Technology has revolutionized the way publishing is done in last decade, a considerable part of the content produced today is consumed in its digital form. Digital content publishing has permeated all the sectors of entertainment, education and information. Diversity in devices, platforms, and specific requirements of the form of resulting content has given rise to variety of formats and delivery platforms in digital content publishing. This has resulted in complex production processes which require unique workflows for the variety of content produced, every step in production of ebooks, web content and online learning resource requires careful examination and customization to suit the required output.
As processes become complicated with proliferation of the variety of products – made possible by advancements in technology – technology itself comes to the rescue. Content production can be automatized to a fair extent now and the technologies are still evolving, score of digital publishers world over have successfully experimented and implemented automation so far. Processes like authoring, editing, multimedia infusion, conversion services to epub, xml and pdf, book design and stylesheet, art work and cover, final proof etc can now happen in a single platform which eliminates manual intervention in many stages resulting in significant reduction in time and cost of production.
Market demands have necessitated integration of new elements in content like graphics, ancillaries, and interactive elements like feedbacks and games, content is enriched with metadata, dynamic indexing, and semantic empowerment. In the current method of content production, completing these processes, giving a final form to the content, protection of content from piracy, and distribution of the final product to the end users or to other players for further enrichment, or for creating more valuable content is a task too complicated for publishers, without the involvement of third party providing those services. With automation in content production publishers or vendors can now accelerate and streamline the entire workflow, operating from the dashboard of an automation platform.
With automation services working on the cloud, any process that can be automated is scripted to work on the cloud infrastructure and workflows are created by aligning various processes in the desired sequence. APIs can be made available for application integration, with a functional UI publishers can set up source content, configure and trigger/ schedule jobs to generate the desired digital output.
iPublishCentral Gears, a SaaS based platform from Impelsys is a content production automation service which makes content production uncomplicated, fast and easy. The platform is designed to execute a variety of automated jobs, like composition, transformation or enrichment job based on pre-assigned automated workflows. Regardless of where your content production practice lies currently, automation can be adopted at any stage, either shift the entire process to automation or adopt it gradually, platforms and features can be customized to suit the demand.
