Future Tense: Making Smart Choices about Content Technologies

While advances in publishing technologies have changed the economics of content production, management and delivery, some publishers still lag behind in their efforts to incorporate new content technologies into their go-to-market strategy.

It’s not for lack of awareness or even initiative, however. The plain fact is that many publishers are unsure which technology will work best for them now and for the near-future.

Options Bound

Some publishers are also reluctant to make significant investments in new platforms or delivery systems, fearing obsolescence or irrelevance in a year or two.

Case in point: many publishers are currently weighing the pros and cons of various ePublishing strategies. Do they convert content for proprietary platforms or do they adopt more generic formats that can be used for a wider range of platforms?

At the same time, these companies are painfully aware that if they stand pat, they run the very real risk of being at a profound competitive disadvantage.

No wonder an increasing number of publishers and information services firms are turning to Innodata Isogen for advice on how to position their information products and organizations for future growth.

Positioned For Growth

Innodata Isogen helps many of the world’s leading publishers and information services firms deploy new publishing systems that have increased the value of new and existing information products. Our consultants and analysts have extensive experience with many of the latest publishing technologies. We’re translating our knowledge and insight into real-world solutions that can help your company speed cycle times and generate new revenue streams.

For example, we’re currently helping a number of leading publishers develop strategies for converting books to meet the industry’s new EPUB standard. In addition, our consultants are also working with a leading publisher to help them adopt a comprehensive ePublishing solution that would support content re-purposing.

Improving Productivity, Lowering Costs

Our engineering teams have also developed specialized tools that streamline editorial and production workflows and lower the costs of adding more features to new information products.

• For a leading STM publisher, our engineering teams are developing a machine-aided indexing solution that uses lemmatization (the process that determines the most crucial term in a sentence to reflect its meaning and context) and semantically-driven natural language analysis to deliver precision and recall at 95% accuracy. Once the text is tokenized or assigned value according to the words in a particular sentence, we then use a set of rules and linguistic filters to identify phrases within the text. By automating this process, we’re able to add millions of additional topics to the publisher’s database at a fraction of the cost of what it would take manually.
• We also developed an automated indexing tool to help one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the United States improve the searchability of its vast archive, increasing the likelihood that customers will purchase online subscriptions or pay-per-view transactions. This tool significantly accelerates the ability of our team to tag the millions of articles and individual pages that had been converted into PDFs for the publisher with metadata.

A Better Publishing Platform

We’ve also helped dozens of clients choose and then deploy new publishing systems and composition platforms. For example, we helped a leading publisher of legal information adopt a new composition platform that integrated content from both PDFs and HTML into one system.

By merging its print and online content, the publisher is now developing new information products and materials for its core audience in the legal profession, improving turnaround time and significantly reducing production costs.

Sorting Out The Options

If you’re facing tough challenges on how to adapt new technology for your business, we can help. Ask our teams of consultants for advice on how to deploy innovative technologies that speed cycle times and generate new revenue streams.