Welcome back! The point in concern is not only to convert the traditional assets to the new standards driven formats such that these could become mainstream publications and bringing continuous revenues to publishers, another concern is how to seek compatibilities between several XML standards which could assist a publisher in planning future business models built around the digital platforms.

If you are an informed publisher (or if you wish to become one), you would already know the following standards which are entirely based on XML technologies:

Production Standards

• EPUB format - which is really a file extension (.epub) comprised of three core standards:
  • OPS 2.0: Open Publication Structure;
  • OPF 2.0: Open Packaging Format; and
  • OCF 1.0: Open Container Format.
• DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) - the latest version is DAISY 3.0, which is a standard for accessing multimedia books;
• NIMAS 1.1: National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard, which is but built around DAISY and OPS, is a key standard for converting your published resources to accessible formats, such as, large print, braille, and digital talking books.

Distribution Standards

• ONIX for Books - is an XML package which contains a detailed metadata about a product (book and its variants) and currently becoming very important for the publishing industry across the globe to adopt this comprehensive metadata that supports sale of a product.
• EDItEUR has also release more standards to support electronic commerce in the book and the serial sectors.

Can e-Learning and e-Publishing be merged?

Why not? e-Learning resources (called learning objects) heavily depend on the content already published in the traditional formats. Educational Publishers could surely look at the XML Workflows which convert the educational content simultaneously to several formats, including an e-Learning resource or a courseware. This has to in compliance with the leading international standards, such as SCORM and IMS.

Leads to Traditional Publishers

1. Make it essential to save your front-lists in an XHTML format; this could be done in QuarkXpress as well as InDesign;

2. Keep all graphic assets in high-resolution archives along with the XHTML archive;

3. Mark-up the XHTML to make it processable on an XML Engine;

4. Higher an XML Engine (such as ePubNow! Online Platform) to convert your asset in a standards-compliant format, such as DocBook v5.x for future use;

5. Use the same XML Engine to produce alternative formats, such as EPUB and NIMAS, in fractions of the time and cost you spend otherwise through the conversion process, and start distributing EPUB through the major channels;

6. You may choose the DRM (Digital Rights Management) channels for distributing your EPUB format eBooks;

7. Educational Publishers can submit the NIMAS format to NIMAC (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Center) and obtain a digital certification as per the relevant legal compliance.

Converting Backlists

Publishers can use high-speed scanners and save scanned files directly as PDFs. That saves a huge processing time in conversing images to searchable PFDs. Content can be extracted from PDFs. Images can be carefully cropped from PDFs.

This is slightly a cumbersome process, that requires a scanning of a book, and proof-reading and keying-in, and subsequent mark-up in the requisite formats. If publishers have the print-PDF archives, the process becomes a bit simple, but a lot of human intervention is required in such legacy conversions.

We shall continue with understanding how the digital books market distribution works in the subsequent post(s).