business is offi-
cially registered as MPS Interactive Systems Limited, it will
continue to operate under the TIS brand.)
The allocation of $25 million toward growth capital means
that there will be more acquisitions after TIS, the digital pub-
lishing platform Magplus, in 2016, and the subscription-order
management platform THINK Subscription, in 2017.
Its platform business segment, which also covers the flagship
cloud-based platforms DigiCore and MPSTrak, grew by 20%
in the past year. “We are seeing clients switching from other
third-party providers, homegrown systems, and archaic tech-
nologies,” Arora says. “Through Platform as a Service, or PaaS,
we aspire to disrupt the platform market in publishing by
solving inherently complex problems in a simple way through
intuitive technology and to pass on the efficiencies to clients.”
Nearly $3 million has been invested in platform technology,
which covers enhancements, maintenance, and customization.
MPS is now focused on its Vision 2023, which revolves
around business transformation through smarter publishing.
“Our aim is to power the differentiation and competitiveness of
our clients through smarter publishing,” Arora says. “We want
to transform publishing by making it transparent, real-time,
and focused on learning outcomes.”
MPS is also about values. “We are driven by the triple-e prin-
ciples—excellence, efficiency, and empathy—that foster an
environment for innovation, growth, and superior results,”
Arora says. “Our 2,800-plus employees are united and driven
by these values, which will move MPS onward.”
Newgen KnowledgeWorks
The latest offering from Newgen KnowledgeWorks is Pubkit,
a highly intuitive and unified platform that facilitates the man-
agement of journal projects, content, and communication. “It
can monitor folder or FTP locations for incoming files, pick
them, and auto-trigger appropriate workflow,” says president
Maran Elancheran. “Pubkit’s intelligent auto-scheduling capa-
18 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
bilities maintain consistency across journals and reduce depen-
dency on manual intervention.”
Pubkit’s all-in-one portal allows authors and editors to view
schedules, access files, and check on rights and permissions, for
instance, without needing to access any FTP server. “A built-in
mail management system further eliminates the need to main-
tain and manage two systems—one for mail and the other for
project status,” Elancheran says. “In fact, the emails are paired
with, and clustered within, the project itself. A shared dashboard
for editors and project managers makes the process even easier.”
Pubkit can communicate with client systems through APIs or
feeds, and it stores metadata and triggers alerts according to
configured rules, Elancheran says. “Pubkit also offers collabora-
tive issue compilation and analytics.”
The content revision, editing, typesetting, and XML output
are powered by another Newgen solution, RedShift, which has
been developed to meet the demand for speed and high
quality. “RedShift has various input pathways and is capable
of multiformat output,” Elancheran says. “At the same time, it
seamlessly integrates with Word and LaTeX for editing and
with InDesign for layout and composition.”
Manuscripts first pass
through CEGenius, Newgen’s
in-house copyediting tool
that auto-structures and
edits based on AI data col-
lected over the years. Then,
RedShift composes the
chosen content using
dynamic InDesign tem-
plates and allows editors to
make changes directly and
to generate updated PDFs
on demand. RedShift is
Maran Elancheran, president of “smart, fast, and accurate,”
Newgen KnowledgeWorks Elancheran says. “It was
rolled out earlier this year, and a few publishers have already
started using it.”
Over the past five years, Newgen has reduced 70% of its
production time and 30% of its production cost. “We have
accelerated the overall publication speed by 50%, providing
publishers with shorter time-to-market, which is one of the
critical factors in the scientific community,” Elancheran says.
“Now that we have built enormous capability around content
and digital solutions for English-language publishing, we are
leveraging that success into other languages—in Europe and
Southeast Asia—and expanding into content solutions for
manufacturing and financial sectors.”
OKS Group
Helping publishers with their XML migration (and thought
process) is a major focus at OKS Group. “Many publishers are
undergoing further consolidation,” says founder and CEO Vinit
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
Khanna, “and one of their major challenges as a result of the
integration is the multitude of platforms and workflows used
by the different operating units.” Khanna says that one client
has had to reevaluate its approach to XML migration as a result
of such integration.
The main issue, Khanna finds, “is in consolidating the cre-
ation of print and digital content into a single platform from
which both can be generated as required, or mixed to create
new offerings. This issue is evident in the K–12 segment,
where design and layout are integral to an imprint’s house
style and reputation, and many of the interactivities in the
print products cannot be translated easily into digital products
using XML.”
For subjects such as mathematics, customized solutions are
often required. “The creation of scripts to streamline the work-
flow and boost productivity becomes critical,” Khanna says.
“For one project, our team developed a script to handle MathML
to meet the client’s requirements, and these scripts were cus-
tomized for different titles in the series.” Khanna’s team has
continued to enhance its cloud-based workflow platform e2e,
which is now live with a major academic publisher.
Meanwhile, OKS Group’s MarkSharks “flipped classroom”
learning apps for math and science are progressing on many
fronts. Content for grades 7 to 10 is now available, and an effi-
cient B2C sales process is in place to grow MarkSharks’s sub-
scriber base.
“In addition to the tablet-based content available to users
and the additional content under development for other classes
and age groups, MarkSharks will have some exciting new pro-
totypes rolling out soon,” says Aditya Tripathi, CEO of OKS
Education. “One prototype will involve connecting the
MarkSharks app to a series of external hardware sensors that
measure temperature, pressure, humidity, acidity, and so on, to
allow students to not only learn virtually from the app but also
verify what they learn by performing their own experiments
and analyzing the results.”
Aditya Tripathi (l.) and Vinit Khanna of OKS Group
20 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
Tripathi and his team are also developing an AI-based algo-
rithm that will create a dynamic study calendar based on vari-
ables such as student performance, available time for study, and
content complexity.
PageMajik
PageMajik is all about bringing authors, editors, and designers
together in one secure workflow-enabled CMS to streamline the
entire prepress process while supporting seamless collaboration.
“Automation, machine learning, and AI are incorporated to
improve user experience and productivity,” CEO Ashok Giri
says. “PageMajik users have reported up to a 40% increase in
the time they now have available.”
Automatic structuring and granular tagging combined with
XML-driven technology that generates ePub and XML anytime
at the push of a button are major features of the CMS. “Next, it
enables automated typeset-
ting, where near-perfect
pages are generated from the
manuscript in just a matter
of minutes,” Giri says. “Then
there is the innovative
proofing module that allows
editors to directly edit on
XHTML files and have these
edits rapidly incorporated
into the PDF format without
disturbing the layout.”
PageMajik “is specifically
designed around content cre-
Ashok Giri, CEO of PageMajik
ation and publishing,” Giri
says. “It automatically creates a comprehensive folder structure for
each product, allowing publishers and content creators to begin
using the system right away.” Its versatility allows for categorizing
data in multiple ways, making it easier to access, monitor, and
obtain information relevant to the product type, be it a book, a
journal, a loose-leaf, or a poster.
An automatic keyword extraction module for enhancing
research discoverability is currently being tested, Giri says. “We
are already seeing accuracies better than anything else out there,
and this same technology will be used to build an automatic
index generator to handle this tedious publishing activity.”
Tests are also underway for a module offering built-in drag-and-
drop element templates for schoolbook writers and designers.
“We are not content with offering just a CMS,” says Giri,
whose goal is to build collaboration and communication tools
within the CMS so that notes, messages, and comments are
exchanged among team members rapidly. “We want to wean
publishing from emails and messages outside the CMS environ-
ment. You should be able to drop in a query and indicate the
exact portion of the text that it relates to or highlight and send
a block of text to a coauthor to discuss—and with PageMajik,
you will be able to do all that and more.”
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
TNQ
TNQ’s U.K. sales team has been kept on its toes in recent months.
“We have recently signed a partnership MOU with a German
company to kick-start our foray into the German-speaking
region,” says CEO Abhigyan Arun. “With our approach being
technology-led and our German partner excited about new
advancements in the field, this is an exciting time for us. The
number of opportunities and RFPs we have addressed—in the
U.K., Europe, and elsewhere—have been very positive. At the
same time, we have revved up marketing and social media activi-
ties to support our communications and revenue-generation
objectives.”
The company’s AI-driven
production has certainly
attracted a lot of attention.
“The big shift in our
approach came about when
our lab setup was integrated
with the production team,
thereby significantly
improving the training of
our AI engine,” Arun says.
“We are now partnering with
experts from academia and
from boutique AI/machine
learning technology firms to
Abhigyan Arun, CEO of TNQ
further strengthen our vision
for production technology. TNQ products are continuing to
push boundaries. Page Central, for one, is challenging conven-
tional typesetting, as well as leading the path to interactive
content delivery of the future.”
Since its launch in 2014, Page Central has been used by about
400,000 authors and generated more than five million pages to
produce 1,500 journals, books, and book series. “It has proven
to be a stable and fast solution that renders high-quality HTML
pages at half the cost and five times the benefit,” Arun says. The
patent-protected, browser-based Page Central “is about transi-
tioning from PDF- to HTML-based typesetting. It is also avail-
able as an independent SaaS integrated with Proof Central, our
proofing platform for books and journals.”
To make the platform easier to use and more accessible, TNQ
recently launched Page Central OnDemand, which further sim-
plifies the pagination process to about five steps. “Upload JATS
XML, choose a template from the many that are available, and
instantaneously see your XML page transformed into a beauti-
fully paginated HTML page,” Arun says. “Together with our
HTML-authoring platform AuthorCafé and proofing engine
Proof Central 3.0, Page Central marks our decisive push to take
the entire publishing process into the online space to provide
production efficiencies, shorter turnaround time, and cost sav-
ings for clients.” These products, Arun says, “are perfectly
aligned with our vision of post-PDF and single-URL
publishing.”
Westchester Publishing Services
The past year has seen a flurry of activity at employee-owned
Westchester Publishing Services. “Our core offerings such as
domestic composition and full-service editorial provided
from our U.S. headquarters have continued to expand,” says
chief revenue officer Tyler Carey. “And our India direct ser-
vices, which are run from our Delhi and Chennai facilities,
are seeing a lot of expansion in the trade, academic, scholarly,
and heavily illustrated book segments.” Recently, Westchester
established a U.K. operation to better service its clients in
the region.
“Our new K–12 educational publishing division now offers
not just typesetting and editorial services but also content devel-
opment, design, and illustration,” Carey adds. He has opened
an office in Dayton, Ohio, specifically to service the K–12 seg-
ment. “We have also partnered with FableVision and
Learnosity, in digital development and assessment offerings,
respectively, to grow our client base and service offerings.”
Westchester’s cloud-based client portal, which provides cli-
ents with more transparency at each step of their projects, has
undergone further upgrades as well. More options for file man-
agement and version control have come about through its
partnership with Dropbox. “Our impetus in launching the
client portal,” Carey says, “was as much about upgrading our
internal technology to better suit our business needs as it was
about reimagining how our clients submit and interact with the
projects they send to us for editorial and typesetting services.”
During the design process, Carey and his team saw that FTP
as a means for engagement and transfer “is being eclipsed by
competing file-transfer methods such as Box, Dropbox, and
WeTransfer, and we evaluated the related benefits of using more
current options for manipulating files.” He notes that the
Dropbox partnership has provided a much more intuitive and
comprehensive experience for clients looking to upload or
download projects, see their files at any stage, compare prior
versions, and review via a simple web interface.
Next year marks Westchester’s 50th anniversary, and exciting
plans are afoot to celebrate the milestone. “Since becoming a
U.S. employee-owned
company in 2014,” Carey
says, “our growth has
accelerated with very little
headwind, and we are
looking forward to helping
existing clients with the
services they have come to
know and expect from
Westchester and to part-
nering with new clients to
help them trim costs, con-
dense schedules, and
Tyler Carey, chief revenue officer at deliver quality publica-
Westchester Publishing Services tions to their readers.” ■
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 21
 Making AR and VR Work in
Publishing
The reality on the ground is slow adoption and careful
application but exciting execution
By Teri Tan
W
hen it comes to popularizing AR, much of
the credit goes to Pokémon Go, released in
July 2016. The mobile app, which makes
AR so fun and easy, not to mention addictive,
has been downloaded more than 800 million
times. (So, you are not alone in feeling
goofy about your slo-mo tiptoe toward a ’mon while gazing
at the phone.)
But the technology really hit the big time in 2017 when not
one, not two, but five major tech companies launched their
AR frameworks or apps: Amazon (Sumerian), Apple (ARKit),
Facebook (AR Studio), Google (ARCore), and Snapchat (Lens
Studio). Add companies such as Arloon, Aurasma, Blippar, and
Layar into the mix, and the AR segment is truly hopping.
In fact, the latest report from Digi-Capital pinpoints AR as
the primary driver in the $108 billion AR/VR market, with
revenues predicted to hit $90 billion by 2022.
VR, while much less popular, is no less exciting, with major
players such as HTC (Vive headset), Microsoft (HoloLens),
Oculus (Rift and Go), Samsung (Gear VR), and Sony (PlayStation
VR) vying to bring the best and most affordable equipment
and technology to the masses. Then there are ClassVR, Lenovo
VR Classroom, and Nearpod VR, for instance, dedicated to
delivering VR experiences right into the classroom.
Getting the Basics Right
While AR/VR adoption is still in the early stages for publishers,
it is not too early to plan for consistent structure and architec-
ture of the content, especially for storage and retrieval, says
Waseem Andrabi, v-p of content services at Cenveo Publisher
Services. “Metadata related to AR/VR content will be critical
for discoverability,” Andrabi says. “But industry metadata
standards for AR/VR assets are not yet as ubiquitous and
tested as they are for published content.”
Use cases and documentation related to the digital arts
and humanities are available, but they remain niche topics,
Andrabi says. “Dublin Core metadata, for instance, is used to
22 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
describe and enable access to digital resources, while the
CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model provides definitions
and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit
concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documen-
tation. But as publishers develop more AR/VR assets, there
will be unique requirements for their markets that need to be
addressed with metadata and associated standards.”
For now, Andrabi and his team are taking part in various
working groups not only to monitor but also to inform metadata
best practices across many markets and content types. “Our
involvement in the Metadata 2020 initiative,” Andrabi says,
“makes us part of an important working group that we believe
will address many forward-thinking use cases.”
Scalability is an issue in AR/VR for smaller and midsize pub-
lishing houses, observes Tyler Carey, chief revenue officer at
Westchester Publishing Services. “If the publishers are already
trying to keep up with acquiring titles and getting them to
market, it can be hard to find the time to, say, evaluate a VR
add-on for a product,” Carey says. “But as the larger publishers
with more resources and time evaluate uses and services around
AR/VR, the better offerings will rise to the top and become
more self-selecting for adaptation at the smaller houses. No
doubt there will also be author-driven projects that will help
test the limits of the media, and like the early experiments with
enhanced e-books years ago, I look forward to seeing where this
all goes.”
The goals of digital publishing, says Subrat Mohanty, CEO
of Hurix Digital, “should not be solely about publishing the
digital version of a book. It should also be about attracting the
right audience and keeping them engaged.” And while readers
can be acquired via marketing and the right metadata, Mohanty
finds that keeping them engaged remains a big challenge. “A
few years back, an interactive e-book was the effective solution
to this issue,” Mohanty says. “But after making the content
device-friendly and adding video or audio, what else can be done
to get the reader’s attention? This is where AR comes in to
elevate the reader’s experience.”
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
Offering AR/VR Solutions
Hurix Digital’s Kitaboo AR platform, which was launched in
February, combines the experience of physical books and the
digital world. “Publishers can easily upload multiple digital
assets—audio, video, or external links—to make the physical
books more engaging for the readers,” Mohanty says. “Students
can point an app-enabled device at the physical page and
discover digital content, making it a simple point-and-play
feature.” With the Kitaboo AR platform, publishers can
eliminate the need for multiple editions of their books,
thereby reducing their production costs, Mohanty says. “At
the same time, this platform provides detailed reader ana-
lytics so that publishers can refine their offerings and better
plan their marketing strategies.” One leading European pub-
lisher is now in the midst of integrating Kitaboo AR with its
existing publishing workflow to keep the target audience
engaged by adding interactive digital assets to its books.
As for PageMajik, there is a built-in module within its CMS
to create AR content to go alongside standard print content.
“Readers can scan and identify the content in a book using an
app to bring up related content, which can include anything
from fun videos and animation for children’s books, to maps and
photographs for travel guides, to data and diagrams for med-
ical texts,” says CEO Ashok Giri. “Since the core of PageMajik
is a secure and easily navigable online content repository,
supplementary resources related to a concept can be stored,
accessed, and updated, ensuring that it remains relevant.”
For now, the AR/VR segment is hampered by the lack of
techno-creativity and of a standard open platform, and by
unfixed technicalities, says Madhu Rajamani, executive v-p at
DiacriTech. “But we see the promising use cases that are directly
connected to business operations and profits, and in fact, we
started exploring this segment a few years back,” Rajamani
says. “Today, we have established our own brand, Immersive
Gaze, to focus on interactive technology solutions, and two
major projects—an AR-based library for an American univer-
sity client and another using HoloLens MR for the health-care
sector—have proven our expertise in the field.”
The educational segment “will focus on content that is
immersive and interactive, and the way we interrelate with
data will make a huge difference,” Rajamani says. “For pub-
lishers that have their printed books and digital assets in
place, we can offer AR to add value to the print content by
developing apps that augment the interactive experience.” One
partnership with an international publisher in India illus-
trates this point: the DiacriTech team developed a VR experi-
ence based on selected modules of the publisher’s science
books to showcase to private schools, and the success of this
 Digital Solutions in India 2018

techno-commercial initiative has given the publisher a major

edge in the highly competitive field.

Showcasing the Expertise

One highly interactive AR app for a major American educa-
tional publisher, for instance, illustrates Integra Software
Services’ expertise in the segment. The end-to-end app develop-
ment, aimed at smartphones and tablets, is a supplement for
various human anatomy books for both school and higher educa-
tion segments. “There are interactive 3-D models that allow
students to zoom in, zoom out, rotate, and check out the cross
sections,” says company founder and CEO Sriram Subramanya,
whose company started building its AR/VR capabilities in
2014. “The 3-D animations explain the various parts and func-
tions of the anatomy,” Subramanya says, “while interactive prac-
tice components and assessments track student understanding
of the content.”
Improved learning outcomes through AR technology are
the main goal of the app, Subramanya says. “With this app,
students have the ability to visualize and manipulate things
that they cannot see in the real world and to repeat the learning
process as many times as needed in a risk-free environment.
We also implemented the required accessibility standards and
ensured that users can access this AR app without any
challenges.”
Then there was one particular VR project for a higher educa-
tion segment that required the Integra team to capture 360-
degree video footage of the Taj Mahal using advanced tech-
nologies. “The end product is very engaging, with animations
that explain the architecture and history of this world
wonder,” Subramanya says. The interactive videos will be
hosted in an LMS for handheld devices, with a VR version for
use with Google Cardboard and Daydream, and Oculus Go.
For Lumina Datamatics, it was one proof of concept (POC)
for one of the world’s largest educational content, technology,
and services companies that kick-started its foray into the AR
world. “This POC helps automobile workers identify compo-
nents in a four-cylinder engine and encourages them to disas-
semble and reassemble it,” says Vidur Bhogilal, vice chairman
of Lumina Datamatics. “It allows the user to experiment on a
virtual engine without the risk of injury or of causing costly
damage to an actual component.”
The finished visual assets were imported into Unity3D, a
popular rapid game/simulation development tool that can be
deployed to desktops, mobile devices, and gaming consoles
simultaneously. “Using ARKit and ARCore frameworks
in Unity3D, we were able to leverage the latest technology
to bring these reconstructed assets to life,” Bhogilal says.
“Once the application was thoroughly vetted, it was deployed
to the Apple and Google App stores. The metadata is now
tracked around the event triggers in these apps so that we can
better understand how they are being used in the learning
process.” ■

24 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
 Next Steps Toward Digital
Accessibility
“Born accessible” is now the goal for digital equality
By Teri Tan
I
n 2014, the International Digital Publishing Forum exec-
utive director, Bill McCoy, spoke to PW about the orga-
nization’s goals, influence, and success in advocating for
accessibility in publishing and how ePub 3 will push its
agenda forward. Chennai-based digital solutions provider
AEL Data added to the conversation with examples of
digital talking books, braille titles, and Section 508–compliant
projects and with the progress on its dyslexic-friendly e-reader
DysLektz. To get an update on the state of digital accessibility,
we spoke to several digital solutions providers in 2018 about
the newest developments and some of the projects they have
been working on.
What comes across loud and clear is the push to produce
“born accessible” content right from the start alongside other
print and digital formats. As the nonprofit organization
Benetech, which operates Bookshare, the largest library of acces-
sible e-books in the world, succinctly states on its website, “If
content is ‘born digital,’ it can—and should—be ‘born acces-
sible.’ ” Generating born accessible content from the get-go
certainly makes sense in terms of strategy, cost, and process.
Digital equality is the goal, says Mahesh Balakrishnan, execu-
tive v-p at DiacriTech. “In this age of advanced technologies,
publishers are focused on an engaging-all-audiences strategy
through accessible solutions,” Balakrishnan says. “For us and others
in the digital solutions industry, this means offering world-class
services that include creating born accessible content as well as
transforming existing documents into accessible formats.”
Marianne Calilhanna, marketing director at Cenveo Publisher
Services, says that overlooking accessibility “is akin to ignoring
mobile optimization in 2014. When accessibility is well exe-
cuted, it can expand readership and provide a higher quality
user experience. It also helps publishers with the rapidly
growing area of voice search while keeping content nimble for
future repurposing. Increasingly, search engines and consumers
are pushing back on static content.”
Publishers “are still working on validating the business drivers
for accessibility and ensuring that the costs make sense in
terms of their P&Ls,” Calilhanna says. “We will look back one
day and compare this to the early days of XML, when publishers
were trying to justify the costs of structured content. Today,
XML is a no-brainer. It is a similar situation for accessibility,
particularly when accessibility is just an extension of struc-
tured content.”
A Bumpy Road Ahead
Unfortunately, true accessibility still has a long way to go, says
Uday Majithia, assistant v-p in technology services and presales
at Impelsys. “An online screen reader may not have accessibility-
compliant notes and highlights features and may not handle
book navigation and presentation of complex data such as
tables and mathematical equations,” Majithia says. “These may
be due to issues in digital rights management and proprietary
formatting and the lack of standards in platforms. So the
industry needs to evolve to provide true accessibility.”
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, still
under study, addresses the accessibility requirements of people
with cognitive and learning disabilities, low vision, and mobility
impairment, Majithia says. “This may set off a new set of stan-
dards that will serve the complex accessibility requirements of
the latest platforms and content.” Every platform or mobile app
that Impelsys builds, Majithia says, “has all the accessibility
requirements to make it easier for impaired and aged users to
access, navigate, and read or watch content.”
A strong comprehension of the four principles of WCAG
2.0—namely, that content must be perceivable, operable,
understandable, and robust—and how these principles apply
to different types of content is critical, says Rahul Arora, CEO
of MPS Limited. “This understanding,” Arora says, “coupled
with an extensive experience in areas such as e-learning, anima-
tions, interactivities, and simulations, has enabled our design
and programming team to provide end-to-end solutions to
clients for their accessibility requirements.”
Still, accessibility is not the default mode of publishing today,
though it should be, says Ravi Venkataramani, the cofounder
and CEO of Exeter Premedia Services. “The challenge lies not with
the intent: all publishers and researchers do want to make their
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 25
 Digital Solutions in India 2018

publications accessible to a wider audience,” Venkataramani says. “Even technological

capability is no longer lagging, to a large extent. We have systems today that can produce
content accessible to anyone with visual, aural, learning, or language challenges.”
What is lacking “is quality input in the form of significant amounts of alternate
text, metadata, rich audio, and video content that enriches the understanding of a
subject,” Venkataramani says. “Today, these enrichments are created after the peer-
review process. It would have been much more effective to have authors themselves
provide this supplemental information when their article goes into production.”
Furthermore, Venkataramani finds that involving authors in the effort to enrich the
content “makes it more meaningful to a larger audience—not just those with acces-
sibility challenges—and enhances the depth of understanding of the subject for all
readers. This will help make producing accessible content in a standardized and sus-
tained manner the norm and will increase the reach of articles manifold.”
Sriram Subramanya, the founder and CEO of Integra Software Services, believes that
“accessibility has become a part of the content development process and that it will soon
become mandatory, to comply with relevant governmental legislations.” Accessibility
requirements, Subramanya says, will become more device-specific in the coming
months.
For Westchester Publishing Services, expansion into the educational space and its
large presence in the academic market means that accessibility has become a more
frequently discussed topic with clients. “For many of our publishing clients, the acces-
sibility requirements—while still on a horizon that may feel a bit far away—have
outpaced their ability to keep up with what is required of them,” says chief revenue
officer Tyler Carey. “For our part, we have an internal task force for evaluating the
requirements, options, and policy so that we can tailor the solutions to different mar-
kets and products, and we are working proactively with clients to adhere to the stan-
dards and, wherever possible, to plan ahead of the curve.”
At TNQ, whose publishing platforms—Proof Central, Page Central, and
AuthorCafé—are browser-based (and browsers are increasingly accessibility-com-
pliant), adhering to the guidelines and delivering accessible content is not an issue.
“To add greater value to our UX/UI accessibility efforts, we have partnered with a
U.K.-based agency for assessments and reports on our products, which are used by
millions of researchers around the world,” says CEO Abhigyan Arun, whose team has
been advising its client base to move away from print-centric solutions such as PDFs
in view of the increasing accessibility compliance of browsers.
One thing is for sure: more publishers require data to be born accessible and want
their backlist content to be reworked to include accessibility features, says Maran
Elancheran, president of Newgen KnowledgeWorks. Newgen has a special accessibility
division to monitor developments in the area and amend its workflows accordingly.
“There has been an increase in lawsuits related to noncompliance in recent months,”
Elancheran says, “and this will certainly accelerate the accessibility movement.”
Newgen’s accessibility services, says Elancheran, cover three broad categories: digital
accessibility auditing (i.e., evaluating websites and providing a road map for achieving
full accessibility in compliance with WCAG 2.0), alternate text solutions (i.e.,
describing graphical and visual elements within a text), and born accessible consulting
(i.e., integrating accessibility into publishing processes that will guarantee fully acces-
sible frontlist titles and websites). “Our subject matter experts create the alternate text
and long descriptions for images in accordance with WCAG 2.0 and AA guidelines,”
Elancheran says. “We do not use an automated system to create the alternate text.”

Complex Project Requirements

Earlier this year, Calilhanna and her team at Cenveo Publisher Services started helping
Georgetown Law School with accessibility for its content. Anna Selden, associate

26 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
Digital Solutions in India 2018

director of journals and publications at Georgetown Law, says, “We are committed to
accessibility from the moral viewpoint. We have incorporated accessibility measures
into our current workflow and are exploring the best method for making legacy content
accessible.”
Creating Section 508–compliant products is the goal, but it is not as straightforward
as it sounds, Selden says. “Legal content has particular challenges due to the number
of footnotes in the text. We want to provide a seamless reading experience for the visu-
ally impaired and be conscious of not interrupting the flow of narrative while remaining
observant of the importance of footnotes.” The Cenveo team uses JavaScript to display
footnote text in pop-up windows, and once the footnote text is read, the reader can
continue reading without further disruption.
At Lapiz Digital Services, delivery of accessibility-compliant PDFs has exceeded
50,000 pages in the past year. “NIMAS and alternate text generation are common
requests,” president V. Bharathram says, “and we have an expert team—assisted by
full-time, part-time, and freelance personnel—who knows the nuances of working on
such projects.” Most are college textbooks on science, engineering, and mathematics,
Bharathram says. “But even before Section 508 compliance came into effect, many
publishers who had moved to XML workflows were already generating accessibility-
compliant PDFs as a by-product. So the projects we received were mostly those pub-
lished prior to this XML shift.”
Projects involving accessibility requirements are definitely increasing, says Arora,
of MPS. “These include a larger influx of requests for alternate text writing and closed
captioning for audio and video content and for accessible PDFs and PPTs. More impor-
tantly, there is a heavier focus on accessible digital products. Our team has been car-
rying out accessibility gap analysis regarding WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 compliance
,and presenting findings reports together with third-party tool readings and recom-
mendations for achieving compliance.”
For one project that recently landed at Continuum Content Solutions, the client
needed article-level XML files in RGB color format to be created from high-resolution
CMYK print PDFs of magazines and newspapers. “We converted 8,000 to 9,000 pages
within three hours of receipt, and the content was produced in alternative formats for
people with special needs,” company founder and CEO Amit Vohra says. Another
project, also involving creating accessible PDFs for magazines from print PDFs, was
further challenged by the presence of tabular data on the pages. “The reading order
assignment is critical for accessibility, and all tables must be formatted properly during
the PDF creation process,” Vohra says.
There is an increased demand for video descriptions, especially in statistics,
accounting, and STM content, says Balakrishnan of DiacriTech, whose company kick-
started its accessible solutions back in 2005 with NIMAS conversions, braille, large
print, and audio books for K–12 publishers. “For print and related deliveries, our
patent-pending XML-first workflow comes in handy, as it auto-generates NIMAS,
accessible web PDFs, and ePub files,” Balakrishnan says. “One client, not aware of our
workflow, was delighted when we delivered his urgently required NIMAS files for
grades 6 to 9 within three days. We even delivered those files to the National
Instructional Materials Access Center on his behalf.”
Having worked on accessibility solutions for more than two years, Subramanya, of
Integra Software Services, says that his team has built expertise in areas such as alternate
text creation and integration, color contrast ratio, and accessibility auditing and imple-
mentation. “We have expertise in WCAG 2.0 and most of the international accessi-
bility standards,” Subramanya says. “Our accessibility compliance begins at the con-
tent-creation-and-design phase instead of being integrated as an add-on at a later stage
or incorporated only based on client requirements. This is how we want to go about
achieving full and true accessibility.” ■
 A Quick Check on Metadata
Tracking its issues, progress, and real-world application
By Teri Tan

A
t its most basic level, metadata is about 5W1H—
the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a
data set, object, or resource (such as an article, a
book, or a journal). Gathering these basic bits of
information and plugging them into the system
should be easy, right? You wish.
As Marianne Calilhanna, marketing director at Cenveo
Publisher Services, puts it: “Metadata makes the content world
go around, but the metadata struggle is still very real, especially
in these four areas: the lack of consistent information, controlled
vocabularies, revision control, and author-supplied vs. pub-
lisher-supplied vs. vendor-supplied metadata.”
Complexities Abound
Calilhanna uses the simple example of publication date as an
example. “Think about all the types of metadata that one needs
for a journal article: preprint date, online date, print publication
date, and issue title date. Then combine that with the various
ways dates can be represented—day, month, quarter, year, for
instance—depending on the publisher. Throw in dates of any
revisions and things become complicated. So, when combining
a number of journal articles from various publishers on a plat-
form, how do you bring consistency for
and the submission system (enhanced metadata). “The enhanced
metadata, which is mostly fed by authors during the submission
process, is prone to typos and outdated or incorrect informa-
tion,” explains Rahul Arora, CEO of MPS. “Author’s contact
address, for instance, may have changed from when the original
submission was made to when the article was finally accepted
through the peer-review process. But it may not be updated in
the submission system.”
So metadata verification and validation is crucial. “This is a
core production activity at MPS: Our production and workflow
tools are tightly integrated, and communicate effectively, with
the metadata received from publishing clients. Discrepancies in
information between the metadata and manuscripts are identi-
fied and queried. For some metadata fields—funding informa-
tion, and ORCID details, for instance—MPS tools validate the
manuscript details against relevant online database APIs to
correct and/or query the author or publisher as recommended.
This is to ensure that such critical metadata elements are ren-
dered accurately in the systems,” adds Arora.
In the newspaper and magazine segment, metadata is cap-
tured at issue, page, and article levels, and the XML standard
adopted for archival digitization by libraries and content

© andreypopov/istock
search and discovery?”
It only gets more complex as pub-
lishers merge or acquire content from
other publishers. What happens when
a journal moves from one publisher to
the next, or from a society self-pub-
lishing model to a commercial pub-
lisher? Will the article DOIs be the
same, but just updated for the URL to
a new website—just like when a pub-
lisher changes its hosting vendor? For
Calilhanna, “All these require deep
thinking and planning, and a service
provider who understands not simply
what needs to be changed, but also
why, and offer a reasonable workflow
to manage the changes.”
Let’s go back to the sources of meta-
data in the publishing industry. There
are primarily two sources: the pub-
lisher’s system (i.e., the core metadata) Accurate, precise, and consistent metadata improves content discoverability and monetization.

28 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
 Digital Solutions in India 2018

aggregators worldwide is METS/ALTO. “Metadata can be har-

vested in a variety of standard formats, such as Dublin Core,
NISO, PREMIS, RDA, XMP, MPEG-7, IPTC, EXIF, and many
more,” explains Amit Vohra, founder and CEO of Continuum
Content Solutions. “But the creation and management of meta-
data is a challenge because while libraries and indexers usually
create the metadata, sometimes nonspecialist users are also gen-
erating them, and this makes standardization difficult. A proper
guideline should be followed on how, who, and when to write or
remove metadata.”
Identifying core metadata elements is another issue. “Core
elements should describe the origin, composition, navigation,
confidentiality, and quality of the digital objects or resource,”
says Vohra. “For this purpose, metadata can be further classified
as administrative metadata, structural metadata, technical
metadata, and descriptive metadata. It can get complex in a
hurry.” And there is no unique metadata standard sufficient to WHAT PUBLISHERS CAN’T
describe all the documents that are emerging in various formats. DO WITHOUT
“But sampling and analysis of metadata usage patterns can serve
as a guide for designing core metadata sets.”
Meanwhile, there is a lot of metadata out there produced by A Content Management System
Google on its own, observes Abhigyan Arun, CEO of TNQ, “and
the Google search engine is ignoring publishers’ metadata while to bring together the work
only recognizing those generated by its own algorithm. How of your authors, editors, and
will publishers react to—and deal with—this?” Another inter-
esting development, Arun says, “is the effort to create a central- designers in one intuitive
ized metadata repository along with a standard representation of cloud-based platform!
metadata, which is very much needed to improve interopera-
bility between content from various publishers. Crossref is
taking the lead on this, and more will follow suit, I believe.” By automating a wide range
Publishers have spent a lot of time and effort in creating of processes and using AI
metadata, although some do realize that they are not using all
of the metadata effectively, adds Arun. “There are a lot of activi- and ML innovatively, PageMajik
ties in aligning the creation of metadata with their use on online enables rapid publishing to
platforms. Even more so, metadata creation, which was tradi-
multiple formats.
tionally a prepress job, is now being pushed upstream. Our
platform, Proof Central, for instance, is generating metadata
much earlier in the production process, with the metadata With an average 40% saving
vetted by the authors themselves.”
Naming a file correctly, creating a proper biography of the in process time, publishers
author, and tagging the right keywords are the key to success can now focus on making the
in metadata. “Sadly, not many digital publishers are doing this
due to their lack of understanding of the importance of meta-
next great idea a reality.
data, and so their documents get lost in the crowded content
space. Providing the right information in metadata can help
locate the content easily and quickly,” says Subrat Mohanty,
CEO of Hurix Digital, who finds that naming the author is most
essential for academic content. “It is equally important to create FREE TRIAL OFFER!
their profiles and include information on social media accounts
such as LinkedIn and Twitter so that users can connect with the
authors later on. Such information can also help published work Sign up at www.pagemajik.com
get listed properly on various platforms and search engines, and
aid discoverability.”

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 29
 Digital Solutions in India 2018
Monetization Through Discoverability
Metadata improves the discoverability of all books, leading to
better sales—and this is the most important aspect for pub-
lishers, says Maran Elancheran, president of Newgen
KnowledgeWorks, who points out: “Accurate and concise meta-
data helps the reader to find the right book, and ensures that it
meets his or her needs before purchasing it. And by adding the
right accessible metadata to e-books, the digital content thus
becomes accessible, usable, and discoverable.”
Even though metadata has been around for quite a while now,
it was only actively coded as a requirement by many publishers,
but not meticulously by all of them. “It is all in the buzz in the
last couple of years as publishers increasingly realize the relation
between metadata and discoverability of their online content.
But metadata does not just apply to books; it applies to articles,
and now, to other digital assets as well,” says A.R.M. Gopinath,
executive v-p at DiacriTech.
“When content aggregation, segmentation, customization,
and reuse becomes the norm rather than the exception, metadata
is very useful in locating the appropriate content both for internal
and external consumption at a publishing house,” adds Gopinath.
“Although it is more an art than a science, our team has been
building AI tools to help our subject matter experts to tag the
content with the appropriate metadata to ensure higher
consistency.”
The lag between publication and discovery of research has
been well documented in various studies. “We have seen academics
struggle to find the right information amid the deluge of con-
tent available out there,” says Ashok Giri, CEO of PageMajik,
which has created the ability for publishers to do chapter-level
metadata tagging to allow for a deeper level of search function-
ality, and thus, easier and faster discoverability. “As the audience
for research and scholarly publishing expands and changes
toward digital and direct outreach, publishers need to find ways
to work quickly while easily adapting their current systems to
stay not only competitive but also viable. PageMajik offers such
a simple and cost-effective method,” adds Giri.
As self-publishing becomes more vibrant, educating indie
authors on the importance of metadata and its use in marketing
their titles is a must, says V. Bharathram, president of Lapiz
Digital Services. “Achieving consistency in metadata is an issue.
We have seen that marketing of books becomes much easier
with clean and consistent metadata, and when the metadata is
optimized for search engines.”
Publishers are now using metadata significantly to monetize
content, says Vidur Bhogilal, vice chairman of Lumina Datamatics,
whose team is doing a number of projects in which the clients
are using metadata to string together disparate strands of con-
tent to create new assets. “They are also reusing pieces of content
from multiple products to create new offerings, and they are
getting down to more granular chunks of content to sell. For
instance, our team is helping Wiley to pull visual assets from
their journals and make them available for sale separate from
30 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 2 , 2 0 1 8
the articles. This ingestion of visual content into a selling
system is made possible and easier due to proper metadata
tagging.”
For Uday Majithia, assistant v-p in technology services and
presales at Impelsys, metadata is critical not just for digital
content discovery but also personalized learning. “When we talk
about smart content or adaptive learning solutions, the under-
lying layer of metadata is what makes it all possible.”
Majithia and his team have worked with publishers to enrich
digital products—books, articles, quizzes, ancillary content,
and course modules—with metadata tagging. “It allows users
to easily find what they are looking for through efficient search
algorithms and also allows them to see related articles that
would be of interest to them. And when it comes to assessment
application, successful and efficient metadata tagging allows
instructors to narrow down the list of questions each student
receives based on his or her skill level and areas of interest.”
Metadata is so intrinsic in editorial and typesetting that it is
not even a topic anymore, says Tyler Carey, chief revenue officer,
of Westchester Publishing Services. “What makes metadata a
topic is when it is being used for something that is not pedes-
trian, or generated in a way that adds value beyond the incoming
metadata attached to a manuscript.”
Increasingly, Carey is seeing more publishers interested in
“K&A”—key terms and abstracts—as metadata to enhance
content discoverability. “Our director of technology, Michael
Jensen—who is one of the founders of Project MUSE and a
former manager at the National Academies Press—works with
our developers in Chennai, India, to develop a semantic analysis
system that combines the best of scripting and people skills to
glean metadata keywords from a manuscript, and then use real,
living human beings—not AI—to review and catalogue that
data in a way that makes it more usable for discovery and the
creation of abstracts.”
Carey and his team are currently processing 200 backlist titles
for a university press through the semantic analysis system.
“Many of the titles predate metadata in the way we know it now,
and through this system we will create discoverability-focused
metadata tags and other supporting metadata and content to
add value for these titles when they are placed online.”
Metadata enrichment and content agility are areas requiring
immediate action from publishers, says Sriram Subramanya, the
founder and CEO of Integra Software Services. “With digital
content being generated from multiple sources, discoverability
becomes a pain-point for users, and consequently, for content
creators or publishers. The task to infuse legacy content with
metadata is laborious, but it needs to be done in today’s era of
digital content convergence.”
Content seekers, adds Subramanya, can miss out on good
content if the right keywords are not used to enrich the content.
“Content without a proper distribution chain does not reach the
end user, and to avoid this, infusing content with proper meta-
data becomes critical.”  ■
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Services and Solutions

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