By Dev Ganesan
FALLS CHURCH, VA: You might not realize it yet, but there’s an unexpected change occurring in the digital publishing space. We can’t help but notice it ourselves—many of our new clients aren’t who you’d suspect. In fact, they aren’t even publishers, in the traditional sense. They are business-to-business (B2B) corporations of all sorts, and they’re asking us to help them make their content available via e-books.
For many corporations, publishing has evolved into a necessary discipline that is being mastered in-house. Today, nearly every organization is a publisher, whether they sell books, tractors, space shuttles, medical devices, smart phones, or pharmaceuticals. This is equally true for the service industries. Universities, consulting firms, healthcare providers, real estate agencies, translation shops—just about anyone who does anything is a publisher, and now needs to be adept at digital publishing too.
We’re seeing tremendous benefits being realized across corporations as they replace old school publishing approaches. Large volumes of business critical content are being created faster, more efficiently and less expensively than ever before. And, it’s being delivered—often dynamically—to devices of all types and in formats that provide the robust experiences that today’s digitally-native users expect.
Corporate enterprises are recognizing the e-book medium for what it is—an ultra convenient, flexible, device-agnostic format for 
providing information to customers, prospects, employees, partners and shareholders. Using an XML-based workflow, e-books can be created and personalized on-demand and saved in whatever format the reader desires. This means that content-intensive organizations can provide the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right format and language—and on the right device, be it an iPhone, Kindle, PC, Mac, Blackberry, Android or Nokia—without making readers jump through a series of technological hoops to get to the content they desire.
From annual reports, policies and procedures, training materials, marketing collateral, technical documentation, sales literature, analysts’ reports, newsletters, white papers, and presentations—basically any content needed to run a business can be presented in e-book format, and offers readers so much more than simply the digital equivalent of the original content.
E-books can contain a combination of text, images, audio, 3D graphics, and video. They’re searchable, indexable, findable, embeddable, and printable. And, they include handy features like last page memory (modern day bookmarks), cross-references (hyperlinks to internal and external content), and the ability for the reader to annotate (take notes).
For years, corporate enterprises have looked for ways to trim expenses and become more efficient. As a result, they sought new and improved ways of managing, creating, and publishing content. Those who were most successful moved to a component-based XML authoring strategy that separates content from its formatting information, allowing the content components to be re-purposed on-demand to create new value streams.
Because XML is platform-, browser-, and device-agnostic, it allows corporations to quickly and easily migrate to e-books, selecting the right content and formatting it for the right device type, oftentimes on the fly.
In essence, XML “future-proofs” content and is particularly important considering the pace at which e-reading devices are coming to market. It’s not yet clear to which devices consumers will gravitate, so being agile and quick to port your content to any new device type is a critical factor for success.
With XML at the core, establishing a workflow for the simultaneous delivery of content through multiple channels (print, online and multiple mobile devices) is a simple process.
In order to remain relevant and profitable, traditional publishers must meet—and hopefully exceed—their customer’s rapidly changing expectations and position themselves to access new markets fast. Publishers who lack flexible XML-based workflows need to quickly establish a plan for creating and managing digital content if they want to deliver it to their changing reader base—on their preferred devices, whenever and wherever they want it.
Tapping these emerging e-book markets means reviewing the established approaches and definitions that traditional publishers have relied on for decades, and changing the way we think of publishing.
Today, everyone is a publisher and the real digital content markets are just now unfolding, with e-books at the forefront. Will you be there to profit from the opportunities?
Dev Ganesan is the President and CEO of Aptara, a digital e-book conversion and digital publishing company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.
CONTACT: Dev Ganesan directly.
VISIT: The Aptara Web site.
READ: About Aptara’s latest product, eGen, a platform for converting large volumes of content into the ePub format.
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Mohan Nair
8 months ago
Lovely! Hope to see Umberto Eco’s next book solely in an “e” edition on an e-reader from General Electric or American Express pretty soon, sent out along with their annual report. That will teach the intransigent publishers a lesson!
Scott Abel
8 months ago
Wow! It’s about time this issue was brought up and discussed among publishing types. Organizations in the life sciences, manufacturing, and information technology industries have been creating device-, browser-, operating system-agnostic XML content for years. In fact, they’ve been publishing those content assets from a single source XML content management system (content repository) into multiple information products (things like brochures, marketing collateral, training materials, product catalogs, user manuals, regulatory compliance documents). And, they’ve been doing it automatically, on demand…into an increasing array of formats desired by the user.
You may notice that I referred to these types of content as “assets” — that’s because they are. But until an organization views the content they create as assets, they seldom pay much attention to improving the way in which they create, manage and deliver content. Those who “get” the need for change reap substantial benefits.
XML and eBooks are a natural fit. The eBook publishing landscape is changing rapidly. But, it’s not foreign territory. Others have been there before. We were just publishing different types of content, but we solved the same challenges you face by admitting that the way we had done things for decades was outdated and inefficient — and that it prevents us from finding new markets for our content (and often scared existing customers away). Once we were honest about the reasons for not changing – which, as t turned out weren’t reasons, but excuses, change came quite naturally.
Publishers who are smart enough to separate their content from its formatting instructions (one of the tenets of XML) and use style sheets to automatically transform it into multiple output formats (iPhone, PDF, Kindle, etc.) will be way head of the game, but they’ll still be short of the finish line. Traditional publishers and business publishers both also need to examine the definition of a book (it’s not the same as it used to be), ask themselves where and how they’ll distribute eBooks, and in what formats.
What matters most is that you get your content in front of as many prospects and customers as possible. The best way to do that is to go where they hang out and hang out, too. Social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter are excellent promotional and brand-awareness buildings communities, but placing your content on eBook specific communities, and in the iTunes Store and the Amazon.com catalog are extremely important to getting maximum exposure to the content you create.
Thanks to Dev for stepping up and telling publishers what they need to know. There are big opportunities out there for those who dare think differently.
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[...] Is B2B is the Real Market for E-books?Another look at the changing landscape of publishing — how the customer relationships are changing and what opportunities arise (note: not clear from lead grafs, but this is by Aptara). [...]
Richard Hamilton
8 months ago
Great post. My company, XML Press (xmlpress.net), is a publisher operating in the way that your article (and Scott Abel’s reply) suggests. We are in one sense a “traditional” publisher, since we do produce books in print form. However, many of the books we have currently in print or under development are authored in XML. XML simplifies production and lowers cost, even for books that are only offered in print.
One key to success with XML is to use a standard schema. We use DocBook (my favorite) and DITA, both of which have standard, freely available stylesheets that can be customized as needed. A standard schema gives you several advantages:
- There are likely to be standard stylesheets that will get you started.
- Writers are much more likely to be familiar with one of the standard schemas.
- Developers are also more likely to be familiar with a standard schema and will find existing tools available for them.
- You can amortize the cost of stylesheet customization over a series of books.
One trend I’m seeing is companies developing their product information in XML, distributing it directly in electronic form, then contracting out print publication to a company like XML Press. The likely sales of this kind of print publication are small, and for most companies you could not build a good business case for handling print in-house. However, if you have XML, the cost of outsourcing it to a specialist will be much lower, and splitting revenue can bring the up-front cost down even further. All told, it can be a low risk way of offering customers print, but it’s likely to be cost-effective only if you (or your contractor) can generate PDF with minimal production cost. Standard XML makes that possible.
The bottom line is that XML gives you the flexibility to deliver content in whatever form you need, and if you use an established standard (like DocBook), you can easily outsource the parts you don’t want to deal with internally.
Maxwell Hoffmann
8 months ago
Great insights, Dev, and this viewpoint is long overdue. When DTP first emerged, it was viewed through the lens of traditional, commercial typesetting and publishing. It took a few years for people to realize that Desktop Publishing had gone “mainstream” and forever changed customer expectations about presentation quality for print in “ordinary” business documents. The same thing is happening with content, which is more portable than ever with XML. Average users, on and off the job, are becoming increasingly used to capturing quick information from mobile devices. eBooks are a logical replacement for the 3-ring binder, and even the now “creaky” WWW on-line PDF file. It is true that everyone is a publisher. The next step, beyond XML, will be simplified English (limited verbs and expressions) to make content translate more efficiently and cost-effectively. With increased globalization (how many monetary units from China are supporting the loans in *your* business) make it likely that anything worthwhile that you author could be translated within the next 2-3 years. It is time that we consciously prepare all content to be not only portable for different English display and delivery, but in any language.
Julio Vazquez
8 months ago
All very good insights and comments. The swing is definitely towards XML and being able to produce content for the target audience in precisely the pieces the reader needs. This takes a huge effort at analysis, planning, and structure, but the benefits are well worth it.
The caveat is that some publishers won’t get it. They’ll just port their existing dcoumentation into XML and think that is good enough. The reality is that to deliver on the basis Dev describes, you need to understand your information to the point that you can classify it well enough that on-demand delivery becomes simple. That sort of work is not for the faint-of-heart or the novice, but someone who will take the time and energy to look at the assets and determine the best way to describe each asset in the smallest unit that makes sense. Only then, will the vision be fulfilled.
Emma Hamer
8 months ago
As with most new technologies, or applications of existing technologies, or new uses for existing and established technologies, the road to wide-spread adoption of concepts and practices is a long one. This article does a decent job of “educating” the reader about the features of XML, and about e-publishing for mobile devices. In the minds of many, I suspect, e-publishing until now has meant “publishing to the web”. So, kudos to Dev for this heroic, and information-rich, article. But as any marketing professional will attest, talking about features is not going to trigger a purchase.
The only reason publishers, traditional or B2B, will invest in new ways of doing business is if they can (be made to) see the benefits – to them, firstly, and then to their customers. Dev does mention many of the potential benefits, but they get a bit lost in the technical feature education piece.
Key questions: what problem are (traditional) publishers trying to solve? Is it shrinking sales? Is it high cost of distribution? And the old question: “Where’s the burning platform?” For change to happen, the pain of the current approach MUST be greater than the pain of changing to a new one. Find the pain – make the sale.
Kent Taylor
8 months ago
The road is LLLOOONNNNGGG indeed!
I can agree with pretty much everything that’s been said so far in this thread, but I think I can add a couple of twists to the conversation, because I have lived through them.
First a little history. The concepts behind XML aren’t new – they’ve been around for at least 3 decades. The original multi-use need was simply to PRINT the same content on different sizes of paper without having to rekey all of the embedded typesetting macros. This pain point spawned the concept of generic coding + typesetting scripts, the original separation of content and format. Unfortunately, it did nothing for interchange or interoperabilty, as there were as many flavors of GenCode as there were companies doing typesetting in-house.
Then there was SGML – Standard Generalized Markup Language, which was a first step in the direction of enabling interoperability and interchange, as well as separation of content and format for publishing purposes. At a very high level, the SGML Standard was NOT a markup language itself, but rather a set of rules for developing generalized markup languages. The bad news here was that anyone could develop their own conforming markup language and structural rules. The good news was that it was so complex, and so expensive and time-consuming to implement that there were far fewer versions of SGML than GenCode. More good news: a conforming SGML application did enable easy priting on different sizes of paper, and set the stage for easy conversion to on-line information and CD-ROM delivery of content. And since there was a set of common rules, it was sometimes possible to write conversion scripts that would sometimes convert some parts of some SGML applications to some parts of other SGML applications, somewhat enabling interchange. Sometimes … maybe.
This situation spawned a long stretch of inter-company and inter-industry efforts to develop SGML interchange standards – basically interlingua. You convert your version of SGML to the common interchange standard, and all of your trading partners convert from the interchange standard to their flavor of SGML. Everyone writes a two-way conversion utility to the interchange SGML, and everyone is (mostly) happy. But again, it’s not perfect, and only the big guys can afford to play. About this same time, globalization started to pick up, and the need to publish in multiple languages (and on multiple paper sizes) drove more of the big guys toward the ugly world of SGML.
Then came the World Wide Web and HTML, the first real standard markup language. HTML is actually a conforming application of SGML, but what set it apart was that it established a standard set of tags and structure optimized for web display and delivery – a standard that everyone could use, and that forward-looking vendors could build and sell tools for. While it was limited in what it could do, HTML provided a nudge in the right direction. SGML was too sophisticated, complex, and flexible; HTML was too simple, flat, and not extensible enough to do much more than web delivery. The need for something in between these extremes was evident, and XML staggered on to the scene, followed by DITA.
While all of this was going on, Document Management, Content Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management, Translation Management, Single Sourcing, Multimedia, Multi-use, multi-purposing, and multi-headaches also proliferated. And yes, today everyone is in the publishing business. For better or for worse.
The good news is that all of these technologies have enabled us to publish more content, in more combinations and permutations, more forms,formats, and media, and more languages than anyone could have imagined even 10 years ago. The bad news is that many of these new “publishers” have focused so hard on tagging, chunking, reuse, repurposing, regurgitating and translating ever-increasing volumes of disjointed, inconsistent, duplicative, irrelevant, poorly written “chunks,” that they have completely lost control of what their customers actually see. The technology has enabled fantastic productivity, but how useful is quantity without a reasonable level of quality?
Maybe I’m just a hopeless perfectionist, but I think it’s time to get back to basics, and start focusing on what’s between the tags. It’s time for the pedulum to swing back in the direction of Quality. A handful of companies have been able to maintain and even improve content quality and customer satisfaction while simultaneously applying the technology to improve productivity and throughput, so I know it can be done.
Whatever happened to “Quality is Job 1?” I’m tired of digging through mountains of irrelevant information, random structure, dead links, typos, sentence fragments, abrupt (non)transitions, and just plain poor writing that poses as customer support information these days.
Am I the Lone Ranger??
Scott Nesbitt
8 months ago
The B2B area is an obvious fit for ebooks. As you pointed out, there is a considerable amount of content than firms of all sizes produce. And a lot of the time that content isn’t available. I might not have an Internet connection. I might not want to deal with a set of huge PDFs. I definitely don’t want to cart any number of hard copies around with me. With ebooks, true portability — both in size of the files and the types of devices on which those files can be read — has a chance of becoming a reality. Whether the reader is using a desktop or laptop PC, a smartphone, a netbook, or a dedicated ebook reader they can always have that content with them and easily move it between devices.
XML seems the obvious choice for tagging and preparing the content of ebooks. As other commenters have noted, you not only get a separation of style and content but the ability to literally mix and match content. I liken it to building with LEGO. You’re not just stuck with one type of block; you can combine blocks of different sizes and shapes into interesting combinations. On top of that (again, as others before me have pointed out) XML can be fairly easily transformed into multiple formats, including a number of ones that ebook friendly (such as ePub).
But a company also has to ask itself if its content is right for remixing into an ebook. Just as I don’t want to bother with a tedious novel or academic tract, I definitely don’t want to read content that leaves me wondering why I’m wasting brain and eye power on it.
The content of an ebook, like any other work, needs to be clear, consistent, and concise. It also needs context, and that context will depend on the reader. The human touch is essential. No amount of tagging or transformations into multiple formats can convert bad or bland content into something worth reading.
The eBook Agency » Blog Archive » Roundup of eBook Related Articles #4
8 months ago
[...] Is B2B the Real Market for E-books? [...]
SamD
8 months ago
I feel that having good quality XML is the key to good output. Addition of semantic tagging to the XML for the future devices would add to the usefulness of the content. B2B model is more open to testing and trying new things than a B2C environment but does suffer from not having moved to xml early enough. B2B needs an eBook delivery solution though and companies such as Amazon and Sony should start to look into this immediately.
Scott Abel
7 months ago
Wow. These are some great comments. There’s probably ten other article ideas in this comment thread. Dev, you’ve got plenty of fodder for a series of articles. Great job!
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2 months ago
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