Digital Solutions in India

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY .
C O M
Special Report 2016
Digital Solutions in
INDIA
The 11th Annual Review
More innovative digital workflows and solutions

to tackle the challenges of time-to-market,
user engagement, discoverability, and monetization
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Transforming ideas
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Digital Solutions in India 2016
Combining components digital and human to push publishing further
A New Era in Digital Solutions

By Teri Tan
The digital solutions industry is having its own Industrial

Revolution. More automation, newer processes, and better
efficiencies rule the day. Production volume is up, investment
in R&D climbing fast, and scale taken for granted.
cover photo from istock nikolaev
n the flip side, resources

such as skilled laborare
getting scarcer, and the
market more picky by
the minute. But unlike the
Ford cars that rolled out
all in black, the digital solutions industry
serves up products and solutions in all
variants, from the rigorously automated
(such as typesetting and scanning) to the
highly skilled (manuscript reviewing
and STM editing).
While keyboarding and triplekeying crop up less often in marketing
collaterals, these services are still
offered by the smaller outfits, and often
outsourced by the bigger ones. Much
commoditized and with razor-thin
margins, these are less glamorous than,
say, mobile learning or white-labeled
e-bookstore development.
The way services are bundled and presented is getting sophisticated.Smaller
operations may offer transcription,
indexing, and abstraction services, but
at larger entities that target established
publishing clients, these are collectively
positioned and marketed as knowledge-based solutions. It is typesetting
and layout for one, composition and
project management for the other.
Small operations talk about per-page
fees; the big guys talk about licensing
and pay-per-use.
Somewhere along the service evolution, some of the vendors and BPO
(business process outsourcing) companies
turned KPO (knowledge-based outsourcing), and quite a few went IPO. The
Darwinian rule applies: the big and
strong tend to survive better, or at least
last longer.
If previous talks were about converting legacy files and repurposing old
titles, the conversation is now all about
solutions. And while content is increasingly mobile and fluid, solutions are
going enterprise-wide and modular.
The vendor-client relationship is similarly changing, not exactly fluid but
definitely less conventional, with collaborative partnership just a whisper away.
XML, which used to pepper any digital-related conversations, seems to have
lost the popularity contest. But it remains
right in the fore- and background in the
form of XML-first and round-tripping
XML workflows. Its role in digitization
is unshakable, but other standards
HTML5, ePub3, and NIMAS, for
instanceare monopolizing the chats,
tweets, and blogs because of the demands
for mobile content, interactive features,
and accessibility.
And though processes and workflow
are going systematic and automatic, the
latest rage is all social, albeit in the virtual
domain. Engaging consumers through
virtual community and social marketing is about enabling discoverability,

which allows for identification, monetization, and metrics.
That brings us to measurable data,
which empowers strategies through
actionable intelligence, which bringus to
the world of big data, analytics, metadata,
semantics, tagging, oh my! Since shifting
through the humongous volume of information to obtain measurable data is
beyond our human capabilities, we bring
in artificial intelligence and machine
learningnever mind those predictions
about AI destroying humankind.
Many are also offering cloud-based editorial workflow, management platforms,
and delivery systems to enable quicker
access to content despite lingering doubts
about the security of virtual storage.
Throughout these changes, content
remains king. But the consumer is calling
the shots, demanding great user experience made available on highly intuitive
and accessibleuser interfaces. The
access has to be instant, wherever and
whenever on whichever device or platform
used. And of course, content should be
customized, personalized, and, at times,
open access. Engaging the consumer now
tops any market-facing strategy.
Time to market has taken on a new
urgency. Fast to market, fast to money
and this applies equally to solutions providers and publishers. And revenue, of
course, is the true driver of any technology adoption or business strategy.
Money makes the world go round, and it
pushes all parties to remain innovative,
nimble, and exciting. The contest now is
to see who will survive the revolution
and emerge stronger (and cooler).
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M
Reimagining, retrofitting, revamping, restrategizing, oh my!
Unfolding the Next Chapter in

Digital Content Proposition
By Teri Tan
his being Generation Flux,

perpetual innovation and
transformation are imperative,
and competitive advantages
are, at best, fleeting. Continuous
value creation and higher
engagementat lower cost and faster
speed and with improved qualityis the
key to business longevity. No wonder
present-day characteristics of digital
solutions, workflows, and platforms
cover adjectives from A to Z, with
emphasis on agnostic, cloud-based, customizable, design-centric, efficient, innovative,
measurable, and smart. And not forgetting
Zen-like simplicity and sophistication.
So, though nobody had predicted an
App Store, a Google driverless car,
Leap Motion, or Oculus Rift, these are
definitely the results of innovative thinking
and retrofitting of old ideas to suit a world
in flux. For digital solutions providers
big and small, in India or elsewhere,
being nimble and flexible applies to strategic initiatives and synergistic offerings
for their publishing clientsand their
clients end consumers.
Automating for Faster

Time to Market
Publishers relentless drive for the shortest
possible time to market and the need to
have content in multiple formats at
lower costs has resulted in vendors
shifting their focus from wage arbitrage
to one that emphasizes workflow and
data management efficiencies, says
4
Vinit Khanna, the founder and CEO of

OKS Group.
In other words, automation is a mandatory process in the digital solutions
industry. Aaltech Group director P.
Shivaalkar finds that it is even better if
content customization and personalization is also automated to generate
maximum efficiency while reducing
time to market. And these are exactly the
type of solutions we offerby capitalizing on our IT strengths to meet clients
specific needs. We have reduced manual
intervention by half in some processes
while ensuring 100% quality delivery.
In fact, automating full-content tagging and extraction irrespective of the
structure and language of the input is
becoming crucial, says Nakul Parashar,
v-p for enterprise content management
of SourceHOV. Publishers are invariably
looking at achieving high quality, better
project management, faster turnaround
times, and content repurposing at much
lower costs, Parashar says. Cost reductions have, in fact, become critical to
survival for many publishing clients. At
SourceHOV and our sister company
Rule 14, the deployment of our enterprise-wide and AI-based solutions has
proven successful in helping publishers
achieve their goals.
Today, publishing processes are completely technology-driven. Cloud-based
digital publishing workflow, automated
composition system, online smart editing,
and machine language learning are some
examples, says Vinay Singh, executive
P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY M AY 2 , 2 0 1 6
director of Thomson Digital, adding

that the drive to meet end users dynamic
requirements are essentially changing
the publishing paradigm while exerting
tremendous cost pressures.
So, yes, the business model in which
publishers opt for low-cost outsourcing
destinations is definitely outdated,
Singh says. The larger publishing houses
are already focused on simplifying their
processes and requirements so as to aid
automation while ensuring predictable
outputs at much lower costs, he adds.
To this end, publishers and solutions
providers are working collaboratively to
mutually benefit from automation and
technology adoption.
Embracing the New

Teamwork Concept
A consultative stance in which publishers
discuss their digital strategies with
solutions providers and build digital
products collaboratively works better in
the longer term for both parties. This is
even more critical at the product-design
phase, when budget, development
timeline, launch date, and target devices
have to be addressed as early as possible,
says Indira Rajan, CEO of Lapiz Digital
Services, adding that many of the companys products and solutions are
bundled with support packages so that
if a file format becomes obsolete, it can
easily be upgraded to a higher version or
converted to a new format, such as from
Flash to HTML5.

At Newgen KnowledgeWorks, the
philosophy has always been to function
as an extended arm for clients by forming
dedicated teams with client-specific
training, creating technological solutions, and offering a complete range of
services, from content authoring to discoverability. Our approach is to be a
reliable partner to our clients, and to
build long-term mutually beneficial
relationships; investing in technology to
build easily scalable and cloud-based
platforms has also enabled us to be an
integrated technology-cum-service provider, giving us the ability to be a partner
with deep engagements with clients,
founder and CEO Prabhakar Ram says.
Both journals and trade publishers
have started to look for IT and platform
solutions apart from general content
solutions, says Vidur Bhogilal, vicechairman of Lumina Datamatics. Their
preference is for a technology supplier
with specific domain knowledge, and
they have started collaborating with their
suppliers to develop market-facing products. There is also considerable interest
from publishers on managing rights and
permissions, and their need for a workflow system to handle these issues.
Tackling the Rights Side

of the Business
The ever-changing technology and the
demand for instant content access have
tremendous implications for rights and
permissions. As recently as four years
ago, rights were secured for specific
products, territories, and user quantities, says Jill Dougan, director of rights
and permissions at MPS Limited. Today,
publishers are not only requesting permission for products they have planned,
but also for those that are yet to be conceptualized, and sometimes for technologies
that are still unavailable commercially.
On the other hand, you have copyright
owners who want to protect their IPs and
require transparency when reviewing
requests to use their content. The U.S.
and European copyright laws meanwhile
are undergoing progressive reforms as lines
6
are drawn between content creators,

providers, and users.
MPSs Rights & Permissions management platform, which is a module within
DigiCore, has the capabilities to maintain a robust copyright owner database,
generate customized correspondence and
reports, and analyze and store granular
data. This cloud-based platform provides publishers with a quicker, better,
and easier way to protect, monetize, and
market their IPs, CEO Rahul Arora
says. In times of depressed margins from
book sales, print or digital, every bit of
additional revenue counts, and this is
just one of the ways we look out for our
publishing clients.
Publishers are not sure if their legacy

content is worth converting or if they
should just develop new product from
ground up, says Subrat Mohanty, CEO
of Hurix Systems, pointing out that
many who started the conversion process
early are almost done with everything
that they thought worthy of conversion.
And since their reason for converting
legacy content is to make it mobile,
enhancing the user experiencewhich
should no longer be plain, or flat, as in
print books or journalstakes the center
stage. That is where we come in with
in-house UI/UX experts to design
intuitive yet simple and efficient user
experience for the end consumers.
Gearing Up for More

User Engagement
Facilitating Digital and

Classroom Learning
All other topics aside, revenue remains

the biggest challenge, says M.V. Bhaskar,
chief creative officer of TNQ. But the
issue of engagement has to be considered
since it is the only thing that translates
into revenue, Bhaskar says. Getting the
right mix of engagement and big data,
which will express the engagement tangibly and demonstrably, willand
shouldlead publishers towards
revenue.
Unfortunately, STM publishers cannot
provide readers with a viable alternative
to PDF. So readers access the publishers
portal, download the required PDF, and
then go away, which results in disengagement, Bhaskar says. The market
needs more engaging ways to make
readers read the PDF online, but that is
just a half measure. We need HTML that
has all the qualities of a PDF in terms of
readability and portability. Such HTML
can go beyond the PDF and deliver
engagement metrics to publishers.
Consumer engagement also means
offering the right user interface (UI) and
user experience (UX). And as mobile
devices get more sophisticated and screen
sizes more varied, more thinking is going
into the UI/UX development and impact
for each app, says Gurvinder Batra,
CTO at KiwiTech.
Using mobile technology to engage and

educate and turning classrooms into
mobile-based interactive and self-paced
learning environments is becoming the
norm, says Khanna of OKS Group.
Publishers are revamping their content
to make education an interactive process
and coupling it with online assessment
to monitor individual progress. It is
about making history, science, and math
theories come to life, which is what
MarkSharksour flip classroom learning
system based on mobile technologyis
all about.
Adaptive learning and, more specifically, personalized learning have been
the most positive outcomes of digital
learning, says Acky Kamdar, CEO of
Magic Software. Tailoring instructions
to learners needs as Triumph Learning
is doing with Waggle is a prime example.
Then there is microlearning, which
includes rolling out bite-sized chunks of
content tailored to individual learner
needs and attention spans. When combined with other content resources,
microlearning will allow teachers to
assemble instructional content themselves, thus empowering both teachers
and learners. Khan Academys success,
for instance, can be attributed to their
focus on microlearning.

Waseem Andrabi, senior director of
global content services at Cenveo Publisher
Services, says that adaptive technology
is set to become a transformative force as
educators increasingly see it as an ally
rather than an adversary. Virtual reality
in education is the other juggernaut
poised to take off in 2016. Whether it is
taking a virtual trip near the North Pole
to learn more about the aurora borealis
or a visit to the chemical plant to witness
a specific manufacturing process, virtual
reality is going to make the educational
experience truly immersive.
Meanwhile, gamification will continue to gather momentum, and social
learning is going to be the next big
thing. Social learning gives users the
chance to share, comment, debate, and
critique content, as with GitBook,
Kamdar of Magic Software says. Liking
some aspect of learning and sharing it
with ones community or group is
extremely relevant in todays heavily networked social communities.
Building Accessibility
and Efficacy in Education
Education specialists have raised issues
and contributed ideas and innovations
that will eventually have a broad impact
across all publishing sectors, and accessibility is a hot topic, says Andrabi, of
Cenveo Publisher Services. EPub for
Accessibility project, formerly known as
EduPub, is an important part of this, and
accessibility is no longer just about

text-to-speech or audio access, but also
to support alternate learning modes,
Andrabi says. With this comes open
annotation, or W3C specification, for
personal accessibility on all Web-based
technologies, as well as accessibility
certification and testing. Publishers are
realizing that it makes good business
sense to offer content in as many ways as
possible, including making it accessible.
The movement in education is toward
efficacy, primarily in creating measurable
learning outcomes. There is a need for
blending technology and content, says
Bhogilal of Lumina Datamatics. On one
end, the content has to be tested, rigorous,
and validated. On the other, technologies
such as virtual reality simulationbased
learning have to be merged with content
in order to enhance learning. Then, the
data coming back from the learner has to
be evaluated for insight, remediation, and
efficacy. There have been a lot of efforts to
increase the learning outcomes.
And with mobile devices making
multitasking, content consumption, and
learning on the go so much easier, the
focus now will be on bundling diverse
assets into applications that offer richyet-intuitive user experiences. Such
collaborative solutions will be the key to
drive user engagement and implement
social media strategiesright from user
identification to social engagement to
gamification, says Uday Majithia, assistant v-p for marketing and presales at
Impelsys. Semantics will further help in

building these collaborative experiences,
bringing together content and learning
from different sources directly to users in
personalized streams.
Semantic-assisted contextual
authoring, automated editorial workflow solutions, and better content
discoverability through machine learning
algorithms will pave the way for future
content development, says Majithia,
whose team is currently pursuing effective partnerships in this service domain.
Discoverability and
Monetization
For Bhogilal of Lumina Datamatics,
mobile technologies is not just about a
way to access and distribute content over
the Internet, but also for apps and services, which would not work without
mobile technologies. In such cases,
beacon technology is a likely solution,
offering discoverability; time-, location-,
and person-specific approach; and is suitable for activities such as marketing, content delivery, and sales.
Content monetization through mobile
apps continues to be a mixed bag, however. Those on medical content seem to
be much more successful. In fact, eight
out of 10 products that we have built in
publishing are for medical content, with
the monetization coming mostly from
advertisement, says Batra, of KiwiTech,
adding that it is becoming more critical
Online Coverage of the Digital Solutions Industry

The following articles are available online in conjunction with this print report:
A Multitude of Outstanding Projects (featuring complex mini case studies from various vendors)
Articles in the Expert Series, penned by invited vendors, examine critical topics impacting both the publishing and digital
solutions industries:
Taking the Game to the Next Level by Anuraj Soni, COO of Magic Software
Publishing
in the Post-PDF Age (or Single URL Publishing) by M.V. Bhaskar, chief creative officer at TNQ
Cloud: The
Latest Digital Transformation Weapon for Publishers by Aditya Chakravarthi, marketing director
at Hurix Systems
Visit www.publishersweekly.com/digitalsolutions2016 to read the full report for more articles in the Expert Series and
continuing coverage, as well as news on the digital solutions industry.

to provide a way for end users to access
content from a mobile platform. There
has been some shift towards using
responsive Web instead of native mobile
apps but these are early days.
The differentiated and ever-changing
nature of digital has formed the challenges faced by the industry, says Walter
Walker, the president of CodeMantra.
The questions run the gamut: how to
deliver a consistent XML or other digital
output; how to improve content discov-
erability; how to publish more with fewer

resources; how to manage concurrent
print and digital production cycles in
one workflow; and how to manage, record,
analyze, and measure the impact of the
work done. These are the questions that
shaped the development of our flagship
product, CollectionPoint, which is now
at version 4.0.
So, while most publishers have understood the possibilities for a digital product
offering, what remains less certain,
Aaltech Group
Walker says, is just how well a digital

title will perform. Sales reporting and
analytics are needed to provide clients
with a consolidated and comparative
view of product performanceand this
is a module that we are adding to CP 4.0
to eliminate much of the guesswork.
And for the following 21 companies,
including Walkers, unlocking opportunities for publishing clients while
minimizing the guesswork is really the
only way to deal with a market in flux.
that our business is driven by

IT strengths have always been the
clients, and so our strengths
hallmarkand backboneof the
are further enhanced and
nine-year-old Aaltech Group, which
tweaked to suit their specific
is headquartered in West Yorkshire,
needs, Baskaran says. We
U.K. In fact, half of its business
provide end-to-end content
comes from IT projects, with the
management solutions, digital
other half coming from publishing
publishing, and data converclients such as Grupo Santillana,
sion for journals and book
Bookshaker, DCL, Flexedo, and
publishers across the globe.
Vielflieger-Verlag.
Delivering the best service
Automation is the key in the
through the most cost-effective
modern business environment, and
manner is our focus, and over
technology adoption is crucial in the (From l.) Thiru Baskaran, Richard Athisayaraj, and
the years, we have grown both
publishing industry. For that, we P. Shivaalkar of Aaltech Group
in capacity and capability to
have efficient and effective IT teams
serve the publishing industry.
working in an agile manner to adopt the changes continuously.
We have leveraged our IT strength to offer a multitude of tools
Cenveo Publisher Services
to manage and automate publishing processes, says director P.
The creation of the Publishers Office has provided Cenveo and
Shivaalkar, whose team converted more than two million pages
its clients with a unique opportunity and increased flexibility
last year. Our workflow automation system handles the most
to interact and collaborate. We provide a combination of
common documentation issues, such as spacing, punctuation,
process, automation, validation, and ongoing technical support
hyphenation, and text styles, while our project-monitoring
for production and management of books, journals, and digital
system provides real-time tracking and control of the whole
projects. In essence, we become an integrated extension of a
process. Our conversion tools, meanwhile, can be used to genpublishers team, marketing director Marianne Calilhanna
erate ePub3-compliant files with native audio and video support.
says, adding that Cenveos end-to-end project management
Images in PDFs, for instance, are automatically converted into
for pre-K12, higher education, and STM publishers has
SVG format for better scaling while math equations are rendered
grown tremendously in the past year.
in MathML. These are just some of the processes that we have
More publishers have turned to the Design Studio to turn
backed up and strengthened with our IT expertise.
ideas into assets, whether they are simple concepts for art or
Through its offices in Australia, Germany, Spain, the U.K.,
entirely new digital products. At the same time, Cenveo
and the U.S., Aaltech also offers multilingual content services
Publisher Suite, with tools such as Smart Edit and Smart Proof,
for clients across the globe. We handle Arabic-, Chinese-,
is more popular than ever. One of our major journal clients has
Dutch-, French-, German-, Italian-, Japanese-, Spanish-, and
installed Cenveo Publisher Suite for its internal staff use, and
that implementation has resulted in a formal training program,
Swedish-language projects and also function as QA partners for
documentation, as well as a stronger product, Calilhanna says.
content aggregators in those languages, Shivaalkar says.
This is a classic case where a larger and diverse user base further
Client-centricity is the goal, says Thiru Baskaran, Aaltechs
improves the software.
Chennai-based v-p for business development. We understand
10 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y M A Y 2 , 2 0 1 6
The Cenveo Publisher Services digital team at work
Then, there is the Lunch & Learn initiative, through which

Calilhanna and her team bring together members of the publishing community to discuss important industry topics over
lunch. No sales pitches and no PowerPoint presentations here,
Calilhanna says. This is lunch with passionate conversation on
intricate and important topics that shape our industry. So far,
we have talked about MathML, new journal publication
models, and creative workflows. It has brought together leaders
from the STM and educational publishing industry to network
and learn from each other. Two white papers, on NIMAS and
MathML standards, respectively, were the results of this initiative,
and are available from Cenveos website.
Increasingly, publishers are recognizing that cheap is dear
and that great customer service is not only important to produce
quality work but also makes the process enjoyable, Calilhanna
says. The proliferation of offshore vendors has brought pricing
models down, she adds. While initially attractive, publishers
are finding that thoughtfulness and editorial quality have been
slipping away. With so much technology integrated into publishers workflows, it is easy to forget that human QA ensures
premium editorial and production services. And this is why
Cenveo, despite our technology-based processes, remains
focused on hiring the best people to serve our clients.
CodeMantra
The latest version of
CollectionPoint, CodeMantras
flagship product, is not just an
asset management distribution
platform. It supports an entire
publishing process from manuscript to delivery via one unified
system. Publishers told us
about the challenges and aspirations driving their business,
and we listened, says chief
product and technology officer Sanjeev Kalyanaraman, chief
Sanjeev Kalyanaraman, adding product and technology office at
that his team set out to use CodeMantra
technology, automation, and process management, and relied on

our deep publishing experience to design innovative solutions
that improve the competitiveness of our publishing partners.
The result is CP 4.0.
The new platform delivers its services in three main categories.
Collaborateon CP provides an efficient collaboration tool for
content development and aligns with any existing customer
workflow, making it nondisruptive and highly cost-effective.
The Manageon CP suite, on the other hand, addresses major
challenges in the management of vast amounts of metadata and
product assets through various distribution and institutional
channels, and uses a rich sales-reporting capability. Then there
is Engageon CP, which provides customer engagement that
leverages the publishers intellectual property across services
such as product catalogue generation, direct-to-customer
delivery, and community engagement. CP 4.0 is a scalable and
fully configurable platform that meet the unique needs of a
publisher through standardized modules, says president
Walter Walker, whose team will continue to invest in CP, and
actively pursue strategic alliances that will help to expand
CodeMantras offerings to publishers.
Meanwhile, CodeMantras Chennai production facility has
undergone significant changes since the companys 2014 acquisition by new investors and the introduction of new management.
To begin with, we introduced specific areas of accountability
through a global project management office as well as continuous
process improvement initiative, Kalyanaraman says. New
processes and automated technologies to overhaul the content
production were carried out without disrupting ongoing
production and its quality. Over the past year, CodeMantras
operations team members have received training in process
improvement (Six Sigma), agile technology (OpenStack security
frameworks), and organizational governance (Program
Management) and are applying their learnings to improve
operations.
With new processes and automation, we have more than
doubled our productivity, and with improved quality too,
Kalyanaraman says. The next 12 to 18 months are to continue
investing in our people, technologies, and scale to meet business
growth while maintaining our culture of innovation and
accountability.
Continuum Content Solutions

Continuum, which employs about 150 people, may be just 14
months old, but its foundersCEO Amit Vohra and COO
Pawan Narang, formerly of Contentra Technologiesare
definitely no strangers to the publishing and digital solutions
industries.
Leveraging on their expertise and footprints in the magazine
and newspaper digitization sector, both Vohra and Narang have
developed a robust, agile, and seamless digital solution, called
ContinuumX. It accepts input file formats such as InDesign
and PDFs, and converts them into Digital Replica files such as
tnq.co.in
We make the
page faster than
you can turn it.
From XML to pages we go in less than a second per page. A patent-pending engine in Page
Central coaxes the browser to render the pages with header, footer and meaningful float
placement, in one column or two.
Page Central has a toolbox to edit content, which makes it ideal in a revision workflow. The
revised content re-renders to pages in a snap. The output looks like a perfectly typeset PDF, but
isnt. It is pure HTML. But if you insist, you can get a PDF export.
Skip reading now and mail us for a demo of this page turner. Contact aarun@tnq.co.in.
Page Central
Pawan Narang (l.) with Amit Vohra of Continuum Content Solutions
RePub, PRISM XML, and NITF XML that are compatible

with leading e-newsstands, Vohra says, adding that Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean languages are supported along with
major European languages. But the best part of ContinuumX
lies in its design and engine, which converts magazines and
newspapers at higher efficiencies and with lower costs. In fact,
our clients have experienced an average of 25% reduction in
costs while maintaining high quality levels.
ContinuumXs publication management module also
maintains production schedules, sends out friendly reminders
when a publications on-sale date is approaching, and guarantees on-time delivery.
ContinuumXs efficiencies and language capabilities offer
global distribution opportunities, Narang says. National
libraries and publishers across the globe can take advantage
of this solution to preserve and digitize their legacy data,
especially now that we are providing the complete process that
includes microfilm scanning, content refurbishing, digital data
preservation, and Web-hosting solutions.
For the next 18 months, the company is focused on ePub3
solutions, HTML5, and mobile content. A company needs to
evolve in order to stay ahead in this technology-intensive
industry and tap into the productivity and expertise of the
Millennial generation, Narang says.
But it is not just about work at Continuum, which has a CSR
initiative as ambitious as those found in much larger entities.
We believe in letting our staff know that they are working for
something bigger than themselves, that our business is not
one-dimensional, and, more importantly, that we care about
people, especially those in our community, says Vohra, whose
employees take one Friday each monthContinuums Social
Dayto give back to the community through employee
volunteerism and resources by working towards eradication
of hunger and poverty, and promoting education to underprivileged children. Each Social Day has a different theme,
allowing different departments to come together for a
common cause.
Deanta
Dublin-based Deanta (which means full-fledged or complete in
Gaelic) has always been run differently from its industry coun14 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y M A Y 2 , 2 0 1 6
terparts, says CEO Darren Ryan, who founded the company in

2011. We believe strongly that the developments and changes
within the publishing industry are more than just about traditional print to digital, Ryan says. It is about content rather
than format, and content is fluid and not necessarily dictated by
parameters such as page count. Therefore, it is important to
address this in our service offering and consider the options of
providing a full-fledged partnership arrangement.
It is about resourcingas opposed to outsourcingwith
the team positioned as an extension of the publishers production
division, or, as Ryan puts it, a resource on hand to tackle any
and everything that they need. At many vendors, individual
staff members specialize in particular aspects of the publishing
process, but Deanta staff is qualified to manage every aspect of
the process. Rigorous six-month in-house training regime
aside, there is a strong emphasis on soft skills such as leadership,
problem solving, communication, and decision making, Ryan
says. Everybody is accountable for his or her work.
Deanta clients are charged a
flat monthly fee based on the
required service level. Not only
does this make it easier for the
publisher to budget, it recognizes that there is a different
type of relationship at work,
Ryan says. This also means that
Deantas team of publishing
professionals and a dedicated
project manager are on hand at
Darren Ryan, CEO of Deanta
all times, regardless of what
crops up. However, Deanta does offer a tailored package
solution in which services such as copy editing, proofreading,
typesetting, artwork creation, indexing, and digital deliverables are charged on a per-page basis.
Every Deanta client also has access to Lanstad (which means
period in Gaelic), a collaborative project management portal to
organize the publishing process and enable streamlined communication. We have added milestone tracking, task tagging,
XML content editing suite, content transformation engine, and
digital asset management. Lanstad is also available as a SAAS
[software as a service] offering for those wishing to use it to
manage their production internally, says Ryan, whose Chennai
production facility, supported by teams in Ireland, the U.K.,
and the U.S., has worked with clients including Bloomsbury,
CRC Press, Informa, Oikos, and Rowman & Littlefield.
DiacriTech
Publishers are increasingly looking at offshoring more
editorial work, says executive v-p A.R.M. Gopinath, whose
team has shown significant savings in cost and time on
clearing permissions and editorial processes. At DiacriTech,
we constantly strive to move up the skill levels as clients are
trusting us to work not just on converting print books to

digital, but also on storyboarding as well as
creating digital-first
titles, which are instrumental in driving print
sales.
Even though science
and math projects are
DiacriTechs strong
niches, more social sciences, literature, and
A.R.M. Gopinath (l.) with Mahesh Balakrishnan of DiacriTech
religious titles are
arriving at its doorstep for the creative process. We have expanded our team to
include developmental editors in charge of creating audio scripts for digital assets
that we create to elaborate on a specific concept, executive v-p Mahesh Balakrishnan
says, adding that several publishers are agreeable to using accent-neutral voice
artists, but more often we have to go back onshore to our freelancers and teams for
recording as the audio requires native speakers. But, no matter how the requirement
goes, we manage the process end to end.
This year is an exciting time at DiacriTech, Balakrishnan says. We are hoping to
bring a change in the way digital is presented to end consumers, he adds. We are
tying up directly with institutions, and in partnership with publishers, to host and
deploy content in an engaging way. This would make it more personalized to the
institutions while at the same time utilizing existing content that publishers may
already have. The institutions are more than willing to fund the project when the
delivery mechanism is an engaging digital platform that will make a mark in the
industry.
Cloud-based solutions, Gopinath says, will be a trending topic in the industry in
the coming years. With capital expenditure still down, customers are increasingly
asking for SAAS models and cloud-based solutions to repurpose content, Gopinath
says. For publishers, it makes perfect business sense not to increase developmental
costs while keeping zero inventory of print titles, and yet continue to do business
and generate revenues. Publishers are also very open to revenue sharing in this space.
We can deploy our cloud-based integrated platform, Ssparkl, which has solutions not
just for authoring but also for delivering content directly to end consumers.
OFFSHORE
ONSHORE
HYBRID
PhoneGap
development
Xamarin
IPad & Android

Apps
eBooks
ePub3
HTML5
Solutions
Beyond
Content
Services
Expectations
Virtual & Augmented

reality
Composition
Illustration
&
Design
Hurix Systems
Winning the coveted Brandon Hall Group Excellence award three years running is
a huge endorsementand boostfor Hurix and its flagship cloud-based digital
publishing suite, Kitaboo, which has seen its user base grow by over 100% in the
same period.
New features have been added to the Kitaboo platform
to give clients more value for money: 100% ePub3 automated conversion, LTI compliance, and fixed and
reflowable layout support. For clients, there is now
Kitaboo LMS and a Kitaboo e-store, in addition to the
Kitaboo Cloud solution.
Kitaboo LMS is a cost-effective system that deploys
e-learning content, manages learning administration,
aligns learning processes with client requirements,
provides blended learning, and creates a centralized
learning and reporting platform, CEO Subrat Mohanty
Subrat Mohanty, CEO of
says, adding that its most salient feature is in allowing
Hurix Systems
+91-44-4288-9000
sales@diacritech.com | www.diacritech.com
a division of diacriTech
+1-617-236-7500 | www.laureltech.com
Do-It-Yourself with Ictect
With a company name that is derived from the phrase intelligent content
architecture, Ictect promotes a different and structured way of looking
at unstructured content. Its patented XML automation technology has
been implemented by a diverse roster of clients, including the City
University of New York, Lam Research, NetApp, Petersons, ScholarOne, and the United States Department of Defense.
Established in 2008, Ictect makes software that helps clients handle
complex documents on their own, generating XML, ePub, JATS, and
DITA files as required. We offer proof of concept and a small-scale
production support through our U.S. headquartersin Brookfield,
Wisconsinand Bhopal facility in India, company president Pradeep
Jain says, pointing out that getting the tags in remains a challenge
for organizations and service providers despite advances in the last 15
years. Our XML technology gets the tags in for STM publishers for
their journals, or big corporations for their technical manuals.
A midsize STM publisher recently called for a proof of concept that
covered a random sampling of articles from 42 journals for XML-toJATS conversion. The company produces 500,000 pages of journal
content annually, and the proof of concept, if extended to production,
will save several million dollars, Jain says. Another client, NetApp,
was attempting Word-to-DITA conversion when they saw our Word
plug-in and were sufficiently impressed to start a project with us.
They receive several thousand technical manuals annually that have to
go into SDL content management system, and our software helps
them to do this quickly on their own without having to outsource.
Ictects XML automation platform comes
with models to improve
quality, consistency, and
outputs for various types
of content. The platform
is based on Microsoft
Word and supports
Office 365 workflow,
which makes it ideal for
technical as well as nonPradeep Jain, president of Ictect
technical users. It offers
the comfort of the familiar Word while providing the benefits of
highly granular XML, says Jain, whose company is now a Microsoft
Gold Certified Partner. Developing innovative publishing apps on
Office 365 with intelligent content can be more user-friendly and less
expensive compared to the alternatives out in the marketplace.
Over the next 12 months, Jain will be expanding Ictects product
offerings for Office 365, with some interesting enterprise-wide applications. A cloud-based XML automation for the STM segment is also
a part of our plan, he says.
organizations to scale up their LMS

functionalities without incurring costly
infrastructural investments. It also
enables social learning and tracks user
engagementwhich are in line with
the requirements of the current technology-based education industry.
Kitaboos e-store, which was launched
last year, allows end users to read purchased e-books on white-labeled reader
apps across multiple platforms. Aside
from supporting the back-end processes
of pricing and distribution, it manages
the marketing side of the business
through banners and promotional links,
and supports multicurrency and geolocation services. At the same time, by
having a white-label e-bookstore, publishers do not have to pay commissions to
third-party marketplaces such as Amazon
and Google Play, Mohanty says.
Kitaboo Cloud, as its name implies, is
an e-book ecosystem through which
publishers can create and enrich digital
content and distribute it in multiple
ways, and end users can consume it on
readers on iOS, Android, Windows, and
desktops. It can be easily integrated with
client system to distribute e-books using
different licensing models, Mohanty
says. It is our goal to provide as many
ways as possible for publishers to disseminate and monetize their content
easily and securely.
By combining Kitaboo LMS and
Kitaboo Cloud, you can distribute multimedia content along with e-books and
utilize the powerful group or classroom
management features that have reporting
and analytic functions. Furthermore, the
integration allows one-click or one-tap
book launch in Kitaboo reader apps from
the LMS, says Mohanty, whose clients
include Hachette Livre/Grupo Anaya,
McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and
Scholastic Media.
Impelsys
A massive reengineering effort covering
two major productsiPublishCentral
(for e-book distribution) and
KnowledgePlatform (content and learning
solutions)takes the center stage at

reader, with support for enhanced e-books
Impelsys. In line with our goal to provide a
distribution.
one-stop solution to publishers and to enable
Meanwhile, more than 450,000 profesthem to deliver any content and learning to their
sionals have completed various courses through
B2B and B2C markets, we have now placed
iPublishCentral Learn in the past three months.
KnowledgePlatform under the iPublishCentral
This platform is most suitable for medical
suite umbrella, says Uday Majithia, assistant
publishers, enterprises, universities, and instituv-p for marketing and presales.
tions offering online educational and professional
The SAAS platform now comes in three vercourses, Kumar says. With built-in instructor
sions: iPublishCentral Ebooks (with features such
and student dashboards, it allows instructor-led
as white-label portal, built-in DRM, online and
and instructorless learning either to replace or
offline readers, apps, e-commerce, and analytics); Uday Majithia, assistant v-p
supplement traditional classroom training.
iPublishCentral Enhanced (for complex and for marketing and presales at
Another new service is courseware developmedia-rich content delivery); and iPublishCen- Impelsys
ment, in which Impelsys offers development of interactive
tral Learn (to help publishers and educators transform their
courses replete with ancillaries, assessments, and supporting
online learning delivery; supports SCORM, LTI, QTI, and
media for deeper learner engagement and understanding. It is
other standards). All three can be seamlessly integrated with
a world away from plain textbooks or journals, says Kumar,
one another and with clients existing infrastructures.
whose team has already delivered several courses for clients in
The latest iPublishCentral Ebooks (version 7.0) addresses
recent months.
several unique challenges currently faced by publishers and
Tapping into the growing trend of online learning in
learning providers, says Jagadesh Kumar, assistant v-p for
emerging markets is another expansion strategy. Impelsys
content engineering. This WCAG 2.0compliant version
three-year partnership with Bogota-based Hipertexto has seen
offers solutions for video distribution, geography-based pricing
a dozen Colombian publishers implement iPublishCentral.
for retail models, and right-to-left languages, Kumar says.
In India, our local partner Global Information Systems
We also add SCORM-compliant reader and Chromebook

Technology uses iPublishCentral to deliver scholarly content
from global and Indian publishers to academic institutions and
libraries across the subcontinent, Majithia says. Similar partnerships are expected in other parts of the world this year.
Integra Software Services

This year, Integras digital focus is on offering innovative technology solutions and adding value by enhancing established
products. Its Integrated Digital Publishing Ecosystem platform, for instance, has even more innovative features and tools
to help publishing clients. It can transform content to go anywhereprint, Web, tablet, or mobile, managing director and
CEO Sriram Subramanya says. It can extract every bit of value
from the content and put it in multiple media for access and
discoverability. Then there is iCorrectProof, which is lauded
as one of the most comprehensive products for online journal
proofing solutions for both publishers and authors.
Another new product from
Integra is iPMS for project management that combines functions of Microsoft Excel, Project,
Access, and SharePoint into a
single application, and has
proven to be effective in helping
project managers achieve their
project goals, and work with
time and budget constraints.
iLancer facilitates on-boarding,
planning, tracking, and rating
of freelancers, and functions as
Sriram Subramanya, managing
director and CEO of Integra
a seamless interaction platform
Software Services
between freelancers and publishers. It encapsulates the critical solutions that the Integra
team has developed in-house in order to deal with its own
huge pool of freelancers in different areas.
Expansion and incubation are the other buzzwords at Integra. Its
Chennai facility, which is located along the citys technology corridor and can accommodate up to 3,000 people, currently houses
instructional designers, media specialists, and those specializing
in platform/mobile learning. This facility is also the site of our
innovation lab, which focuses on research, design, and innovation
in content creation, delivery, and analytics for the education technology space, Subramanya says. This is a key investment that
will drive the next phase of our strategic growth initiatives.
Last year, a new office was also established in the U.K.,
specifically for business development and end-to-end project
management. Now Integra has an experienced team capable of
offering clients onshore project management from the U.K.
itself. But, most importantly, its team now has access to a wide
network of onshore freelance pool of developmental editors,
copy editors, and design and illustration specialists through its
offices in the U.K. and the U.S., supported by full project
management and production teams in India.
KiwiTech
The Web and mobile technology solutions provider KiwiTech
made the last year about multiplatform and complex projects
that spanned months of development. We had to step up our
gamepushing our limits in new technologies and toolsto
be able to deliver the projects. Each of these projects was also
from a different vertical, which gave us a broader experience,
CTO Gurvinder Batra says from his new office in Noida, which
has a seating capacity for more than 450 people and nearly 20
meeting rooms with multiple recreational areas.
Batra says the relocation to the new office is in line with the
companys growth. We have been growing very rapidly, adding
10 to 15 people every month, Batra says. The location, within
walking distance from the metro station, is a boon to our
employees while the open and modern office gives them a comfortable environment to generate ideas and execute projects.
Meanwhile, KiwiTechs startup model, in which it partners
with selected technology startups, now has more than 60 companies on its roster, each from a different vertical. We have had
a lot of startups visiting us in the past year to work more closely
with our teams, and this has helped us to build a better product
for each of them, Batra says. We have also stepped up our
ability to provide more funding to the startups in addition to
providing the best technology and mentoring. These startups
include GlobeChat (a chat app that can translate more than 40
languages on the fly), Quantified Care (a complex health-care
platform that connects patients to caregivers), Sensery (a financial portal that brings advisers closer to clients), Brillata
(a hospitality platform that links back-end staff with front-end
office), and SeeYouAll (an event management portal that
provides solutions for monetizing and managing events).
We still havent covered the full market yet, Batra says.
We are now focused on getting some big enterprises in our
portfolio. Today, enterprises are starving for innovation, and
startups are a quick and solid solution for that. At KiwiTech,
we see a big role for us to connect both parties. The challenges
for us are to keep up with the expected level of quality services,
understand a wide range of technology stacks, and create
complex solutions.
CTO Gurvinder Batra of KiwiTech at his new Noida office
Technology Partner
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Lapiz Digital Services
Flash-to-HTML conversion is fast becoming a niche service at
Lapiz, with more publishers requesting device-agnostic
HTML5 files that are compatible with iOS, Windows, and
Android platforms, including Google Nexus, Barnes & Noble
Nook, Samsung Galaxy, and Amazon Kindle. There are also
a substantial amount of projects requiring HTML5 errorfixingthese are usually files built before the standard was
finalized, and our team has to normalize them, CEO Indira
Rajan says. Some, which were school books, also had to be
made Section 508compliant for accessibility.
The team is now focused on developing complex script-based
HTML5 interactivity for e-books, mostly for the childrens
segment. We have built various HTML5-based e-tools and
reusable interactivities that are also available as off-the-shelf
products. In most cases, these are highly customizable and
easily replicated for new titles or volumes in the same childrens
book series, or when a title is translated into other languages,
Rajan says. Such reusable and adaptable templated tools
optimize the cost of production while reducing the turnaround
time, and this is particularly appealing to midsized childrens
book publishers who are not sure what they want for their
limited budget.
Lapiz has also developed a Moodle-based CMS with various
e-tools specifically targeted at small and midsize publishers
who are looking to leverageand further monetizetheir
print content. With many publishers joining the trend of
developing e-learning courses from print products, we see
them adopting CMS such as Moodle, president V. Bharathram
says. And this is where we see our solutions offering these
publishers added value and ease of content reusability. Ours
is an off-the-shelf product that can be further customized to
suit specific requirements.
With publishers requiring both print and digital deliverables, quality control is also becoming increasingly important.
QC cost for a digital product is often higher than the production cost, as digital files need to be device-agnostic and
QCed across many operating systems. At Lapiz, we have
automated numerous QC tools for new media projects in order
The production floor at Lapiz Digital Services

to rein in QC costs. Our familiarity with the QC process has

brought in quality-auditing projects on content and learning
management systems, archived typeset files, and fixing HTML5
bugs, says Bharathram, whose team will be focusing on solutions for multilingual projects, Flash-to-HTML5 conversion,
and EduPub in the coming months.
Lumina Datamatics
For the past three years, Lumina Datamatics has offered technology consultancy and workflow-improvement products,
tools, and services that help publishers manage customer
requirements in a fast-changing technology environment and
stay competitive. Today, we see ourselves as a company that
assists clients to achieve their business objectives, attain
superior results, and increase the engagement with their own
customers, vice-chairman Vidur Bhogilal says. And we accomplish these through a combination of content and measurement
methods and technologies.
One of the technologies is
CAPS (Content Authoring &
Publishing System), which is an
expansion and enhancement of
an HTML5-authoring solution.
By using CAPS, publishers use
a single system to perform all
production activities from content authoring to delivery.
RightsPlatform, for instance,
can be integrated into CAPS to
monitor assets and acquire
Vidur Bhogilal, vice-chairman at rights and permissions at the
Lumina Datamatics
same system. Having several
automation tools and solutions integrated into CAPS saves time
and speeds up the process, Bhogilal says. Our journalpublishing clients have found this cloud-based system easy to
use and most accessible.
Another new product is MarketWatch, a price-intelligence
solution that monitors price, inventory, and promotions. It
offers flexible monitoring of aggregators, retail channels, and
marketplaces, and reads across feeds and Web pages. It also
works across geographic locations and multiple currencies. One
large publisher in the U.S., for instance, uses it to track three
different priceswhen a title is sold as new or used, and when
sold by a retailer, Bhogilal says. In another deployment, a
U.K. distributor uses it to track and monitor prices across
aggregators and online channels and to show an alert when the
deviation was below the established base price.
For Bhogilal and his management team, all these new products and solutions support the shift from being a cost-saving
company to one that supports revenue generation. Technology
KPO is our goal, and increasing clients engagement with their
customers is our focus, Bhogilal says. So, while we have the
capabilitiesand proven expertisein producing engaging

content, we want to focus on products and technologies that measure engagement. On the solutions
front, we are building new platforms for publishing,
LMS, rights and permissions, and assessment. As for
the client engagement side, we are strengthening our
reach in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S.
Magic Software
For 25 years, Magic Software has been in the business
of combining mobile and social learning for the
K12 market. The cloud-based platform MagicBox
and the digital curriculum products developed for
clients such as Cengage Learning, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, Macmillan Education, McGraw-Hill, Magic Software celebrating its 25th anniversary
Pearson, and Wiley have been used and tested worldwide.
users while meeting all industry standards, including COPPA
MagicBox, a digital content warehouse and distribution
[Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act], COO Anuraj
platform for Web- and mobile-based reading, is currently used
Soni says.
by more than 600,000 students and teachers and offers at least
MagicBox also has built-in capabilities to track and analyze
15 million page views and a million hours of book reading.
content consumption and control content access. The analytics
MagicBox comes with an integrated conversion tool for simple
function, Soni says, helps our publishing clients to measure
one-click print-to-ePub conversion. Unlike other K12 platreturns from each channel and to better manage and improve
forms, MagicBox can host and support a variety of content
their content offerings.
types and assessments and enable easy self-registration and
Testing is another niche solution at Magic Software. Almost
quick setup to go live. It allows sales to multiple segments of
one-third of the companywhich employs about 430 people

is focused on testing and QA of education products, including
content and technology platform testing. For testing, our
philosophy is to get engaged early on during the platform and
content design and automation processes. We deploy two powerful in-house products, AppiTest and WebiTest, to enable
our teams to test more, quicker, and better. A huge device lab
with more than 200-plus devices backs the teams, says Soni,
who lists compatibility, responsiveness, content alignment,
missing text issues, and low-rated user experience as the main
issues in the mobile learning world. Testing early in the
product life cycle is crucial in driving efficiency and agility
throughout the process.
This year, Magic Software is focused on partnering with
clients to manage large end-to-end programs and on providing
consulting services in designing and delivering digital mobile
education products. Continuing to leverage our in-house
tools and platforms and make them available over the cloud in
a self-service mode to clients are just some of our goals for
2016, CEO Acky Kamdar says.
MPS Limited
Improvements and additions to DigiCore, MPSs cloud-based
digital publishing platform, have continued unabated since
its launch. The DigiComp autocomposition module is
now extended to support Adobe InDesign and HTML5. The
output is then validated through
an automated QA tool, and
rejections routed through a
traditional workflow. We have
also added a math-editing GUI
to enable formatting changes
within the XML-editing
module, DigiEdit, which now
has newly enhanced editing
functionalities, says CEO Rahul
Arora, whose development
team has improved the DigiEdit
Rahul Arora, CEO of
engine for further automation.
MPS Limited
We also offer a module within
the DigiCore platform for managing permissions of text
and images.
Several new features are in store for users of the cloud-based
workflow-management platform MPSTrak, including mail
processing from external mail servers; reminders and notifications management; user personalization; vacation management
per geographic location; integration with more third-party
systems, including SAP; and audit-trail management.
Enhancements to DigiCore and MPSTrak platforms to fit
industry requirements and end-user needs will continue while
we look to expand our content creation and development services for the K12 and higher education markets, Arora says.
We will also be looking into more ways of helping publishers
secure and monetize their IPs by improving our Rights &
Permissions Management System, which is now a part of the

DigiCore suite of services.
More publishers, especially those in the journals segment, are
looking for highly automated fast-track workflows for handling
large-volume multidisciplinary open access journals, Arora
says. They want copy editing models involving automated
editing and manual editing by freelancers, and standardized
models or style sheets for enabling autodelivery of PDF
proofs, ePub files, XML, and other deliverables, he adds. In
short, they are looking for cloud-based solutions that accommodate collaborative working and production, and platforms
that allow continuous content updating and publishing
and to have these solutions and platforms integrate processes
such as manuscript submission and peer review.
With their various function-specific modules, MPS DigiCore
and MPSTrak are products that publishers have been
searching for, according to Arora. These solutions have all that
they need and more, and we can customize them according to
their specific publishing requirements, Arora says. And we
will be adding even more functionalities as we go along.
Newgen KnowledgeWorks
There is a plethora of new products and solutions from
Newgen. The MyOwnBook portal, for instance, is a virtual
office for publishers and editorial assistants to manage content
contributors, manuscript development, and preparation work
for production handover. It has been adopted by all of
Newgens clients, with some implementing it for their
internal office use. This portal brings the stakeholders into a
single interface and effectively streamlines the communication
among authors, editors, and publishers, Newgen president
Maran Elancheran says.
Newgens RedShift platform helps publishers get content at
the right time and produce it faster with the most efficient workflow possible while reducing redundancies. Rigorous evaluation
of this platform is ongoing at two major publishing houses.
RedShift is an integrated solution enabling authors and publishers to write and edit through a simple Word interface and
create print-ready PDF, XML, ePub, and HTML outputs on the
fly, says Elancheran, whose team also offers fixed layout and
reflowable ePubs and enhancement of reader experience through
interactivity and accessibility.
Beyond creating e-books, the key challenge to any publisher
is discoverability, Elancheran says. Publishers recognize the
need to understand how readers discover content and the
factors that can ease or impede that discovery. To this end, our
marketing and discovery team offers innovative and proven
solutions that will improve discoverability. We are in fact
building a custom solution for discoverability for some of our
legal and academic publishing clients.
Nova is another new product. A mobile-first platform, it
enables publishers to provide digital copies to customers who
have purchased the physical titles, and helps them to under-

stand customer preferences. Authors, contributors, and editors
can also receive their complimentary copies through Nova,
which saves publishers some money in sending out the print
books.
Then, there is JAWS Evolve, a journal-publishing platform
that integrates article submission, peer review, and production
processes. The underlying content management system, workflow management, and tracking system makes it an elegant
solution for journal publishers. For distribution of journals and
articles through tablets, we have ResearchPad, a white-labeled
solution that eliminates any bespoke work for tablet distribution, Elancheran says. It seamlessly converts XML to ePub
and delivers the content on the fly to the end users. It also offers
library features and search functions.
OKS Group
Reduced production costs, a shorter publishing cycle, and
increased author involvement are the factors behind the creation
of e2e, OKS Groups cloud-based workflow platform. It is an
HTML editor that integrates the complete prepress production
process into a single workflow while allowing for parallel
product deliveries in XML, ePub3, HTML, and PDF. And since
this is a Web-based application, there is no need for any licensed
application or server-side pagination program on local computers to get going, founder and CEO Vinit Khanna says,
adding that e2e allows full flexibility and customization across
multiple languages, product typessuch as journals, academic
texts, reference works, and fictionas well as individual publishers house styles.
Many e2e features are specifically developed to support true

collaboration and online communication and more autonomy
for authors: a concurrent editing system for authors and editors;
built-in pre-editing and validation tools; a built-in reference
manager configured for The Chicago Manual of Style; a built-in
math plug-in; infallible version control; a content management
system; and a built-in reporting system. Styles such as APA,
MLA, Harvard, and Vancouver are currently under development. From a collaboration and cost standpoint, e2e is ideal
for open access publishers, Khanna says, and incredibly
helpful for the others.
With the cloud-based environment ensuring a live platform
that allows all partiesauthors, editors, and prepressto have
round-the-clock access to their content, e2e transcends the
physical limitations of location and time zones, Khanna says.
In other words, flexibility and accessibility is the key.
Meanwhile, MarkSharks, a unique flip classroom learning
system that harnesses the power of mobile devices to teach math
and science, has made much progress in the past year. Class 8
Science, our first app, was published on the Google Play Store,
and has more than 35,000 downloads so far, says Aditya
Tripathi, CEO of OKS Education. These downloads have
helped us to fine-tune our marketing and communications
strategy in preparation for more content launches in the coming
months.
For Tripathi, 2016 is the year that MarkSharks moves from
being a fantastic idea that has been receiving great feedback and
reviews to a revenue-generating business. Currently used by
Indian schools, MarkSharks is now being beta tested in the
U.K., and a voice-over pilot has been made available for a
European K12 publisher.
SourceHOV and Rule 14
Vinit Khanna (l.) and Aditya Tripathi of OKS Group

Three new productsJet, BoxOffice, and CourtQhave taken

the center stage at SourceHOV in recent months.
Jet automatically identifies critical fields to be extracted,
and, once extracted, the data is available for future queries or
actions, says Nakul Parashar, v-p for enterprise content
management. The automated content-extraction platform
intelligently recognizes and classifies data using naturallanguage processing and machine-learning tools. By removing
manual intervention through Jet, the publisher does away with
vendor dependency and is able to speedily go to market,
Parashar says. This translates into time, cost, and quality
advantages.
BoxOffice is a composite enterprise information management
solution. It ingests, extracts, and stores key data from documents. It helps in aggregating, enhancing, summarizing, and
routing content for real-time repurposing and archival. For
business units within a publishing company, BoxOffice
empowers them with actionable and trackable intelligence,
Parashar says, adding that cloud-based BoxOffice offers
greater security, a drastic reduction in paper handling, and

allows role-based access for seamless retrieval in most
formats. Major BoxOffice modules include content
aggregation, conversion, extraction, enhancement,
classification, summarization, and XML generation.
CourtQ, as its name implies, is for the legal sector and
enables users to efficiently search, monitor, and mine court
documents for actionable intelligence based on recent case
activity. For Parashar, working with two large legal content aggregators for the past two decades has given us a lot
of insight into legal editorial operations. Additionally,
there are more than 40 law graduates and postgraduates
working in SourceHOVs India offices, with a similar
number at its Minneapolis facility. Our team have been
writing articles, blogs, abstracts, synopses, and headnotes
for legal companies worldwide, Parashar says. We also
Nakul Parashar, v-p for
do a lot of XML conversion of legal documents and
enterprise content managereal-time support on updating various case laws. We have
ment at SourceHOV
extensively automated headnote writing using machine
learning and natural language-processing techniquesand these are the understanding and automation that we apply to the creation of CourtQ.
Rule 14, SourceHOVs sister company, remains focused on big data analytics and
is now actively occupied in building intelligent conversion, extraction, and summarization engines, Parashar says: We continue to employ Rule 14 to scale SourceHOVs
operational capabilities and take away the need to increase head count or turnaround
timewhich is to the benefit of our publishing clients.
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Thomson Digital
DigiScape, Thomson Digitals newest division, leverages the companys four
decades of publishing experience and a workforce of more than 100 software professionals. This division offers
software product development
specifically workflow and content
management solutionstogether
with managed services such as
software development, testing,
support, and maintenance, executive director Vinay Singh says.
Two new products have already
been developed under the DigiScape
umbrella. Unitouch is a single-touch
platform where manuscripts are converted and paginated for print and
Web. Then we have Coast, which is
a Web-based tool primarily focused
on aiding researchers in various
aspects of literature survey. It is a
complete product in itself that
meets almost all research requirements, Singh says, adding that these
two products are the culmination
of successful past experiences in
developing solutions for both clients
Vinay Singh, executive director at Thomson Digital
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Thomson Digital has introduced numerous customizations into TD-XPS, its
flagship Web-based digital publishing platform for books, allowing it to generate the
efficiency and quality output that one has come to expect with journal production.
We have added analytics support, machine learning techniques for intelligent
structuring of content, and semantic tagging and granular data organization. APIs
for various databases, including CrossRef and PubMed, are also added, Singh says,
pointing out that the platform already has real-time proofing, a Web-based submission
system, and a platform-independent auto-pagination system. TD-XPS users can
build LMS modules from scratch or use its smart apps to facilitate one-click publishing
on handheld devices. It will continue to grow over time to support key business
requirements for our clients.
For the past year in New York, the Thomson Digital subsidiary TDI Digital
Solutions has provided onshore services that focus on rich media, animation, and
gaming, catered exclusively to the requirements of the North American publishing
market. This subsidiary has started to offer project management and editorial
services, and, soon, software solutions as well, Singh says. We have amassed a huge
pool of freelancers with rich publishing background and domain expertise, and clients
will benefit from their core competencies.
Anticipating future market requirementsand adapting the companys workflow
and solutions accordinglyis a make-or-break business stance. Managing change
and the ability to be flexible and nimble regardless of company size is the key to
success in the business, Singh says.
TNQ
More than 1,500 journalsamounting to more than 800,000 STM pages across
all subject areas from large publishers and societieshave been handled by Proof
Central, TNQs proofing platform.
The latest addition to the platform, Page Central, an independent SAAS, is set
to draw in even more users. Bundled with Proof Central, it is based on a patentpending engine that updates the content changes and user edits into a neat page
view that looks like a typeset PDF. But it is not PDF; it is essentially an HTML
page that is shown with page breaks, chief creative officer M.V. Bhaskar says.
On Page Central, the floats and notes are placed
logically within the HTML page. Images, for
instance, do not overfloat or spill across pages as is
often the case with ePub files. Page Central also rotates
big tables to fit the width to the greater dimension,
and when tables continue across pages, the table
header shows up on every page. Obviously, since it is
HTML, the content is hyperlinked, Bhaskar says,
adding that the user does not need to install a plug-in
or program. Page Central does the pagination in
seconds, using the browser. It has everything that users
and publishers expect of a typeset PDF, with much
less of the process loads of a PDF-based publishing
M.V. Bhaskar, chief creative
process.
officer at TNQ
The inventor of Page Central, Suki Venkatesan, once
referred to it as TNQs landing on the moon, Bhaskar says. It may be a moon
landing for publishers as well, since our surveys report a healthy want metric. Page
Central is the fastest way to autogenerate an elegant page, using just the browser
to go from XML to HTML and on to PDF.
Meanwhile, Author Cafe, TNQs what-you-see-is-what-you-get HTML-authoring
platform, is now going through user-acceptance testing, first with a small group of
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mathematicians and then with hundreds of users from across
the sciences. The public beta version, slated for June, will represent TNQs decisive push in taking the entire publishing
process into the online space.
The business side of TNQs new subsidiary in London is now
led by managing director Yakov Chandy, and Abhigyan Arun
(formerly of Innodata Isogen) has joined the senior management
as chief digital officer. We see 2016 as the year of the big push
of products that we have been working on for years, like Author
Cafe, and for making strategic partnerships in the Americas,
Bhaskar says.
Westchester Publishing
Services
Over the last 12 months, Westchester,
which is headquartered in Danbury,
Conn., has been busy expanding its production and editorial capabilities in
India. It recently added a floor to its
Chennai production center, which now
employs nearly 300 people for composition, digital conversion, project management, and copy editing. It also added a
new office in Delhi. Both offices are rapidly expanding with additional project
management and copyediting staff to
handle the growing demand from clients
for cost-efficient India-based services.
We offer the full suite of services out of
the U.S. and India, allowing us to provide the right product blend to meet
specific publishing needs, says business
development director Tyler Carey, who
says sales are 100% U.S-based, 60% of
which come from books and digital
products, and the rest from journals.
Westchester serves many different
publishing markets, including trade,
academic, STM, university presses, and
policy groups, offering both composition-only and full-service editorial
options. An offering that combines editorial, composition, and digital services
has been the greatest growth area over
the past decade, with clients such as
Harvard University Press, ABC-CLIO,
and Springer Publishing. We provide
great value to our clients by providing
high quality services at a cost which
would be very difficult to match with
in-house staff, thus allowing our clients
to focus on title acquisition and develop-
mental editing and all postproduction activities, Carey says.

With the expansion of our offshore editorial and project management operations, we are poised for further growth in all
markets.
The team recently worked on bestsellers as varied as Jonathan
Franzens Purity, Thomas Pikettys Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, and the Norton Anthology series. The range of projects that we handle has expanded tremendously, from heavily
illustrated titles for a martial arts publisher, to digital issues of
journals for a medical publisher, to fixed-layout childrens
titles, Carey says. This wide client base is a tremendous benefit to our clients, as trends in any particular segment do cross over and take
hold in other spaces.
Westchester, established in 1969, is
the largest U.S.-based full-service provider, delivering about 4,000 titles and
80,000 journal pages annually, and in
2014 it became a 100% employee-owned
business through an employee stock ownership plan. Our experience means that
we have the acumen to ask the right questions and the expertise to take the right
Tyler Carey, business development director at
actions for our clients, Carey says.
Westchester Publishing Services
The 100% U.S.-owned editorial, composition,

& digital publishing services provider with
operations in Connecticut, Chennai & Delhi.
We are a trusted name in providing publishers with all
mission-critical elements of the production process. From
pre-edit to final print and digital formats, our clients
count on us to deliver excellence on time and on budget.
Westchester offers U.S.-based project management as
well as an India Direct model, under which you may
liaise directly with our teams in Chennai and Delhi on a
full range of editorial, composition, and digital services.
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Discovering, organizing, and delivering the worlds scientific

and technical information
Big Data and Al with Meta

By Teri Tan
ith nearly 4,000 biomedical research papers

features, including standard metadata elements like authors,
published every day, there is an information
affiliations, and reference lists, as well as deeper concepts such
overload in the scientific research and
as diagnostic procedures, medical devices, and regulatory
knowledge world. Inundated with manuactivities. It then compares these features to over one million
script submissions, publishers are strugpublished manuscripts, and, based on this analysis, generates
gling to determine which articles are the
a detailed report that includes projected impact, citation count,
best and in which journals they should be publishedamid
and the best journal for its publication.
other challenges that often result in lost revenues and missed
papers. Researchers, while trying to keep up
And what are the benefits of the
with newly published papers and information,
report to publishers and their
are missing those articles that are pertinent to
partners?
their areas of focus.
Firstly, it helps to pinpoint high-impact manAnd this is where Meta, formerly Sciencescape,
uscripts the moment they are submitted for
comes in. A scientific knowledge network and
publication. Secondly, it allows publishers to
aggregator rolled into one, Meta was estabprerank manuscripts based on deep predictive
lished in 2010 by Toronto-based founders Sam
profiling and publish more content by inteland Amy Molyneux. It currently offers 20
ligently cascading rejected manuscripts to
cutting-edge artificial intelligenceenabled
more appropriate sister journals within their
data services for researchers, publishers, and
portfolio.
lifescience companies that will make the
Jeff MacGregor, chief marketing
worlds scientificpapers discoverable to the officer of Meta
On average, what is the accuracy
peopleand industrieswho rely on them.
of Bibliometric Intelligence?
An AI company for science, Meta partnerswith 30 major STM
Our tests show that Bibliometric Intelligence performs 94%
book and journal publishers to scantheir entire libraries of fullbetter than thousands of human editors at predicting article-level
text academic articles. Meta also reads theentirety of PubMed,and
impact for new manuscripts, prior to publication. It also improved
continuously crawls the Web to identify all of thepeople and entithe pre-release identification of superstar articles those that
ties mentioned in the literature. The result is essentially the largest
represent the top 1% of high-impact papers by 118%.
scientific knowledge graph in the world, one so powerful that it
knows every relevant paper, person, and entity.
Lets move on toUniversal Recommendations.
PW spoke with CMO Jeff MacGregor about the data
What prompted this service?
services and the ways publishers and their digital solutions
Well, researchers are spending less time on publisher pages. As
partners can leverage some of these solutions.
globalresearch output continues to rise, it is becoming increasingly moredifficult for publishers to attract, engage, and retain
Which of your 20 data services are most relevant
readersonline. And, with new sites being created daily to report
to the publishing and digital solutions industry?
the latestscientific discoveries, the competition for researcher
Jeff MacGregor: Bibliometric Intelligence and Universal
engagement isonly getting tougher.
Recommendations are two that immediately come to mind.
How doesBibliometric Intelligencework?

It scans a submitted manuscript and identifies 210 unique
So what does it offer in terms of discoverability?
Universal Recommendations provides expert-validated recommendations spanning fourcore entities of scientific research:

articles, topics, researchers, and journals.Researchers can discovermore key papers, find more influential authors, and subscribe to moreimportant journals without ever having to leave a
publishers site. As such, it will increase article readership, usage,
and citations as well as increase time on site and page views. It
will also increase discoverability of high-value related content.
How would publishers use Meta?

There are two ways: through our full-text publisher partnership
program and through our commercial services. The full-text
partnership program allows publishers to use Metas AI to
expand their reach to greater audiences. Meta scans their
full-text articles and factors thecontents into its Knowledge
Graph of science, a continuously evolvingscientific intelligence
network.Through Meta, researchers arediscovering papers
that would otherwise remain buried andundiscovered, while
publisher manuscripts are reaching even greateraudiences.
Who are some of your full-text partners?

The American Medical Association, BioMed Central, Elsevier,
Karger, Sage Publishing, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer,
and most recently the Royal Society, are among our 30full
textmining partners. Combined, Meta covers 38,000 serial
titles that offer around 19 million closed-accessfull articles
the largest commercial STM text-mining collection on earth.
Your commercial services would be those 20

data solutions?
Yes, and that includes what we just talked aboutBibliometric
Intelligence and Universal Recommendationsand others
such asIntelligent Manuscript Matching and Horizon Scanning.
WithIntelligent Manuscript Matching, for instance,
researchers can pre-triage their own manuscripts directlyon
a publishers site and have their manuscript scanned
throughBibliometric Intelligenceto understand what journal
within apublishers portfolio is the best match. This helps
speed up the pathto publication.
Horizon Scanning, on the other hand, exposes emerging
technologies and conceptsthat are still years away from materializing. It allowsfor reliable early detection of scientific and
technical emergences across disciplines and deeply within
areas of focus. So publishers candevelop new journals and filter
for manuscripts that represent theleading edge.
Horizon Scanning would be tremendously

helpful to digital solutions providers as they
are taking over the peer review, manuscript
development, and discoverability parts of the
publishing process. Do you agree?
Yes, these data services and the others that we talked about are
definitely applicable to publishers digital solutions providers,
which are functioning as an extension of their editorial and
production teams.
Which other Meta services would you

recommend for publishers?
There is Article Trajectory, which projects the three-year impact
trajectory of a manuscript as well as its postpublication citation
performance. This helps to prioritize submissions during triage.
Citation Enrichment, on the other hand, identifies key citations
that may have been overlooked to enhance the quality of a
manuscript or article. Optimal Reviewers is also useful to
publishers, assigning ideal combinations of manuscript
reviewers based on parameters that include domain, prominence, and collaboration histories.
How does your business model work?

Our primary licensing model is subscriptiondata as a
service,whether that is provided via an API, plug-in, or
Analytics Dashboard.Meta Science, our AI-enabled literaturediscovery engine, is free forall researchers.
What differentiates Meta Science from

engines such as PubMed?
Search engines like PubMed and Google Scholar are great if a
researcher already knows what they are looking for. But what
about papers that arent on their radar? Meta Science is a literature-discovery engine designed for unstructured exploration
and real-time streaming. It lets researchers explore science
through the entities that make up their research world. This
cuts down on the volume of papers within a certain topic and
ensures that nothing important is ever missed.
How would digital solutions providers utilize

Meta or incorporate it into theirservices or
solutions for the publishers?
One way would be to embed Metas data services into their
projects andproducts. For instance, Metas Author Profiles can
be used todisambiguate authors with similar names and
understand the fullpublishing history, papers, and topics of
a given author. Thisinformation can be useful for the formation of editorial boards oridentifying key opinion leaders,
as examples.
We are partnering with publishing-workflow providers to
embed bibliometric predictions within the workflow tools
for editors, making relevant information available right at the
momentof manuscript submission. In another partnership,
an editing service provider provides Meta Bibliometric
Intelligence reports directly toauthors who use their editing
services.
So whats next for Meta?

Biomedicine is just the start for us. We want to expand into
physics, chemistry, information science, social science, even
patents. Our mission is to organize and deliver the worlds scientific and technical information, and well keep pushing until we
realize that goal.
Total Supplier
Virtual Editorial Office
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Business Solutions
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Content Management System Integration
Digital Marketing
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P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY .

Special Report 2016

More innovative digital workflows and solutions

The Design Studio

The Publishers Oce

e : info.p sg@cenve o.c om | p: +1.267.640.9158 | W WW. CE N V E OP UB L I S H E R S E R V I C E S . C O M

Digital Solutions in India 2016

Combining components digital and human to push publishing further

A New Era in Digital Solutions

The digital solutions industry is having its own Industrial

cover photo from istock nikolaev

n the flip side, resources

virtual community and social marketing is about enabling discoverability,

Digital Solutions in India 2016

Reimagining, retrofitting, revamping, restrategizing, oh my!

Unfolding the Next Chapter in

his being Generation Flux,

Automating for Faster

Vinit Khanna, the founder and CEO of

director of Thomson Digital, adding

Embracing the New

Digital Solutions in India 2016

Tackling the Rights Side

are drawn between content creators,

Publishers are not sure if their legacy

Gearing Up for More

Facilitating Digital and

All other topics aside, revenue remains

Using mobile technology to engage and

Digital Solutions in India 2016

accessibility is no longer just about

Impelsys. Semantics will further help in

Online Coverage of the Digital Solutions Industry

Digital Solutions in India 2016

erability; how to publish more with fewer

Walker says, is just how well a digital

that our business is driven by

Digital Solutions in India 2016

The Cenveo Publisher Services digital team at work

Then, there is the Lunch & Learn initiative, through which

technology, automation, and process management, and relied on

Continuum Content Solutions

Digital Solutions in India 2016

Pawan Narang (l.) with Amit Vohra of Continuum Content Solutions

RePub, PRISM XML, and NITF XML that are compatible

terparts, says CEO Darren Ryan, who founded the company in

Digital Solutions in India 2016

IPad & Android

Virtual & Augmented

Do-It-Yourself with Ictect

Digital Solutions in India 2016

organizations to scale up their LMS

Digital Solutions in India 2016

Digital Solutions in India 2016

Integra Software Services

CTO Gurvinder Batra of KiwiTech at his new Noida office

Art & design

Design & Development

Lapiz Digital Services

Interactive White Board

Digital Solutions in India 2016

The production floor at Lapiz Digital Services

to rein in QC costs. Our familiarity with the QC process has

Digital Solutions in India 2016