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P u b l i s h e r s W e e k ly .

c o m

Special Report 2012

Content Services in

INDIA
Rushing to deliver device-neutral and
media-rich content across publishing segments
for multiple platforms and technologies

Content Services in India 2012

Living with digital products and


multiplatform e-deliverables

Market Transformation
Equals Challenges and
Opportunities
By Teri Tan

In 2006, when PW released the first report on the content


services industry in India, the topics centered on XML, PDF,
and e-deliverables, and conversations revolved around
print- vs. content-centric work flow.

t was a time when SSTM publications formed the bulk of the


digitization business, while childrens books and trade titles made
their first appearance on the production floor. Then, Apple was
still four years away from launching its
first-generation iPad. And Google had
just acquired a 22-month-old startup
called Android Inc. Life was much simplerand far less exciting.
Six years ago, publishers were busy
pushing larger volumes of work to India
in a bid to slash their production costs.
The focus then was to move print content production offshore, with some

publishers beginning to ask for XML


deliverables for Web-based platforms,
says Nishith Arora, chairman of MPS
Limited, who has seen the landscape
shifting from near and far. After selling
ITC, which he founded and owned, to
Infomedia in 2006, he left the industry
for a spell before establishing ADI BPO
and Neuetype. Last October, he roared
back onto the scene with the acquisition
of industry pioneer MPS Limited.
Today, with online sales finally taking
off, Arora sees a heightened focus on
digital-first production. Devices such
as iPad and other mobile handhelds are
well entrenched in our society, and class-

room teaching has undergone major


transformation, he says. Print books,
which used to be publishers primary
source of revenue, are now likely to be
just one component of their sales. It is
not an exaggeration to say that publishers are grappling to realign their business models to this new reality. Going
forward, one should expect to see further
vendor consolidation, more emphasis on
process and work-flow standardization,
and closer client-vendor partnerships
compared to when publishing outsourcing first started. Arora points out that
publishers would much prefer collaborating with service providers such as
MPS who have both upstream and
downstream competencies to cover all
bases.

Buying In from the Top


The most visible trend in the industry,
says Jim Lewis, senior v-p for sales and
marketing of Innodata Isogen, has been
the explosion of iPad sales. With 100
million iPads expected to be sold by the
end of this year, and a total of 300 million tablets in the market by 2015, we
have noticed a dramatic rise in interest
from senior-level publishing personnel
in mobile, tablet, and multichannel content development. Specifically, senior
executives are looking more closely at
the earliest stages of content supply and
asking what they need at the point of
content creation to ensure that their content is ready for multichannel consumption. To address this need, Innodata has
developed Content Profiling, a methodology that helps publishers develop content supporting new digital product
functionalities across devices and platforms. Lewis also notes that media orga-

Online Coverage of the Content Services Industry


The following articles are available online in conjunction with this print report:

PW Talks with Jan Barsnes of eBokNorden and Prograph (on outsourcing to India and the state of the e-book industry
in Scandinavia)

Vendor Selection 101 (featuring 12 crucial steps in selecting your vendor)

Visit www.publishersweekly.com/ContentServices2012 for continuing coverage on the content services industry.


New articles and q&as with vendors and publishers will be added every other week starting from April 23.
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

Content Services in India 2012


nizations appear to be refocusing their
efforts on revenue enhancement strategies and therefore digital products.
There is growing awareness among
publishers that digital product development and production should be the focus
of their innovation and R&D investment, says president and CEO Dev
Ganesan of Aptara. Before, there was
some recognition of this but little organizational commitment. Now, there are
concrete moves reflecting growing commitment, affecting areas such as new
product innovation and development,
partnership business models, and sales
and marketing strategies, as well as content development, production, management, and distribution. Aptara has
focused its investment on several key
areas, including digital instruction and
visual design, rich-media programming,
and content technology development for
its PXE publishing platform.

Reaching for the Cloud


Speaking of PXE, this complete end-toend digital publishing platform is built
on cloud-based technologies to enable
seamless collaboration among subject
matter experts, reviewers, and content
professionals through the production
work flow. Employing the cloud
enhances communication and collaboration between editorial and production
staff, and facilitates queries and reviews,
says Ganesan, whose company, a certified Inkling partner, uses Inkling Habitat, a content production platform that
relies on a cloud-based work flow from
editing to published products.
Cloud delivery of digital content is an
important part of a publishers e-commerce delivery channels, as evidenced by
the success of Amazons Kindle, B&Ns
Nook, and various tablets. But using
cloud-based distribution technologies to
disseminate content to public and private institutions after the point of purchase remains a work in progress due to
social, economic, and security concerns,
says Ganesan.
In the U.S., higher education is a step
ahead of k12 in adopting cloud-based
technologies, thanks to LMS (learning
4

Review Process for This Report


Every year, usually in January or February, PW travels to India,
staying for as long as two weeks, to visit content services vendors
in several cities. As a rule, first-time report participants receive
lengthier visits, providing an in-depth facility tour and a presentation
by key executives. Our visit is meant to ensure the following:
The company is legitimate, with a proper production setup, and definitely
not a sweatshop or shell operation.
The company has the required expertise to provide the services offered.
For instance, if a vendor offers legacy content digitization, then PW will
check out the types of OCR equipment and processes used, the tools for
cleaning scanned images and the capability to provide searchable
PDFs, XML workflow, and other e-deliverables.
The facility is a secure area, to protect clients assets/content, and there
are backup servers with secondary storage facilities in case of disasters.
There is a sizable workforce to produce the work required. PW looks for
companies with, ideally, at least 200 people, but we will revise the
requirement depending on the type of service offered.
The company has been in the industry for a while and has many finished
projects to show.

Before the visit, we do online research on the vendor, check out


its Web site, obtain a general understanding of its operations,
and e-mail for further information if required. In the case of previous report participants, we obtain updated information on the
company and services. Any complaint or negative response about
a vendor is taken seriously. As much as possible, our goal is to
uncover proven vendors with special niche services, unique technology, or specially developed tools that will help the publisher.

management system) adoption and other


cloud-based courseware in recent years. To
Ganesan, there is no question that cloudbased technology is capable of providing
broad and efficient content distribution.
Publishers, distributors, and libraries
have made some progress toward utilizing
cloud-based solutions to distribute digital
content to users. However, continued
publisher concerns regarding content
security and pricing haveimpeded distribution through services such as OverDrive. A resolution between the parties
has to be found before broader cloudbased adoption is possible, he says.

New Standards and


Formats

The launch of EPub 3 and HTML5 is a


boon to the content services industry,
with more publishers demanding con-

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

version into these new formats. But as


with any new standard, there are drawbacks and challenges. The lack of effective interdocument linking is a big issue
with EPub 3. With HTML5, the biggest
concern is that it is not yet fully supported by the different browsers and
e-readers, says founder and CEO Nizam
Ahmed of DiTech, adding that conversion from Flash to HTML5 with JavaScript is a tedious process requiring
extensive analysis and coding.
While the industry body International Digital Publishing Forum is zealously championing EPub 3 as the new
e-book delivery format, publishers
remain concerned about the lack of a
DRM (digital rights management) component. This is a major deterrent for
many who are thinking of adopting the
standard. But EPub 3 will definitely

Make copy changes


while changing trains

cP

Title Management
MANUSCRIPT TO MARKET

U.S. +1 610-940-1700;
UK +44 (0)1865 261437; Spain +34-607 261 801
www.codeMantra.com info@codeMantra.com

Mobile Apps: Whats Up Now

Content Services in India 2012

PW Talks with Gurvinder Batra


When mobile apps first appeared on the scene,
trade books were the second-largest category after
games for KiwiTech, says cofounder and CTO
Gurvinder Batra. Other publishing segments did
not see the iPod and iPhone as viable media for
delivering content, he says. But the iPad changed
all that, and journal, medical, and childrens publishers are going for mobile apps in a big way. For
journals, publishers and societies find apps a very
efficient way to reach out to their subscribers, who
in turn find it easy to access critical information
and updates with the iPad, wherever they are.
PW asks Batra for more updates and insights on
the mobile space.

What other industry changes do you see?


Childrens publishers have been steadily embracing apps,
since parents love interactive storybooks and adaptive
learning resources for their kids. The corporate sector is
also coming into the picture, using apps to convey the
latest product information, provide interactive training,
and for other organizational functions. I expect to see the
new iPad with its higher-resolution screen, which has
drastically improved image and video quality, to have an
even bigger impact on medical publishing. Android is
also becoming popular. We get requests for Android for
every three out of five apps that we develop. The impact
of Windows 8 on the tablet market is something that we
are eager to find out.
Has KiwiTech developed any interesting apps
recently?
The American Chemical Societys C&EN app comes to
mind. It is a weekly magazine app that is updated every
Monday. The content is rich in text, images, and videos,
and the app has RSS feeds of the latest news, CENtral
Science feed, and jobs in the chemical industry. It features
very simple navigation, easy content access, and an attractive user interface and experience, among others. This app
has been named the eProduct/Best in Physical Sciences
and Mathematics by the Association of American Publishers. Another app, MSK Injections, is based on the
textbook of the same title. It contains only about 40% of
the books content, but offers a lot of videos on administering injections.
Could you give an example from the childrens
segment?
Ruckus Media Groups My Little Pony is a good one. It
injects interactivity into a traditional storybook. Parents
can read the story to their kids or let their kids read it on
their own through audio sync. There are lots of videos

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

(l. to r.) KiwiTech cofounders Gurvinder Batra, Rakesh Gupta,


Anita Gupta, and Neal Gupta

integrated into the app, and kids can play and learn
through story-related activities. Future app enhancements
will include connecting these activities to a back-end
server for adaptive learning.
How do EPub 3 and HTML5 figure in your app
projects?
The biggest advantage of EPub 3 is that now we can have
a single archive for text and multimedia components
rather than having to combine them separately. In the
case of HTML5, portability is the biggest advantage,
especially for producing apps across platforms. We can
structure the app in HTML5 and then use a framework to
create a native app. But HTML5 remains device and
browser dependent, and apps developed for Android
require a lot of testing for all devices.
How is KiwiTech doing since your 2009 launch?
We have more than 150 staff now and continue to focus
on the mobile platform, even though our team is increasingly involved in mobile front-end and back-end applicationsbasically, building the complete ecosystem. It has
been an interesting journey that went from a small Washington, D.C., office with one developer when our first app
was built in March 2009 to the current vibrant New
Delhi office. We emphasize a culture of creative freedom,
and everyone seems to be having a lot of fun. In fact, we
just came back from a company trip to Chahl near the
Himalayaswith five busloads of people.
What are your plans for 2012?
We have been doing very well in the publishing sector.
Our understanding of content has certainly differentiated KiwiTech from other industry players. Internally, we
have recently expanded our sales team from four to eight
persons, and we are looking at further growth in the
coming months. We are also adding many new verticals
to our portfolio, including corporate, health, and
government.

Content Services in India 2012


evolve and improve with time. When
that happens, we will have a single unifying standard, adds Ahmed, pointing
out that this will enable the publishing
community to do away with multiple
e-book formats, and the accompanying
costs and headaches.
It is undeniable that companies such
as Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble
have brought significant changes in the
way content is organized, distributed,
and used, says Amit Vohra, v-p for sales
and operations at Planman Technologies. We have seen publishers acting
quickly to maintain their leadership
position and setting up dedicated teams
to work on their device or technologybased strategy. From the digitization
standpoint, EPub has been a winner
both in static and reflowable formats
and Amazon, through Kindle Fire, has
finally addressed trade market needs
with KF8. Owing to these changes, we
have seen many publishers coming to us
for digital solutionsin EPub, apps,
and now iBooks Authorat both strategic and development levels.
American publishers have always been
quick to accept new technologies and are
always trying to deliver a richer user
experience using media components.
The recession has exerted a lot of pressure on print products, prompting many
states within the U.S. to pass resolutions
to adopt digital products for education.
So more publishers are looking for digital
media and new technologies that would
help them publish content securely and
at lower costs, says executive v-p A.R.M.
Gopinath of diacriTech, adding that
using CSS3 and JavaScript with the new
HTML5 specifications would enable
delivery of complex content, animation,
and other content enrichment components on various platforms, such as desktops, smartphones, and tablets. This is a
major step toward content mobility, and
there is no question that HTML5 with
EPub 3 wins over Flash.

Go Digital or Be
Irrelevant

and CEO Sriram Subramanya. Publishers are seeing increased content demand
across a variety of devices and platforms
but have fewer resources and tighter
deadlines. Agility, speed-to-market, content optimizationthese are always on
their minds. Then there is the need to
drive up e-sales exponentially with high
profitability, and to manage consumer
demand for interactive e-books, apps,
learning products, and online learning
now that the proliferation of tablets and
smartphones has reached critical mass.
For many, there is the pressing need to
offer content continuum with games, animation, and interactivity. Constant evaluation and tweaking of work flow to suit
these changes and challenges are the order
of the day. But keeping pace with the fastchanging technology and understanding
consumer behavior is a really tall order.
What the publishers decide to do will
naturally affect the content services
industry as a whole.
Market trends put further pressure on

publishers, says Subramanya: Many


large educational publishers digital revenues are expected to surpass their print
revenues this year. At the same time,
classroom content is leaning toward digital products. For our industry, such
trends are reflected in increased demand
for EPub conversion, apps development,
new media, e-learning, abstracting, and
indexing.
As digital publishing continues to
rise, print revenues are declining. While
the value of quality content has not
changed, repurposing content has
emerged as an important addition to
publishing operations. Such repurposing
may range from packaging the content
for different consumers to enhancing
content functionalities through the use
of hyperlinks, annotations, and multimedia components, says Vinay Singh,
executive director of Thomson Digital,
pointing out that STM and academic
publishers with substantial backlists are
now busy adding value for their sub-

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P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

E-learning: Whats Up Now

Content Services in India 2012

PW Talks with Samudra Sen


Customers are getting more sophisticated in their
expectations of online learning, according to CEO
Samudra Sen of LearningMate (still the only major
e-learning player to focus on the educational segment). Demand for a more integrated and holistic
learning experience is growing. For instance,
e-books need more interactive features with social
learning constructs built around them to allow
learners to share notes while reading, view peer
comments, or read syndicated content from thirdparty sources, he says. There is also a shift to
activity-based assignments (learn by doing) that
require learners to access relevant material in order
to complete the activity, thereby
letting them explore the topic. Personalized learning based on sophisticated analytics engines and efforts
to predict learning preferences
using statistical models, he adds,
are getting more common. What
else is happening? Sen shares more
insights and news.

What is GoClass?
This is a cloud-based solution that works on tablets and
mobile devices, and you can download the app from the
Apple App Store. With GoClass, students interact directly with teacher-curated content and benefit from a oneon-one learning experience. Teachers, on the other hand,
receive instantaneous attendance and class participation
data, real-time comprehension results with detailed analytics, and out-of-classroom usage information. The
GoClass app has been downloaded for use by more than
700 schools and educational institutions.
And what about Learning eXchange?
This platform offers a holistic learning experience where
social learning and collaboration principles are built
around learning objects that students
interact with. It also links each object
with related articles, blogs, posts, and
discussions so that the learner can delve
deeper. The learning object can therefore
be enriched over time as learners and
instructors contribute additional related
material, creating a current and dynamic
content repository.
What do you think of EPub 3 and
What else have you been up to?
HTML5?
We have significantly expanded our ediWith Flash on its way out, most publishtorial services for digital products, investers are facing a significant legacy convered in work-flow management tools, and
Samudra Sen, CEO of
sion problem, since their assets need to
CMMI Level 5 processes. We also did a
LearningMate
keep up with emerging technology stanhuge amount of vocational training
dards such as HTML5. Similarly, EPub 3 is the emerging
courses for two large educational publishers. And over in
standard for creating media-rich interactive e-books,
the U.S., our team is involved in a complex statewide
whereas EPub 2 is mostly for static e-books. I think that
technology project.
there is going to be a convergence of standards or definiAre you able to elaborate on that project?
tion of interoperability standards for e-books very soon.
It is a technology rationalization project. Vendors will put
Our focus at LearningMate is on creating quality learning the applications they offer on a cloud-based platform, such
experiences built around the book. We have seen a big
as administrative, teaching and learning systems, backincrease in HTML5 conversion projects from higher ed,
office, etc. School districts or the state can then decide
STM, and k12 clients in the past six months, besides
which applications to use and which to retire. Our team is
specialized apps for their titles. To meet the demand, we
now auditing all applications to make the platform more
have upgraded our ICE [Instructional Content Editor]
efficient and smart. We are also working on business intelplatform to enable a large degree of templating and autoligence, analytics, and IIS [instructional improvement
mation for such conversions, which in turn leads to huge
systems] to raise learning effectiveness across state- and
efficiency improvement and cost savings.
district-level schools.
How about cloud-based technologies?
Any major plans for 2012?
Today, most RFPs [requests for proposal] ask for cloudThe new facility being built in Rajarhat, Kolkata, will
based implementation, and this technology is becoming
allow us to increase our staff strength from the present 450
increasingly important. We have moved everything
to 600 at the beginning of 2013. Our U.S. team will also
mobile and enterprise applicationsto the cloud, and use expand from the current 30 people to 50. We are seeing
Amazon Web Services to support our own products such
very strong organic growth, which should match the
as GoClass and Learning eXchange.
more than 50% growth that we enjoyed last year.

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

Content Services in India 2012


scribers by digitizing content and creating databases. Such databases may contain journals that go back several decades
and are important sources of historic
information on a specific subject or
theme.
By and large, publishers are upping
their digital output by 50% or more
while tweaking their plans to suit market trends. Digital revenues are forming
an integral part of most publishers business plans. But different segments deal
with digital products differently, adds
Singh. For trade books, digital delivery
is viewed as an add-on and not as a supplement to existing revenues. For SSTM,
digital revenues are not viewed separately from print revenues, and the focus
is on content, not format. In the educational segment, digital content offerings
are often restricted to a small portion of
their offerings, such as assessment and
testing. But on the whole, publishers are
moving gradually toward larger investment in digital vs. print. Online distribution and subscription, custom publishing, and digital bookstores are
becoming increasingly popular as channels for distributing content.

Emerging Opportunities
Three to four years ago, interest in XML
was largely restricted to STM publishers, says Walter Walker, executive
director of publishing services at codeMantra. Today, we see trade and educational publishers pushing for XML-first
work flow and structured XML content
solutions. This has audacious implications for the future of publishing and our
business as more and more publishers
and vendors seek skills and talents that
are commonly associated with the software industry. The characteristics of publishing have changed, and competitive
publishers have become, in part, technology companies, however reluctantly.
For codeMantra, technology is the problem as well as the solution. Its three
trademarked productsCollection
Point (now in its third version), Universal PDF, and pubXMLwere created to
simplify the process and help publishers
solve problems that arise from their need

to digitize, convert, manage, and distribute assets.


With new technologies entering the
market at a dizzying pace, many publishers and content providers do not
know how to maximize the value of their
content, nor do they have the road map
to show them how to get there, says
John Wheeler, v-p for strategy and
emerging technologies at SPi Global.
We are helping these companies to connect the dots and create that road map for
both the print and digital space. Our
Innovation Lab, for instance, is working
with several companies that are looking
to migrate from Flash to HTML5.
Wheeler adds, Companies today
face more complex challenges with
their work flows and in redefining
their business models to meet customers changing needs. Having a skilled
labor force to execute the plan is part
of the solution to these issues. For these
reasons, India and the Philippines
where we have several production facilitieswith their skilled labor pools,
will remain the destinations of choice
for the foreseeable future. SPi Globals
delivery network has 18,000 employees working in 24 locations in North
America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
While the shift toward e-publishing
may mean some threat to the pure typesetting business, Wheeler believes that
it does open many other opportunities
to design new products and offer innovative solutions. Publishers may also need
to create their own platforms or utilize
third-party platforms to get their content uploaded and managed. Wheelers
database and customer support services
team is working on one such platform to
provide voice-based help desk services to
publishers that have difficulty uploading
their content onto various platforms.
Each company profiled in this report
is answering calls for new products and
novel solutions in its own way, building
on proven expertise and established reputation. Some are busy expanding through
acquisitions and organic growth targeting new markets, while others are being
acquired and taking advantage of deeper
pockets and better resources to further

Content Services in India 2012


solidify their industry standings. Whichever path they choose, there is no denying that the content services industry is
thriving in the face of relentless digitization and pursuit of newer products to
wow consumers and clients alike.
Now, lets take a closer look at 17
companies, in reverse alphabetical
order, to learn more of their capabilities and what they have up their sleeves
for the foreseeable future. You can then
evaluate, choose, and decide which
vendors can best help you transform
your content and be your partners on
the digitization journey ahead. (New
articles and q&as with vendors and
publishers on the content services
industry will be available at www.publ i s h e r s w e e k l y. c o m / C o n t e n t S e r vices2012 starting from April 23.)

Thomson Digital
Although the STM segment has long
been Thomson Digitals core competency
(with a clientele comprising a whos who
in the segment), executive director Vinay
Singh is still discovering many untapped
areas. Customizing solutions to meet
these niche requirements ranks high on
his business plan: With technology continuously bringing disruptive innovation to the industry, publishers have to
constantly deal with challenges such as
high digitization costs, complex multichannel delivery, content interoperability, and content security. But help is at
hand: we are in the last phase of developing an enterprise content management
portal, which we call TD-XPS. This is
one of our innovative solutions designed
to provide our clients competitive differentiation and operational efficiencies.
The increasing demand for e-learning
modules and content compatible with
smartphones and tablets has also raised
the demand for concept art and character
design with distinct local flavors. Since
there is a shift toward multichannel
delivery, conceptual design now takes
into consideration the requirements of all
delivery platforms right from the initiation stage. While online distribution
makes it convenient for publishers to test
new markets, it comes with an increasing

Making
content
digital,
mobile,
now.
Vinay Singh, executive director of Thomson
Digital

need for design adaptations. The challenge is to maintain the original art style
of the publisher while creating adaptable
content, as well as products, for different
markets.
Adds Singh, For every new technology that has come on the scene, Thomson
Digital has created applications that
capitalize on the best that the technology
has to offer. For instance, our team has
created unique and immersive mobile
learning, or m-learning, modules that
produce an advanced knowledge environment using mobile technology to the
maximum. We have customized mobile
apps for different segments, ranging
from magazines, health care, and medical
publishing to k12 and higher ed. Our
team of content developers, instructional
designers, and technology experts make
maximum use of the digital space to create a rich media experience. In short, we
offer publishers cost-effective ways to
distribute their content on various platforms, enhance their brand value, get in
sync with market demands, and create
new revenue sources.
There is also immense opportunity in
the non-English-speaking world. We
have been able to tap and develop such
markets by extending the complete
range of services to them, including content development and technology localization, says Singh. We now have associates in Rio de Janeiro and Poland in

Content Services in India 2012


addition to existing overseas facilities in
the U.S. and Mauritius. Meanwhile,
Thomsons latest facility in Sikkim
Indias least populated state and the second smallest in land areais moving
ahead, leveraging the areas good basic
education for its people, low labor cost,
and stable infrastructure.

condition. However, we met the clients


expectation of 100% segmentation accuracy and 99.98% text quality, says
Shanmugam, who uses a Gage R&R
(repeatability and reproducibility) system to evaluate and select personnel for
the project. This project plays to our
strength in digitizing archives in XML
encoding schemas such as TEI, NIMAS,
Swift Prosys
PubMed, NLM, Dublin Core, MODS,
With only 70 people in its Chennai office
and METS/ALTO.
and another 110 in Trichy, Swift Prosys
Another library project involves
is the smallest operation featured in this
MARC 21 standards, for which Shanmureport. But its successes with unusual
gam (in his current role as director for
projects (see Projects Showcase) have
technical and business development)
stood the company in good stead.
developed a cataloguing tool that eases
Founded in 2007 by Mohan Thas Shanthe process considerably. We reproduce
mugam, it started by digitizing archives
the text on the scanned library cards from
for the local market before expanding to
our client and encode each field accordEurope. In 2009, it became a part of
ingly. The data is then stored in XML and
Meridian Group, a major player in Chenchecked against MARC 21 standards.
nais manpower supply market.
Author names are also checked against
the Library of Congress
database for normalization
and duplication. The final
output, in MARC XML, is
validated against the
schema prior to delivery to
the client. We have done
more than 237,000 cards
so far.
For Shanmugam, the
time is right to expand his
U.S. client base, targeting
venerable publishing
houses and institutions
with old volumes for digiMohan Thas Shanmugam, director for technical and business
tization. This year, we are
development at Swift Prosys
expanding our office space
One Swift Prosys project is IMPACT
by another 3,000 square feet and adding
(Improving Access to Text), which is
at least another 100 employees. We have
funded by the European Commission to
also set up the Swift Prosys Academy to
digitize the regions cultural heritage.
train graduates and diploma holders in
We are currently digitizing 16th- and
EPub and XML technologies, who are
17th-century books in XML for institusubsequently placed in various organizations such as the Innsbruck University
tions. Manpower supply is, after all, one
Library, the Bavarian State Library, and
of our groups core businesses.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Our client provides scanned images and OCR text,
SPi Global
which we have to clean up and dechunk
Crowned BPO Company of the Year at
into words, lines, paragraphs, and segthe 2011 International ICT Awards,
mentsa tedious process as old books
beating seven other finalists, and ranked
are not well formatted. In some cases, the
#1 service provider (print and publishing
scans are terrible because of the books
vertical) by the 2009 Black Book of Out12 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

John Wheeler, v-p for strategy and emerging


technologies at SPi Global

sourcing, SPi Global is the biggest player


in the book segment. Its acquisition of
Chennai-based Laserwords in November
further solidifies its focus and strength in
the STM segment. SPi Global is a wholly
owned subsidiary of the Philippine Long
Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), a
major player in three verticalscontent
services, health care, and voice-based customer relationship managementthat is
listed on the Philippines and New York
stock exchanges.
In recent years, we have become more
of a partner to our clients than just a vendor. This is one of the key differentiators
that set SPi Global apart, says v-p for
strategy and emerging technologies John
Wheeler, who spearheads the companys
200-strong Innovation Lab. The labs
recent work includes conceptualizing
e-first work flow and production processes for books and journals, improving
content experience through enhanced
e-books, helping clients with EPub 3 and
HTML5 deliverables, optimizing clients work processes, and piloting projects in services and solutions that are not
commonly outsourced.
HTML5 and EPub 3, adds Wheeler,
are the future of e-deliverables. We are
seeing a huge amount of interest in
repurposing Flash content, especially
quizzes and interactive exercises, for
delivery in HTML5. So our team has
developed robust and scalable work flows
for such conversion. On the other hand,
EPub 3 allows publishers to leverage the
power of various mobile devices by incorporating media components into their

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Content Services in India 2012


deliverables. It is interesting to see
HTML5 becoming an important part of
media delivery and being tightly integrated into EPub 3 specifications. Needless to say, we are capitalizing on our
content conversion and multimedia
expertise to maximize our clients ability
to deliver through these two important
technologies.
The attention on e-books and mobile
apps is expected, given the ubiquity of
handheld electronic devices. For
Wheeler, it is only logical to make content available for these devices. The typical smartphonewhether it is Apple,
Android, or Windows poweredis
essentially a very powerful minicomputer. Still, I am a bit surprised at the
amount of reading done on these devices.
The utility of many mobile apps has
completely changed how everybody
views and uses handhelds. Naturally, our
team is actively preparing and converting content for these products.

Planman Technologies
Last year, a major publisher of textbooks,
reference works, trade titles, and educational software selected Planman as a
vendor of choice for a project to produce
multiple programs for mobile and handheld devices. This project required an
understanding of educational products,
as our team had to review the content and
make decisions and recommendations
relating to file formats that could be produced, such as reflowable EPub and
fixed-layout EPub. Furthermore, the
content had to be tested on multiple
devices and platforms based on the clients acceptance testing criteria and quality parameters, says v-p for sales Amit
Vohra. Now that EPub 3 and DAISY
standards are converging, the idareadera software application produced
by Planman and Danish company xmltekst for dyslexic and visually impaired
readerswill be the first to have the
ability to read aloud both DAISY and

EPub 3 files across platforms. The past


eight months also saw Planman helping
publishers to convert existing Flashbased content into HTML5.
As for meeting tight deadlines and
stringent quality control, no one beats
Planmans newspaper digitization team.
Says v-p of operations P.S. Narang, Our
team has digitized more than five million pages of newspapers in the past three
years using our state-of-the-art proprietary work-flow solution. We have also
digitized more than two million contemporary newspaper pages in the past year.
The challenge lies in delivering 50-plus
titles (approximately 4,500 pages) on a
daily basis within three hours upon
receipt. A robust work-flow monitoring
system plays a big role in making everything happen on time, every time.
(Planman works with national libraries
worldwide and digitizes newspaper
archives from microfilm.)
Vohra notes that American publishers

Content Services in India 2012


(l. to r.) Subhrajit
Dasgupta, Amandeep
Wasal Singh, Amit
Vohra, Pawan Singh
Narang, and Dipak
Shaw of Planman
Technologies

are asking for more full-service packaging and digital technology solutions,
often with simultaneous delivery. Planmans full-service packaging model is
focused on the k16 market, and its team
has just finished a big primary math
project for a well-known educational

publisher. European and Asian clients have just


started to ask for
such services, and
we see this market
expanding.
The goal for the
coming year, adds
Vohra, is to help
clients make the transition from print to
digital. The idea is not only to produce
content for digital devices but to help
create an ecosystem by developing
e-reader applications that allow e-books
to be read on different devices, producing
those e-books, and then deploying the

OFFSHORE
ONSHORE

content in an e-bookstore where users


can purchase the books for that ecosystem. One of the problems of developing
an e-book is that it would not look the
same on all e-readers, even within the
same ecosystem.

Newgen Knowledge
Works

Last July, the Carlyle Group sold its


majority stake in Chennai-based Newgen to a consortium of private equity
funds: Aureos South Asia Fund, ePlanet
Capital, and Franklin Templeton Private
Equity Strategy. That change in the companys private equity investors coincided
with a name change to Newgen Knowledge Works. The new name better
reflects the depth to which we now
engage with the content we handle and
the extent to which our publishing clients have come to view us as a technology
solutions provider, says president Maran
Elancheran, who found the 2012 TOC

Solutions Beyond
Expectations

HYBRID
eBooks/ePub3/HTML5
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Content Services in India 2012


Conference in New York one of his most
rewarding industry experiences. The
response to the launch of our e-book conversion platform SILK at the conference
was extremely gratifying. Trade fairs can
be a lonely experience for exhibiting prepress vendors, but TOC is a venue for the
exchange of ideas rather than rights. A
lively q&a session and a slew of e-mail
requests for further information followed
our presentation. SILK uses intelligent
automation to address much-publicized
quality issues found in e-books that are
converted from backlist print titles.
Last year, Newgens U.K.-based subsidiary, GPSL, partnered with the American Chemical Society to design an inhouse XML-first system that allows true
automated composition of complex technical journal articles. This has translated into significant cost and time savings and increased revenue opportunities
for the society, adds Elancheran. GPSL
also formally launched RDG China and
opened a new office in Beijing last February. RDG China, a joint venture with
SFP (a part of the Shandong Publishing
Group), will provide technical solutions
to complex publishing challenges in the
growing Chinese market.
Back in India, Newgen has developed
and implemented JAWS, a system that
provides authors and publishers with a
(browser) window into the automated
XML composition workflow. JAWS
does away with the need for authors to
provide proof corrections as annotated
PDFs, scanned pages, or e-mailed lists of
changes. Instead, they can now log into
the system through any browser, make
changes to the content, and see those
changes reproofed instantly for approval.
Authors do not need to have any knowledge of XML.
Alongside the standard huge backlist
conversion projects and multivolume reference books, the past year has also seen
Newgen and its clients experimenting
with disruptive ways of producing and
disseminating content. Adds Elancheran, There has been a greater willingness to experiment in the past year. For
us, it is exciting to be an integral part of
these projects, and we are looking for-

ward to our clients product announcements soon.

MPS Limited
The indisputable leader in the journal
segment, MPS is currently building an
app factory with interactive journal content for a large publisher. We anticipate
that journals will increasingly shift to
mobile delivery and incorporate handheld devices visual and interactive features. Devices will play a bigger role in
determining and driving content dissemination, says chairman Nishith
Arora, adding that the key drivers of
journal and STM publishing are going to
be monetization of content, minimal
manual intervention at the prepress
stage, and time-to-market.
Helping publishers to generate usage
statisticssomething that is required by
libraries and institutions that subscribe
to their e-books, e-journals, or databasesis one way of monetizing content. Our MPSInsight delivers COUNTER-compliant reports and a suite of
reports through a Web-based interface.
We have also added a sales module,
Insight Plus, which can be used by publishers sales and marketing teams to
increase revenue and analyze content
usage from multiple angles. Libraries can
now log in to access reports as well as
download them, using SUSHI client, to
their ERM systems. Another new application, Data Analysis Tool, allows publishers to write ad hoc queries to slice and
dice data from different dimensions.
IEEE, for instance, switched to MPSIn-

Nishith Arora, chairman of MPS Limited

16 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

sight after its previous COUNTERreporting vendor failed to deliver crucial


reports on time.
Meanwhile, the team is building a
comprehensive publishing platform that
can be used to paginate, publish, and distribute books for on-demand printing,
online retailing, the Web, and mobile
devices. Says Arora, We are essentially
integrating and expanding many of the
tools and platforms that we have built in
the past to create a publishing solution.
As cost and time-to-market become
more critical, we expect a part of the publishing world to move to this platform.
MPS, which is listed on Indias major
stock exchanges, is 76% owned by ADI
BPO Services Private Limited. However,
a merger with ADI BPO/Neuetype is
currently not in the cards. MPS will continue operating as it is, while according
to Arora, Neuetype, a niche content
player, will continue to provide services
to school, college, and professional publishers. ADI BPO, on the other hand, is
a contact center in the city of Dehradun,
240 kilometers north of Delhi. At some
point in the future, MPS may share some
of ADIs resources. As of now, MPS
already has six large production facilities
in Bangalore, Chennai, and Delhi with
2,500 employees. The additional Dehradun facility will, however, provide us
with a competitive advantage and space
for future growth.

Lapiz Online
Anticipation of production costs and
attrition rates creeping up in Chennai
prompted Lapiz to set up another office
in Ranipet, 110 kilometers to the west,
about seven years ago. Today, there are
more than 300 employees at this facility,
equipped with the same skill sets as the
Chennai production site. Since Ranipet
is surrounded by colleges of science,
engineering, and humanities, recruitment is easy, and the attrition rate is
quite low in such a small town. It is a
win-win solution, says COO V.
Bharathram.
Lapiz has seen an increase in whiteboard projects in the past year. So far, we
have developed IWB projects for Pro-

Content Services in India 2012


methean ActivBoard and SMART
Board, Bharathram says. Promethean
comes with more advanced technology
and software, and is portable with better
online support. From a teachers point of
view, however, both whiteboards share
the same functionalities and their tools
are similarly versatile. Web-based
whiteboard development is more complex, he adds. The developmentsay,
of e-text, HTML, or Flash components
is carried out by a production team,
whereas product testing is done either by
a different team from the same vendor or
by a different vendor. Such work division
is natural, as programmers know how to
make a functionality work, while test
engineers have a better perspective of
what might go wrong with that functionality. Having the same vendor for
development and testing means a single
point of accountability. But some clients
prefer to do multisourcing to separate
development from testing.
His main focus in 2012, adds Bharathram, is to enhance Lapizs EPub 3 and
HTML5 capabilities. Flash is certainly
on its way out, replaced by HTML5,
which allows for more interactivity, animation, and media support. By combining EPub 3 with HTML5, we can provide rich-media experience and interactivity, layout enhancements, global language support, and improved accessibility. It would enable functions such as
video and audio embedding, metadata,
hyperlinking, navigation, scripting,
text-to-speech, and dynamic layouts. But
not all browsers support HTML5, and it
is still a work in progress. For school
projects, which is our core segment, both
EPub 3 and HTML5 can be used based
on client requirements.
But whether the project is a whiteboard, school textbook, or e-book project, the trend is to use fewer templates,
says Bharathram: Clients are cutting
down on the number of templates to
reduce cost and time-to-market. For us,
the solution is simple: what the client
wants, the client getsas long as it does
not compromise the quality of the end
product.

Integra Software
Services

Integras acquisition of Elm Street Publishing and Silver Editions (in 2007 and
2009, respectively) speaks volumes about
its U.S. focus. Having built a solid foundation in the higher-ed and pre-k segments through these acquisitions, we
have now augmented our management
team with several industry experts, says
founder, managing director, and CEO
Sriram Subramanya. He has brought on
board Don Lankiewicz (v-p for k12
publishing services), Jeff Dinardo (v-p
for creative design and imagery services),
Frankie Wright (director for editorial
and innovation), Christine Sandvik
(director for instruction and interactive
design), George Duda (director for k12
sales), Cathy Pare (director of rights and
permissions), and Amy Boilard (manager
for key accounts).
A few of these appointments are tied
to Integras new services, such as permissions management. Our team is well
versed in copyright laws, with over 20
years of experience in handling highvolume text and image research and permissions. Whether it is obtaining permissions or negotiating fees, we have it
covered, adds Subramanya, who plans to
put this service online to facilitate access
and tracking by clients.
At its full-fledged audiovisual division, preproduction services (ideation,

Sriram Subramanya, founder, managing


director and CEO of Integra

Gantec Publishing Solutions


scripting, and storyboarding) are now offered along with
shooting in HD, HDV, and DV formats. Our services range
from simple editing to high-end 2-D and 3-D animation
and composition, besides CD and DVD authoring, duplication, and streaming. We use Nuendo and Pro Tools for editing, mixing, encoding, and restoration [of audio], and we
have talented voice-over artists and music and sound effect
libraries, says Subramanya.
Total Project Management (or E2E), on the other hand,
is a premium service for large customers, which takes the
whole project off the publisher so they can focus on their
core competencies. The team is currently working with a
U.S.-based global information services and publishing
company and two multinational publishers. Also new from
Integra is game-based learning, which uses competitive
situations and scenarios to motivate learners of all ages to
challenge themselves.
The past few months also saw plenty of accolades for
Integra. Its iHelp app, which enables researchers to do keyword searches in native languages, won the Popular Choice
Award and came in third in Elseviers Apps for Science
Challenge contest. Joint managing director Anuradha Sriram was named one of the Business Wizards of Tamil Nadu,
and Subramanya received the Pathfinders Award from the
Times Group of India for his contribution to the regions
ITES/BPO industry. The company also took the Best Talent
Management Award at the 22nd World HRD Congress in
Mumbai.

Innodata
Listed in EContent magazines 100 Top Companies in the
Digital Content Industry (again) and KMWorld magazines
100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management,
Innodata is one of the two Inkling partners to provide digital content production services utilizing Inkling Habitat.
The team has also helped two of the worlds largest media
companies create leading digital products, one of which
recouped its investment in less than two months.
This year may prove to be the tipping point in the development and distribution of media-rich interactive content.
With the new iPad, Inkling, and many other platforms
using enhanced processing and high-definition interfaces,
digital textbooks, cookbooks, and childrens books will take
a significant leap forward in their multimedia capabilities,
says senior v-p for sales and marketing Jim Lewis, adding,
this trend is not limited to publishing and media organizations. Multimedia content will become a part of customer
engagement strategies for leading companies in industries
such as high-tech software, hardware, manufacturing, and
financial services.
The apps market is only one of the many delivery channels
for content. Although we have helped many companies
develop app solutions, what we are really interested in is the
market beyond that. This is where new ways of monetizing

Our services :
Art, Design, Production and Pre-press
Copy Editing, Proof Reading and
Indexing
Data Conversion & eBook Production
eLearning, Animation and Multimedia

Mobile App Development


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Markets Served :
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University Presses and Higher Ed
Trade, Professional and STM Publishers
Magazine & Catalog Publishers

Delivering innovation
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To know more about us visit


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For sales inquiries:


info@gantecpublishing.com
(847) 598 1144 Ext 4145
Offices: USA Singapore - India
Corporate office :
1111 N Plaza Drive Suite 300
Schaumburg, IL 60173
USA

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

19

Content Services in India 2012


application to help companies outside
the information and publishing industries adapt to the realities of the digital
revolution.

Gantec Publishing
Solutions

Jim Lewis, senior v-p for sales and marketing


at Innodata

content beyond straightforward apps are


to be found, and that is where we are
engaged with our customers, says Lewis.
Up till now, the notion that content is
separate from the delivery mechanism,
i.e., print, was the standard. In reality,
content is wrapped in software, and the
distinction is blurred. In order to support
the new marketplace for highly interactive, vibrant, and real-time content, software systems must be designed to support the creation of that content, and
developers must be able to anticipate
developmental needs in terms of talent,
skills, experience, and methodologies.
India is certainly one place that can
amply meet these two needs. (And India
is where Innodata has two facilities
staffed by a 2,100-strong workforce.)
Innodata, Lewis says, will continue to
provide strategic support to media,
entertainment, and publishing industry
leaders as they tackle tasks such as new
product development, tablet and e-platform transformation, and content monetization. We will also be working more
with organizations to solve enterprise
content challenges in software, hardware,
manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and other areas where rapid digital
adoption has changed the business
requirements for effective customer
engagement. Additionally, the IADS
(Innodata Advanced Data Solutions)
division will design products for broad

Established eight years ago as a division


of Chicago-based Gantec Corporation,
the firms background in software services has served it well. We fully understand the challenges faced by the publishing industry in adopting technology
that is constantly changing, says CEO
Ramana Abbaraju. Using our technology expertise, we are able to provide
digital transformation consulting services and act as technology partners to
our publishing clients. Today, we are one
of the leading solutions providers capable
of building e-commerce platforms for
selling content built on HTML5 and
EPub 3 standards. We consider our technology expertise the biggest differentiator between us and the competition.
Nearly 70% of Gantecs sales come
from the U.S., most of it from the elhi
segment. A 300-strong production team
supports its U.S. delivery center. Global
delivery with local touch is our mantra,
and publishers choose to work with us
because we offer a complete end-to-end
solution covering traditional prepress services, digital media solutions, and distribution. Gantec also works on appsfor
both iOS and Android platformsand
Abbaraju sees the market moving
toward an apps subscription model versus
outright purchase. No one, it seems,
wants to buy content, but people
are prepared to
pay for subscription in order to
receive content.

(l. to r.) Margaret


Marco, Ramana
Abbaraju, and
David Aubrey of
Gantec
Publishing
Solutions

20 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

Gantecs 10-month-old division,


eBooks2go.net, is a first for a content
services provider. Aimed at making
online publishing easy and simple for
independent authors and publishers, its
services range from e-book conversion to
e-distribution through retail partners.
Today, the site receives on average 200
e-book conversion projects per month.
Presently, we are one of the few that specialize in all three major categories of
servicese-books, enhanced e-books,
and e-book apps, adds Abbaraju, whose
team developed an e-book app reader
that supports multiple input file formats, such as PDF, Word, and XML, and
publishes the content as iOS and Android
e-book apps. Upon client approval, the
e-book is published on Apples App Store
and Google Apps Marketplace for access
by readers worldwide. The client can
then monitor and track its sales on
eBooks2go on a daily, weekly, monthly,
or quarterly basis. Partnership is crucial
to eBooks2go, which shares costs and
profits with clients. Says Abbaraju, We
have partnered with leading publishers
such as Marshall Cavendish, Cengage
Learning, Pear Jam Books, and Windy
City Publishers, and the list is growing
every day. As of now, independent
authors make up 60% of our business.
This year, Gantec will have a new facility in Tirupati (150 kilometers from
Chennai), which will accommodate more
than 500 employees and function as
eBooks2gos main production center.
Adds Abbaraju, We will also be launching in May a cloud-based e-reader store

Inno ationLab
SPi Global

Content Services in India 2012


that supports several mobile platforms,
including iOS, Android, and Windows.
This will enable eBooks2go to offer
authors and publishers higher royalties
than Amazon and other retail stores.

DiTech Process
Solutions

DiTechs conversion services segment has


seen increased demand in recent months,
especially after the launch of EPub 3 as
the standard format for e-publishing. I
am also seeing more projects and inquiries for e-books, especially enhanced
e-books, across the STM and childrens
segments, says founder and CEO Nizam
Ahmed. It looks like publishers are no
longer content with simple conversion of
print into PDF for their hardcover titles.
They are moving away from conventional
e-books and exploring versions with rich
multimedia, animation, interactivity,
and all the works. We will certainly see
more innovation and evolution in
e-books, making them much more
attractive and appealing to readers.
As one of the few vendors that have
gone into less established markets (such
as Australia and New Zealand), DiTech
has been getting more active in the Middle East. Digital publishing is just
beginning in this oil-rich region and is
proving to be a big potential market for
us. Per capita device usage is high, and
publishers are keen to digitize childrens
and religious titles. The younger generation, adds Ahmed, is looking for content beyond the type that their parents
are accustomed to, leading to the proliferation of blogs and other social media.
A new wave of publishers focusing on
high-value content has also emerged. We
are eager to broaden our presence in this
market and cater to their publishing
needs with our experience and domain
expertise.
Seeking out new markets and establishing new clients in existing markets is
just one of Ahmeds 2012 goals. We are
also looking into developing our domestic market. While India leads the world
as a publishing services provider, the
domestic publishing industry is still at a
developing stage. Indias digital publish-

Nizam Ahmed, founder and CEO of


DiTech Process Solutions

ing industry needs a push, and we intend


to play a critical role as a technology
partner to help Indian publishers enrich
their customers reading experience.
But rapid technological advances and
changing consumer demands pose new
challenges. Adds Ahmed, It is no longer
enough to be tech savvy and able to do
elaborate coding. Any vendor thinking of
staying in the game and grabbing a bigger slice of the pie has to work on services,
and that is another of our 2012 goals: a
renewed focus on services, be it adding
new solutions to our portfolio, creating
high-value content, developing ancillary
products, or enhancing mobile apps.

diacriTech

So we developed our own from scratch


based on what we need and must have.
The ERP system boasts features such as
project logging, auto/manual manpower
allocation, work-flow charting according to client requirements, project
tracking, version control, production
tracking, performance analysis, human
resource planning, business analytics,
and proactive alerts on delivery projections (based on real-time data management vs. planning).
Executive v-p A.R.M. Gopinath is seeing more demand for cloud-based technologies and custom publishing. The
two do go together at times. For instance,
we have developed several cloud-based
portals for custom publishing. We store
the content from various projects in
XML formats on the portals, and end
users across the globe can search the
repository to create customized titles
with different chapters from different
books by the same publisher. Such portals enable instant electronic delivery,
such as moving print-ready content to
print-on-demand partners. The technology we develop also enables the generation of fresh indexes, tables of contents,
and other front matter components for
the customized title on the fly.
Another interesting trend, adds
Mahesh, is the adaptive learning route
many publishers have taken. Traditionally, content is organized as chapters with
multiple learning objectives. But the rise
of customized titles has seen publishers
looking at learning objectives differently.
Our team, for instance, has reorga-

For diacriTech, creating its own ERP


(enterprise resource
planning) system
makes perfect sense
to executive v-p B.
Mahesh. We could
not find an off-theshelf system that
would fulfill the varied requirements of a
full-service provider,
or one that could be
hooked to a publishers content management or production
management system. Mahesh Balakrishnan (l.) and A.R.M. Gopinath of diacriTech

22 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

Content Services in India 2012


nizedand at times rewrittencontent
pedagogy specifically for print-ready
files or e-delivery formats.
Certain publishing segments, meanwhile, are getting sophisticated to deal
with multiplatform delivery. Dictionaries, for instance, offer highly structured
content with different elements requiring
extensive and varied styling. Dictionary
publishers need their content to be styled
elaborately to ease their work flow. So
each term has several tagging elements
within it. In fact, the more granular the
styling, the better the dictionarys content utilization and delivery.
This year, more content development
will be done from India. We have
invested heavily to raise the number and
quality of people in our facilities. Editorial, fact-checking, supplementary material production, and so on have all along
been done here. But of late, publishers
are pushing to take it to the next level by
having tasks such as item writing and
supplementary material development
done in India too.

technology industry, is
globally. There are
gaining momentum.
many platform-based
Increasingly, entersolutions and products
prises of all sizes are
that will simplify their
embracing it. Curlives, and we would
rently, we offer several
consider offering such
cloud-based solutions
solutions in open source
for work-flow manageand proprietary techment, billing, and
nologies, says Kanodia,
social collaboration.
who also plans to focus
Our clients have benemore on Europe in the
fited immensely from
coming year. Last year,
these solutions, which
he set up a delivery cenimprove resource utiliter in Bosnia, attracted
zation and offer quick Rahul Kanodia, vice-chairman and
by the countrys strateCEO of Datamatics
adaptability for dynamic
gic location, geopolitiscalability, resulting in cost reduction
cal stability, and good infrastructure. It
and increased profitability.
is an excellent location for scaling up our
Over in Puducherry, Datamaticss new
European operations. The team there
state-of-the-art delivery center now has a
provides support to our customers in all
team of 200-plus people focused primarEuropean languages and a few Asian ones
ily on understanding the evolving needs
as well. Gradually, I see this center gainof publishers and e-retailers, and develing traction with increased service offeroping DPR solutions for such clients
ings and new clients.

Datamatics Global
Services

Vice-chairman and CEO Rahul Kanodia


is busy exploring opportunities to further fortify his companys domain expertise in specific business segments.
Under consideration and evaluation are
expansion plans for our digital publishing and retail (DPR), financial and
accounting, and content and document
management businesses. We are in dialogue with a few BPO companies about
acquisition, but it is premature to talk
about these at this moment. Last year,
Datamatics made two acquisitions: U.S.based CIGNEX, a leading open-source
solutions company focusing on enterprise portals, content management, and
document management, and Bangalorebased Vista Infosystems, a professional
services company focused on embedded
markets in the automotive, aeronautics,
and consumer electronics industries.
At the same time, Kanodia is looking
into leveraging cloud-based computing
technologies. Cloud computing, still
one of the biggest buzzwords in the
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

23

Content Services in India 2012


Adds Kanodia, Publishers are looking for companies that can help them
migrate structured and unstructured
content to platforms that would meet
readers changing preferences. At the
same time, readers today want to access
content in any form anywhere and anyhow. Traditional publishing service providers would find it rather challenging
to meet these requirements. And this is
where an IT and KPO company like
Datamatics can help the client. With our
technology and domain expertise, we are
able to enhance productivity across the
enterprise by using content services and
information management systems.

codeMantra
Established in June 2002 and headquartered in Pennsylvania, codeMantra operates in seven states across the U.S. and has
client service, production, and sales staff
based in the U.K., Italy, and Spain.
Together, its three production facilities in
Chennai, Vellore, and Coimbatore have
nearly 1,250 people. The U.S. currently
accounts for 80% of its business, and a
little more than 50% of its revenues come
from e-book creation and conversion.
Currently, codeMantra has 42 publishers, mostly university presses, using its
Web-based digital asset management
and distribution platform, cP3.0. At
present, cP serves as a repository for post-

Walter Walker, executive director of the publishing services division at codeMantra

production print files, the source for all


digital derivatives, and a digital warehouse, says Walter Walker, executive
director of the publishing services division. We are in the final stages of releasing the Title Management module,
which will extend the cP platform further upstream to accommodate key
publishing processes and work flows,
including contract management, royalty
management, rights management, production scheduling, plus sales and marketing scheduling and tracking. It will
be fully integrated with other cP components and applications, including
digital distribution and tracking, widget
creation and analytics, catalogue creation, and of course, our latest offering of
cP Metalogic, which is an ONIX-driven
metadata management and configuration module. (The full title management module will be launched at the
Frankfurt Book Fair.)
Requests from publishers for different
versions of essentially the same PDF files
for their various aggregators and retailers
also prompted codeMantra to create
uPDF. Some required individual chapters bookmarked along with a linked
table of contents and an index. Some
wanted bilateral links. A few asked for a
searchable text layer, while others require
low-resolution images, Walker says.
Fulfilling these varied specifications
was impractical and costly, and it
occurred to us that a single PDF addressing all these requirements would be
welcomed by publishers. Launched in
2005, uPDF has become an industry
standard that meets the needs of Google
Books, Amazons Look Inside, B&Ns
book search, Kobos discoverability,
Sonys platform, and OverDrives specifications, to name a few.
PubXML, on the other hand, is
codeMantras generic and multipurpose
approach to XML. It is essentially a data
model (i.e., document type definition, or
DTD) based on docBook. Publishers
new to XML should start with pubXML,
an all-encompassing data model that can
be pared down over time by eliminating
superfluous tags, adds Walker, whose
team also helps publishers analyze their

24 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

content and establish a starting point in


developing the appropriate DTD. This
year, we plan to expand our global distribution capabilities using cP Metalogic
and improved delivery systems. An
increase of 15% to 20% in our staff and
capacity to meet the higher demand for
our service is in the plan too.

Cenveo Publishers
Services

Acquired in August 2011, Pennsylvaniabased Nesbitt Graphics now provides


Cenveo with editorial development and
design solutions for the higher education and school markets in the U.S. Atul
Goel, Cenveos senior v-p of global
operations and technology, says, With
the combined acquisitions of Glyph
International and Nesbitt Graphics,
Cenveo is now a leading provider of
content services in the educational and
STM segments. Cenveos Global Content Services Group provides full-service
publishing solutions and operates off-

Atul Goel, senior v-p of global operations and


technology at Cenveo Publisher Services

shore composition facilities in Chennai,


Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, and four
domestic content facilities in Richmond,
Va.; Ephrata, Pa.; Columbia, Md.; and
Ft. Washington, Pa.
Cenveo recently announced the establishment of the Publishing Lab. The lab
combines members of the technology
teams from all the facilities into a con-

is constant!
...ever evolving and innovating with time,
only to offer you the best!

Experience the

change with us!

Content Development Instructional Design Integrated Print and Digital Design


IIlustrations 2D & 3D Image Research Conversion & Digitization
e-books and apps New Media Technology

www.thomsondigital.com
India USA UK France Australia

Content Services in India 2012


solidated enterprise experienced in
creating and developing solutions
across publishing platforms. This Publishing Lab will continue to develop
solutions targeted at our customers
needs, says Goel.
Meanwhile, development is complete
on a comprehensive e-learning creation
and production module. Utilizing the
expertise of its global resources, Cenveos
e-learning module works with all types
of content, including k12, higher ed,
and corporate training. The courses can
run off the Internet or from any SCORMbased LMS (learning management system).
In addition, Cenveos Mobile dPub
enables publishers to distribute content
on any mobile device via a browserfriendly interface. Using print PDF as
the source file, it moves the content to
iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, smartphones, and desktops, says

v-p of operations Waseem Andrabi.


Meanwhile, ePublish, a new e-book conversion platform, supports many source
files, including XML, HTML, PDF, and
application files, as well as enriched and
interactive content. This platform also
supports graphics, math, and tables, and
can be used for language conversion.
There are also customizable tools that
allow for template-specific conversions
so that clients can have their e-books in
the style and format that they want.
Goels three main goals in 2012 are to
help clients digitize their content, monetize it, and improve production efficiency. Financial pressures remain
strong, and publishers are trying to find
ways to cut costs, he says. But the
demand for technology-enabled solutions continues to grow. The role for
Cenveo is to support publishers in their
efforts to cut costs and implement the
technology solutions that are critical to
continued growth, including coming up
with solutions to reduce turnaround
time, repurpose content for multiple
uses, and enable simultaneous content
creation and delivery. All these combined
would lower production costs while
meeting varied customer demands.

Aptara
Aptaras acquisition by the Londonbased publicly listed company iEnergizer
in February has injected much energy
into the firm. We are enhancing our
focus and strengthening our leading
position in the industry. We now have
even greater financial strength to invest
in strategic growth initiatives, including
acquisitions, says president and CEO
Dev Ganesan, who is looking forward to
utilizing iEnergizers high-end call center and back-office support from its
India and Mauritius operation centers.
With enhanced customer support, transaction processing, and billing services,
we can provide a truly end-to-end solution
for publishers that encompasses business
operations and content production.
Tapping into Indias key skilled labor
areas has been on Ganesans to-do list for
some time. Our strategy in India is to be
geographically diversified with produc26 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

Dev Ganesan, CEO of Aptara

tion sites in New Delhi and Dehradun in


the north, Trivandrum in the south, and
Pune in the west. We are replicating our
successful operational model across the
country. Last year, we opened our new
Pune facility in a modern high-tech office
park where the majority of our instructional and creative designers are based.
Our next phase of operational expansion
will be outside of India in the Pacific
Rim. With iEnergizers operations in the
equation, Aptara can also count on the
French-speaking Mauritius as a base.
Our dedicated digital textbook
design and production center, initially
built for Inkling, has given Aptara a
strong foothold in the educational publishing sector at a time when the market
needs it most, adds Ganesan. This center capitalizes on our strength in fullcontent life cycle management. We are
developing content, designing and
enhancing it, and producing it for digital products ranging from textbooks to
supplemental teaching and assessment
resources. We are working to redefine
not just textbooks but also digital
resourceswhether it is sheet music that
you can listen to, Shakespeare coming to
life through videos of professional stage
productions, quizzes with immediate
feedback for testing knowledge, or 3-D
interactive images of almost anything
science related. And as digital media fur-

Content Services in India 2012


ther levels the playing field, this production center will be a boon to all publishers who want to produce engaging, richmedia content.
Ganesan notes that a future growth
area for Aptara is digital rights and permissions managementa critical need
yet an unwieldy task that has caught
many publishers off guard. Our subject
matter expertise together with our honed
research processes and outsourcing
methodologies make Aptara uniquely
qualified to take this responsibility off
publishers hands by moving these processes offshore for significant time and
cost savings.

Amnet Systems
Ranked #7 in the 2010 Black Book of
Outsourcing, Amnet was the only publishing services provider on the Global
Top 50 list, which was compiled based
on a client satisfaction survey of 2,751
IT-outsourcing companies. Customer
service and relationship development are
our key differentiators. We are willing to
do what it takes to help our clients
growbecause when they grow, we
grow, says North American sales director Molly Redenbaugh, pointing to the
companys 97% client retention rate as
further proof of its outstanding service
record. Her team handles customer service, sales, marketing, and editorial project management out of the one-year-old

Aashish Agarwaal, CEO of Amnet Systems

Urbana, Ill., office.


Customer service is exactly what an
ongoing six-year-old project from a selfpublishing client requires most. We
started with formatting just 20 titles
monthly to doing more than 500 titles,
fiction and nonfiction, that average
100,000 pages per month. Using source
files in Word and InDesign, our team
has to format, proofread, make corrections, convert images, and provide final
PDFs for print and e-book versions for
each title within eight working days. To
speed things along, we developed project management tools to track e-mail
notifications for each title through a
Web portal that is maintained by our
client and constantly updated by our
production team. The big challenge is in
understanding the clients correction
requests. So we jointly developed a softproofing process to eliminate any gaps
in understanding the correction requests
and to track each request throughout the
work flow. The tracking logs are validated and sent along with the proof files
once a title is completed, explains
Redenbaugh.
For CEO Aashish Agarwaal, relationship enrichment is the key to the future.
A multimedia department, headed by an
expert with 14 years of experience in the
animated film and gaming industry, has
just been started. Such services are
something that we envision more and
more publishers will soon utilize. We
have done a fair amount of work in the
childrens segment, and we anticipate
higher growth for enhanced e-books and
multimedia projects within the next few
years. We are also working on how to
best leverage our worldwide editorial
resources for content aggregators and
publishers on a global scale.
Recently, Amnet opened a new Chennai facility, its fifth site. Nicknamed
Energie, the facility houses executive
offices and a production space that can
accommodate up to 450 full-time
employees. Purpose-built, it is designed
to provide the companys premedia and
magazine divisions with calibrated lighting for reviewing high-end illustrations
and photographs.

Publishing Services

We provide
custom solutions
for the global
marketplace.
Integra provides services
in print and interactive
media, from content
development to production.
PreK12
Higher Education
ELT
STM
Call us. Well tell you more.

630 586-2579
Email us. Well get in touch.
marketing@integra.co.in
www.integra.co.in
Powering content
transformations
since 1994
Full-service
development
teams in Chicago,
New York, and
Boston
Corporate
Headquarters:
Pondicherry,
India

Content Services in india 2012

Complex projects and pressing deadlines are becoming the industry norm

Projects Showcase

ing to convert academic titles containing


mathematical, scientific, and graphical
content into XML and e-books. Maintaining a high degree of accuracy during
content conversion and rendering was
crucial. Apart from content transformation, Datamatics was also called in to
provide quality assurance for the publishers projects, including those done by
other vendors. So far, more than one million pages have been processed.

By Teri Tan

diacriTech

Messy source files? Check. Short turnaround? Definitely.


Complex work flow? That goes without saying. Multiple
deliverables? Double-check. (And, really, do you need to ask?)

t seems as if Indian vendors live to


take on any challenge that any
publishing clientjournal, k12,
higher ed, or STMmight throw
at them. If you need more convincing, just take a look at the following projects, chosen randomly, that
showcase these vendors capabilities
across segments and domains, and the
extra mile they go to deliver the projects.

Amnet Systems
XML conversion of religious publications was the challenge for Amnet Systems. The production team had to provide native XML files based on the clients DTD as well as EPub standards.
Most of the 75,000-plus pages that
arrived at its door were hard copies.
Using an integrated XML EPub work
flow, the team relied on its vast experience with theological works to design
the pages in XML/HTML/SGML with
style sheets matching the original source.
The project also involved non-English
languages such as German, Greek,
Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, and Syriac. The
team used biblio- and media-tagging
Amnets two new value-added services
to link resources, references, and images.
Aside from the e-book formats determined by the client, the team also provided an optimally designed single out-

put to fit any output device.


Another conversion project, from PDF
to EPub, saw more than 100,000 pages
processed per month. For those titles
from the clients frontlist, the team had
to deliver each title within one week
receipt; an extra week was given for the
backlist, which usually involved scanned
pages. The mostly non-English titles
came in different complexity levels, thus
requiring more time to fix errors that
cropped up during the normal text
extraction process and to meet the
99.995% content accuracy expectation.

Datamatics Global
Services
Converting more than three million
pages of legal content in multiple formats was what a major legal publisher
wanted from Datamatics. Given the
complex interlinking between the pages
and issues, the team had to develop special tools, a tracking system, and quality
mechanisms to help ensure accurate linking and content rendering. Its four delivery centers in India (located in Mumbai,
Nashik, Chennai, and Puducherry) were
ramped up to deliver the project within
10 weeks. Another four million to five
million pages are to come.
A different project saw the team help-

28 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

Providing full project management services from India was the requirement set
by diacriTechs client for a math-laden
science series. Composed in InDesign
and managed in an XML-first work flow,
the 2,600-page project employed a twoprong approach to enable delivery in
print PDF and e-format (HTML5 and
enriched e-books). Following the success
of their first collaboration, the publisher
is working again with the team to create
several titles with iBooks Author.
Another full-service project, involving
a 2,900-page series with English, science, social science, and math components within each title, presented quite
a challenge. Each title had to be carefully
designed to ensure continuity of the look
and style of the series. The team was
instructed to create and embed interactive elements and read-along audio for
the accompanying Flash e-book. A test
generator was also developed to help
teachers produce assessments based on
the content of the series.

DiTech Process
Solutions
Creating digital pages out of 100 print
titles published between 1995 and 2000
was one of the many digital publishing
projects handled by DiTech last year. The
client gave the team just over one month
to recreate more than 40,000 pages (with
illustrations) and convert them into EPub,
XML, Web PDF, and print-ready PDF, the
last format being the most difficult.
Although high-end scanners were
employed to maintain color accuracy and

Content Services in india 2012


clarity for images and illustrations, the
team still had to do considerable color correction and retouching prior to generating
print-ready PDFs. As for EPub and XML
deliverables, many in-house tools and
scripts were developed and written to speed
up the tagging and QC processes.

Gantec Publishing
Solutions/eBooks2go.net
Creating an iPad app out of a discrete
math textbook was the challenge given
to Gantec. First, pages laden with symbols, equations, charts, and graphs had to
be converted from PDF to HTML. Then
the team developed an HTML reader
with built-in features such as a dictionary, notes, bookmarks, and interactive
practice tests. With this app, users can
convert finished tests into PDF, print
them for review and submission, or
e-mail them.
One of the complex projects received at

eBooks2go.net involved photo research and


management for more than 1,000 backlist
titles. Tasks included identifying royaltyfree photos, replacing those that were no
longer available with free images in the
public domain, and purchasing replacement photos if free images were unavailable. In some cases, the team had to decide
if removing an image from the e-book
would affect its content. Sales from the
e-books through the client and eBooks2gos channels are then reported for profit
sharing, with the cost of purchasing images
deducted accordingly.

Integra
Creating interactive content that is compatible with most Web-based browsers
and interactive whiteboards and viewable on autolaunching DVD was the
project brief from one innovative publisher of supplemental teaching material.
To meet the challenge, Integras new
media services team came up with a mul-

tiplatform interactive learning solution


that featured engaging content, userfriendly navigational tools and templates, animations to reinforce learning,
as well as audio and video-based elements. Integras U.S. team took on the
project management, content development, and customization tasks, while the
rest of the processes, involving new
media, Flash, animation, and interactivity, were done in India.

Lapiz Online
One IWB (interactive whiteboard) project with 10,000-plus flip charts and as
many pages of teacher notes tested the
Lapiz teams knowledge and skills. A
short turnaround time was given to produce pages for different grades and
deliver batches at specified intervals. The
project scope included development,
conversion, building interactivity, and
testing of the flip charts.

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

29

Content Services in india 2012


MPS Limited

Planman Technologies

The MPS team customized a British


journal publishers Web-based production system, Journal Track, to enable
authors to track the production status of
accepted articles and for journal editors
to track the status, content, and page and
color budgets of journal issues. Functions
such as article metadata capture and storage, article and issue tracking, and
schedule creation were automated for the
publisher, and special features such as
measurement of supplier turnaround
time and an e-commerce facility for the
payment of nonsubscription revenue
items were added. Journal Track offers a
full overview of the real-time status of all
material in production and provides
increased transparency throughout the
production process for all involved. Integrated into the accounting system, it also
offers a widget for the finance team to
check order details.

One of the most turbulent periods in


U.S. history, the Civil War, was the topic
of a full-service packaging project that an
American publisher handed Planman
Technologies. The eight-title series
required meticulous content writing and
copyediting to ensure factual accuracy.
Much time was also spent on researching
and procuring photos of that time period,
with each title requiring between 80 and
100 photos. Next, the design team had
to come up with interesting page layouts
to make the content engaging to young
readers (ages 10 to 13) to acquaint them
with this important historical period.

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SPi Global
A decade ago, it took SPi Global five
years to convert more than 30 million
print pages into PDF and XML formats
for an STM publisher. Now, its team
expects to process a similar number of
pages but in more deliverable formats in
less than two years. To speed up the process, besides utilizing special conversion
tools developed for STM and professional
publications (invariably sprinkled with
equations, complex tables, and crossreferences), employing a global workflow model helps considerably. For such
large-scale projects, SPi Globals six
offices in three countries work seamlessly
on a common conversion platform. For a
content enrichment project, another
team extracted information such as
chemical formulas from various STM
publications and updated the clients
databases. Such projects require collaborative partnership with the client and
the skill of SPi Globals 75 full-time
postgraduate and Ph.D.-level subject
matter experts.

Swift Prosys
To handle a polytechnic institutes journals
from the 1800s, the team at Swift Prosys
first had to learn and recognize Gothic
fonts. Scanned pages from the client were
OCR-ed and proofread by two staff, with a
third person analyzing both sets for mismatches and corrections. Style was then
applied and the documents converted into
TEI P5 XML files. However, the liberal use

30 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 3 , 2 0 1 2

JOBZONE_1/6.indd 1

1/20/11 5:08 PM

of technical terms made spell-checking difficult, and special zoning software was
required to work on the large-format illustrations. Nonetheless, within seven
months, the team had completed 46 volumes (24,000 pages) with 250 large-format illustrations.
Another project involves scanned
pages from handwritten burial and cremation registers dating back to the 18th
century, where the biggest challenge lies
in deciphering different peoples handwriting. The teams tasks include analyzing each register, studying handwriting
patterns, preparing a specific set of manuals for each register, double keyboarding, and counterchecking and validating
each record against a huge database of
first names, surnames, counties, and
councils. A tool that provides 99.98%
accuracy in reading the handwritten
script is employed to aid the process.
About two million records have been
processed, with another three million to
four million in the pipeline.

Thomson Digital
At Thomson Digital, a big project
involving 154 chapters and nearly 2,500
typeset pages became even more complex
with requirements for three different
types of deliverables for different chapters (print only, Web only, and print plus
Web) and to liaise with nearly 154 contributors, several section editors, and the
publisher. With some contributors preferring soft copy while others hard copy
for review, job tracking became a challenge. The team had to engage subject
matter experts to interpret handwritten
corrections and monitor all project stages
on the in-house project management system (TDPMS).
Another project, totaling 27,740
pages in 40 volumes (approximately
1,050 articles) on organic chemistry,
took the team nearly a year to complete.
The biggest challenge was index generation from the clients inappropriately
tagged XML files. Special tools were
developed to extract the index terms
before sorting them according to the clients guidelines. The final index took up
more than 500 pages. 

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