Production Service Portals Announced

We are pleased to announce Production Service Portals, an exciting new product option for IGP:Digital Publisher Portals.

If you are a publisher that produces around 20 books per year, for just the cost of the digitization you can have your production work carried out and made available with full access on your own personal IGP:Digital Publisher Portal for one full year. The Portal rental is free. The books can be spread out over the year, and the plan can be repeated in subsequent years by mutual agreement.

Production Service Portals are targeted at the small to medium (SM) publisher who are currently outsourcing their production, or thinking of outsourcing their production, but whose real business requirement is a serious digital content business strategy.

Production Services Portal  benefits?

As we designed this new product we had to ensure there was a clear statement of business benefits for the SM publisher.

Your own Production Services Portal plan gives you:

1. Your content digitized to the highest standards on the planet.
2. The work is carried out on the most advanced technology resources. You have full access and can learn about digital content ownership as you go. No pressure.
3. Your content moves from ad hoc desktop files to a centrally managed, secure content management system.  It's valuable into the future.
4. You instantly get a mature digital content strategy direction, plus an experienced and dynamic support team.
5. You get to deliver the formats while having the space to learn and understanding over time the various issues of owning digital content in a rapidly changing landscape.
6. Your editorial/production team can access and use the system for experimenting with new products, new formats and so much more.

Practical Issues

Having your production work carried out by Infogrid Pacific while having that content available on an IGP:Digital Publisher Portal brings the following benefits:

1. You can use the system for front-list PDF production from your manuscripts and significantly reduce production costs.
2. You can instantly generate multiple editions of print PDFs, multiple e-book formats, make websites and much more with the same content.
3. You have access to the power-tools used by large publishers as you prepare for a digital content future. Your content is future-proofed. Digitize once, use forever.
4. You address the practical business requirements of today while preparing for the future.
5. Your content always remains your own and can be downloaded at any time.
6. You get full interactive support.

The Idea

The concept of Production Service Portals emerged from the work we have been doing with a number of smaller regional and specialist publishers around the world who have found it difficult to get their back-list content into digital form. They want to be able to make their content work harder than just being converted to ePub.

They are publishers who are adept with the various technologies of the print world, but still new to the confusing world of digital formats. They also understand enough about digital content to see that getting the backlist digitized into ePubs is just a repeat of having content available only as PDFs. It is a digital content dead-end.

With the speed at which digital content is moving we saw we had to break the traditional business models so publishers could get current AND future value for their investment in digitization; AND have exposure to advanced solutions; AND have time to plan their future digital content business model.

It can be a challenge for small and medium publishers to put into place a practical digital content strategy. It's confusing and there are a lot of opinions being offered out there. From a publisher's perspective Infogrid Pacific is just another option in a crowded market; until they take a look inside. 

Most publishers have to just move forward and outsource digitization. That means for the money they get an ePub, or some other formats and no future value investment. That is a digital content dead-end.

Digital Content Production-State of Play

The production of digital content is currently divided into the following camps:   

1. Self-production desktop tool camp

At the bottom is the desktop, semi-hobbiest tool group using a combination of InDesign, Sigil, Calibre and other general tools. While these are all capable of producing formats, the  production work adds no value to the content. This means future format delivery requirements will need more expenditure to produce.

This solution camp provides the lowest possible value for digital content, unless it is self-published content. It is not really an option for a serious publisher.

2. Production services provider camp

In the middle are dedicated in-house, local or off-shore conversion services. Typesetting files or PDFs are delivered, and e-Book formats are returned. There are no standards or consistency applied to the content. So it has only the immediate format value. 

This solution camp can provide immediate value at reasonably low price. But the content will not have any future value.

3. Online Technology camp

There is a growing plethora of do-it-yourself production sites. Smashbooks, Vook, O'Reilly and others. These are pretty much an extension of the desktop tool camp to an online environment using fixed simple templates which are possibly suitable for simple linear books, but really only apply for self-publishers. There are usually stacks of fee penalties to get a book from the production system to market. Where they are free, the output shows it.

This solution camp provides the most vicious trap for publisher's valuable content and provides the lowest return on investment.

4. In-house technology camp

The publisher works with external consultants and implements some sort of technology solution with some XML or other content controlling framework that in some method allows the future reuse of content, usually at the cost of processor development.

Small and medium publishers find this too intimidating and expensive both in terms of money and time. There are no off-the-shelf solutions and learning curves to establish real digital content business strategies look too intimidating from outside.

     

The IGP:Digital Publisher Production Service Portal is a blend of 2 and 4 with the publisher controlling the balance. A Production Services Portal means you get your digitization work done at competitive production services prices AND you get a complete future-proof content archive, production, management and multi-format generation system.

A prime difference between IGP:Digital Publisher using IGP:FoundationXHTML is that the focus is not on technology but on editors, production people, the content and the business of publishing. The challenge is always how fast and at how little cost can content be delivered to market.

No Traps

We realised that smart small and medium publishers need confidence on the security of their content. The conditions are easy. General Production Services Portal usage terms and conditions are the same as a Standard Portal.

If you don't like the service or solution. Pull out at any time with 30 days notice.

We never use your access to your content as a condition. Your content is always yours. If you decide not to continue at any time, or at the end of the 12 month period we will prepare a full archive bundle of your books content for you to download, or you can download them in the archive format packages yourself. That means your content is available into the future as IGP:FoundationXHTML and the value is preserved.

During your time using Production Services Portals there is no limit to the number of books you can create, transform or store in your IGP:Digital Publisher Portal.

Pricing

Our standard production prices are highly competitive. There are no penalties in this plan. We don't make our digitization services prices public on the website, but a novel or straight-forward academic book is typically well in the sub-100 dollar range. We price in a wide range of currencies to avoid bank transfer penalties.

Production Services payment terms are 30 days from completion of production. 

Much more important than the portal annual rental saving, is that small and medium publishers get a significant and serious digital content strategy.

References

IGP:Digital Publisher Features

IGP:Digital Publisher Online User Manuals