Digital Content in 2016

A number of exciting new publishing areas are being opened by digital content. It is probably correct to say that the changes are disruptive, but these rapid changes are not heard about in the standard trade-book same-ol discussions about e-books and e-book readers vs. print. Publishing is rapidly becoming a multi-galaxy of spinning digital things extending ever outwards.

Digital content publishing is diverse. In addition to standard academic, periodical, education and trade book production and distribution for print and eBooks our late 2015 workload included:

• Digital design and production of multi-subject examination content for a national examination system that could deliver PDF, Wordprocessor, Online and e-Book assembled tests. (Sorry kids. There is no cheat mode!)
• Adding periodical subscriptions to AZARDI:Content Fulfilment including the various accounting requirements for advanced payments.
• Design and implementation of a custom static site for academic publishing to give simple and secure content delivery to controlled audiences. This is built on the standard IGP Static Site export from IGP:Digital Publisher.
• Updating, enhancing a simplifying the report publishing system for a National Health organization (think 1,000 plus reports published  per month!) depoyed on a customized version of IGP:Digital Publisher. The reports are in PDF and online. (Can someone let Bernie know we are ready with the system when he kicks 'Medicare for All' into action!)
• Design and creation of multi-language aural, interactive textbooks. This is a project of immense importance internationally and we will be posting a lot more about multi-language production and book delivery as the year moves on. 
• Creating publisher catalog generation tools (using IGP:Digital Publisher) and sales tools (built off IGP:Distribution Manager). The catalog tools reduce production time of large complex catalogs to hours instead of weeks and allow creation of custom catalogs for various conferences and tradeshows.

We didn't post many blogs in 2015 because all the talk about digital content publishing seemed to be in a "cut and paste" loop about technical refinement. 2015 was definitely not an exciting year! Thankfully things are warming up again. Fast!

The big items for 2016... so far!

There is of course no time to stand still. Moving forward into 2016 our core focus is:

• We are currently significantly re-engineering IGP:Digital Publisher for trade and academic book production to all formats. That includes simplification of tools and automation of typesetting using new algorithms for higher productivity and quality. Standby for the announcements!
• Adding new features to AZARDI:Content Fulfilment and the AZARDI Reading systems with a focus on highly interactive content delivered in multi-language environments. The focus is developing country education but we are inclusionist, so come-along industrial countries. This includes group note sharing so teachers and pupils can communicate from anywhere. This is important in countries like the Philippines where an average of 90 days of school are lost each year due to tropical hurricanes.
• Keep the AZARDI Readers in syncronization with the changing (at last) ePub specification for forward looking publishers and better education/interactive content delivery.
• Producing more relevant interactive learning content for the AZARDI Learning Library, again with a focus on Primary and Secondary education everywhere. The content is all language (I18N) and all locale (L10N) ready to virtually eliminate the production cost overheads of interactive content.

EPub and emerging Internet standards

The rapid forward movement of Internet technology (HTML5/CSS/ECMAScript/APIs) means that application oriented e-book formats such as ePub (any number) are approaching the end of their useful lives. They were invented way before Browsers became the operating system engines they are today. There is little doubt ePubX reflect a fast receding view of yesterday's technology.

The implementation uptake for ePub3 was atrocious and even now there are sales channels that only take ePub2 books. The new ePub 3.1 specification is ready for draft release and that has a fresher HTML5 approach. We will analyse that in later articles. However reading system uptake is going to be the thing.

IGP:Digital Publisher is ready for ePub3.1, way ahead of the curve, with the production and packaging tools (subject to final spec. changes).  AZARDI:Content Fulfilment is natively ready since we did the experimental E0 format in August 2013.  I certainly hope they change ePub3.1 to ePub4 given the radical changes.

AZARDI was the world's first ePub3 reader released on the 21 October 2011 just one month after the specification was finalized. This remarkable achievement was not matched by the availability of any ePub3 content for nearly a year other than the books we made available on the AZARDI Download site. We followed that notable first with AZARDI being the first Fixed Layout ePub3 Reader released on the 31 December 2012.

We are watching a number of W3C standards currently in development. Publisher digital content will soon be released from Reader applications and locked down e-Retailer models giving publishers the opportunity to discover new business models.

Predictions for 2016

My first prediction is ... Nah! Not going there. It's all changing too fast.

There are plenty of good practitioner work items on our to-to list without trying to become a digital content prophet. There are enough of them out there trying to fill seats in various booky/publishy fair and conference thingys. 

So now time to get to work.