Digitization and
Content Creation
Digital solutions providers are
ILLUSTRATION © NADIA / ISTOCK.COM
ramping up to meet new and
growing publishing demands
while executing their social
obligations
By Teri Tan
T
here is no question that the pandemic has accelerated
the pace of content digitization even as it has deci-
mated revenues in both the digital solutions and
publishing industries. Virtual learning, edtech, and
e-books saved the day. But between prolonged school
and bookstore closures and the slow progress of new
publishing projects in 2020, optimism was in rather short
supply. Add in pandemic uncertainties, and the picture was
quite gloomy.
But good news is in store, literally, for both industries: in the
AAP StatShot report for the first half of 2021, the K–12 seg-
ment posted the biggest sales gain, at 35.2% higher than the
same period in 2020. The higher-ed segment expanded as well,
showing a 15.1% sales increase. News for the trade book seg-
ment was also positive, with NPD BookScan reporting that
bookstore sales jumped 30% over what was a miserable first six
months of 2020.
This feature is published with the support of the
vendors covered in these articles.
in India Rolls On
To get a quick snapshot of what is happening and where the
digital solutions industry is heading, PW speaks to three com-
panies in different parts of the globe—Lapiz Digital, Newgen
KnowledgeWorks, and Westchester Publishing Services—from
their offices in India, the U.K., and the U.S., respectively.
Adopting new ways of working and
collaborating
For Lapiz Digital, a blended office model is now the modus
operandi. “We have a flexible arrangement in which there is a
pool of staff working from home and another at our production
facility,” says head of operations Meena Prakash, adding that the
staff involved in critical projects will be in the office at least
three days out of the work week. “Going forward, for established
work processes and project types, we see the work-from-home
(WFH) option continuing even after this pandemic lockdown
period ends. Naturally, to ensure a smooth workflow with max-
imum security and data integrity within this blended model,
we have been investing much more than before in our IT
infrastructure.”
Increased communications and daily reviews between WFH
and work-from-office (WFO) staff have resulted in better con-
trol of the deliverables while fostering closer working relation-
ships and higher organizational performance. “Day-to-day
huddles for WFH employees further break the monotony and
social isolation,” Prakash says. “Our team leaders and managers
have also made it a point to speak to everyone regularly to check
on their health and on their families.”
“When we started this blended model,” Prakash says, “we
thought that people would be happier working from home and
that attrition would decrease. Well, that did not happen.
Attrition continues in this dynamic industry, and employees
relocate or jump to better opportunities regardless of the coro-
navirus or WFH advantages.”
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 63
 Digital Solutions in India
ore than 90% of Westchester Publishing
M initiatives have helped staff to stay connected. We
Services’ 400-plus employees (from locations in
India, the U.K., and the U.S.) continue to work
from home. “Prior to the pandemic, we already had
the capabilities to support distributed work, which
was built around our global nature but largely
driven by the impact of severe storms on our U.S.
and India offices in recent years,” says chief revenue
office Tyler Carey.
The WFH situation, Carey says, has generated a
greater degree of empathy among publishers, ven-
dors, and, most importantly, employers. “Whether
it’s been talking with a co-worker, manager, client,
Meena Prakash, head of
or partner over the past year, I think we all can relate
operations at Lapiz Digital
to anecdotes of Zoom meetings that featured pets
walking across our desks or children passing by on-screen,” he
says. “The Zoom dynamic at work humanized a lot of what we
do together as an industry and has adjusted the way many of us
will return to work, with hybrid models and flexible schedules
more common in our space than ever before, even as some regions
are prepping to more widely return to the office next year.”
The WFH model has transformed Newgen KnowledgeWorks
in many ways. “We have been able to recruit from a much wider
geographic pool,” says Jo Bottrill, managing director of opera-
tions in the U.K. and the U.S. “Many of our staff have also moved
away from crowded metropolitan areas. While we have to work
harder to foster team spirit and the sense of togetherness, our
smaller client-focused teams, quality circles, and company-wide
Lapiz Digital Focuses on Online Products
The rapid growth of online products has more than compensated
for the dip in print deliverables for the K–12 and higher-ed segments
at Lapiz Digital in the past year, says president V. Bharathram.
“K–12 publishers, especially, have shifted their focus and busi-
ness strategies to meet the rising demand of virtual learning
and edtech products during this pandemic era,” he says. “We
have seen more inquiries for content authoring and rendering for
different digital formats and platforms in recent months.”
The benefits of offering online products—which manifest pri-
marily as savings on print production costs and the ability to pro-
vide new content and information updates speedily—are attractive
to K–12 publishers. “They have increased their investments in
digital products and content, and we fully expect to see the digi-
tal side of our business picking up even more going forward,”
Bharathram says. “Educational publishers were moving from
print to digital even before the start of the pandemic, but this
momentum has accelerated in the past 16 months.” His team
is gearing up to deliver more interactive e-books and AI-based
adaptive learning tools, aside from content-authoring projects.
On the trade publishing side, there has been a significant
increase in e-book conversion projects. “We also saw more
accessibility-related conversions for educational publishing last
year,” says Bharathram, whose team had completed a large
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are investing heavily in and expanding our Pubkit
workflow management system to make it the entry
point for everyone’s working day. We also have new
HR systems that enable us to keep in touch with
our staff in more meaningful ways.”
Bottrill has seen huge benefits to being able to
bring a larger constituency of Newgenites together
in online meetings in the WFH mode. “It has
improved timely and open communication across
the teams,” he says. “Our onshore staff in the U.S.,
U.K., and Continental Europe offices are definitely
more closely connected with their teammates in
our production facilities in India. On the other
hand, our clients have more immediate and open
access to the entire Newgen team, which helps us to form even
closer partnerships and be more responsive and connected to
their needs.”
Helping and giving back to the community
The Diwali celebration early this month was indeed a joyous
event throughout India. New Covid-19 infections, averaging
12,000 cases, are now a fraction of the peak in May, when the
country’s public-health systems buckled under a massive wave
of deaths. More than one billion doses of vaccine have been
administered, and private and public entities are rallying to drive
up vaccination rates and support local communities in need.
In recent months, Prakash and president V. Bharathram, for
volume of accessible content with interactivities for a major chil-
dren’s book publisher, as well as an extensive content-rendering
project across different subject matters with varying complexity
levels for another educational publisher.
New contracts signed with several independent publishers
bode well for the coming months. “Some of our current print-
based clients have also started allocating digital projects with
us,” says Bharathram, whose sales team has added several
small- and medium-sized journal publishers from the Middle
East and Africa to the client roster last year. “All in all, it was a
good start for 2022. We are confident that print-based educa-
tional products will rebound once schools fully reopen in the
U.S. and other major economies.” For now, Lapiz Digital’s major
target markets continue to be North America and Europe.
Meanwhile, investments in security and cloud-based infrastruc-
ture for maintaining data integrity and protecting confidential
information are taking center stage. “This is particularly crucial in
our blended working environment, given the rise of hacking activ-
ities and security breaches in different parts of the world,” says
Bharathram, who is busy expanding his team’s capabilities in pro-
viding accessibility solutions for the publishing segment. Diversi-
fication into the healthcare business, for which VR/MR and niche
analytics services are being offered, is picking up speed.
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 Digital Solutions in India
instance, have arranged for Lapiz Digital
employees several talks by senior epide-
miologists on the importance of vacci-
nation. “We’ve also created a long list of
FAQs to address issues that some may
want to ask but are either reluctant or
too shy to voice,” Prakash says.
“Hopefully, these activities will push
the vaccination rate to 100% for both
doses soon.” Around 90% of Lapiz
Digital staff have received at least one
vaccine dose, she says.
Lapiz Digital has also joined in the Jo Bottrill, managing director of Newgen
KnowledgeWorks in the U.K. and U.S.
efforts to educate the public about the
pandemic. “Last year, many of our staff, along with others from
our sister companies, distributed free self-care packets in rural
communities and helped to design and disseminate posters on
Covid-19 awareness,” Prakash says. “This year, we are con-
tinuing these efforts alongside local communities and govern-
ment in addition to donating oxygen cylinders to local hospitals
for use in their Covid-19 wards.”
Extending the WFH policy and encouraging staff to work
flexibly and from anywhere have been important parts of keeping
people safe during the pandemic over at Newgen
KnowledgeWorks. “Supporting staff in moving out to their
native places and in working confidently and efficiently from
Further Growth at Newgen KnowledgeWorks
The growth of digital products at Newgen’s K–12 education unit
has been dramatic during the pandemic. “We have rapidly
reskilled our K–12 and English language teaching [ELT] project
managers, designers, and editorial staff to enable them to work
across the myriad platforms and workflows involved in bringing
digital projects to life,” says Jo Bottrill, managing director of the
U.K. and U.S. operations. “We also launched a separate English
language learning [ELL] unit in September to emphasize ELL and
ELT content, which is so important to our publishing clients and
the learners.”
Publishers are taking pure digital projects to the market more
confidently, a shift driven by considerable demand from learners,
teachers, and parents, Bottrill says. “Printed resources remain
successful where they support self-learning and revision, with
the backup of online assessment and test-bank materials,” he
says. “Since digital projects are often more complex, being
multi-format and multi-platform, investing in digital project man-
agement skills remains a focus in our company.”
The M&A activities across the industry have brought about
more conversion or repurposing projects. “We have converted
backlists for several large publishers and prepared the content
for incorporation into new publishing platforms, including our
content distribution platform Nova,” Bottrill says. “This process
often involves content and metadata from myriad sources,
including print PDFs, ePubs, hard copies, and fully structured
66 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ N O V E M B E R 2 2 , 2 0 2 1
home while staying connected to the
team has been essential to preserving staff
well-being and playing our part in
reducing the spread of the virus in the
wider community,” Bottrill says, adding
that the company has supported its staff,
their families, and their communities
with medical assistance, including the
establishment of a bank of oxygen con-
centrators that were rapidly deployed to
the sick and needy during the height of
the pandemic.
Then there is the Nandavanam Center
o f Excellence for Children with
Developmental Challenges, a Newgen CSR initiative that was
launched in 2014. “During these difficult times, it has provided
food parcels to families and supported online learning, keeping
needy children and their families connected to the important
lifeline that this center provides,” Bottrill says.
Westchester Publishing Services, on the other hand, has pro-
actively worked with organizations in India to provide free
vaccines to all of its staff, covering any costs incurred and even
providing transportation, if required, to vaccination sites. “As
a company, we have also financially supported the efforts of
United Way, which is supporting vaccination programs in
India,” Carey says.
XML. Our tools, including SilkEvolve, allow us to do the work
very efficiently and at scale.”
Meanwhile, the company’s DigitalWorks division is busy pro-
viding digital marketing, design, and development services, as
well as content distribution strategies. “The team creates and
promotes brands as well as providing ongoing digital marketing
services,” Bottrill says. “Combining these services with our
Nova publishing platform, for instance, gives publishers the
edge in making their content more discoverable in new markets.
The Newgen team also offers services ranging from website
audits to accessible site development. We partner with publish-
ers to assess their outputs and optimize processes from the
very beginning so that all systems and workflows can be
designed with accessibility in mind. This isn’t just an issue of
compliance but one of opening up new markets and ensuring
that the content is available to the widest possible community
of readers.”
Bottrill sees huge growth opportunities in the coming years
across the K–12 and academic markets, with ample room for
product innovation and new distribution models, especially to
the all-important library market. “We focus on supporting pub-
lishers in scaling up their operations quickly and efficiently,” Bot-
trill says. “Increasingly, this will see Newgen KnowledgeWorks
providing more value-added services, such as content commis-
sioning, writing, development, and acquisitions support.”
 Digital Solutions in India
Meeting new demands arising
from the pandemic
Now that different industries are shifting and
evolving owing to the pandemic, quality career
training and professional development programs
are expanding and changing too. In May,
Westchester expanded its career and technical edu-
cation (CTE) content development services unit by
identifying further specialists within different
industries and bringing in Debbie Allen to lead
the team.
“Our clients, including CareerPath, work closely
with districts, education and training centers, and Deb Taylor, director of business ment, sales, and client support, as our director of
professional groups to define CTE programs, and development at Westchester
we play a role in recruiting subject matter experts Publishing Services
and creating and editing content that can be used in these pro-
grams,” Carey says.
The pandemic also exerts its toll on children’s emotional devel-
opment. “Pre-pandemic, educational publishers had begun
including in their content more materials specific to social and
emotional learning [SEL] principles to help students navigate
their emotions and address the challenges of socialization,” Carey
says. “During the past year and a half, these challenges were
exacerbated by the pandemic, with lockdowns and school clo-
sures deepening the sense of loneliness that many kids were
experiencing. Westchester’s team has worked closely with the
CASEL Framework to ensure that these standards are considered
and applied in the content we create for children through our
Continued Expansion at Westchester Publishing Services
Adding more than 150 companies to its client roster since 2019
is not just a reflection of Westchester’s business success, says
chief revenue officer Tyler Carey. “It is indicative,” he says, “of the
expansion within the publishing industry, the number of titles
released in different formats, and how publishers are able to sus-
tain—and grow—their businesses during this pandemic.”
Many publishers “are investing in new distribution methods,
content areas, and file formats,” Carey says, “and we are helping
these publishers via the creation, editing, design, and production
processes. Accordingly, we invest in our own infrastructure and
bring in industry experts to help us continue to grow our internal
and client-facing technologies, as well as offerings to address
these needs.”
Westchester’s education groups in the U.S. and the U.K. have
posted higher growth than ever in the past two years. “One key
factor is the creation of our culturally responsive education [CRE]
rubric, as our response, as parents and educators, to the current
market,” Carey says. “Many parents had not seen much of their
children’s classroom content until their kids were distance-learn-
ing during the pandemic. And not all parents liked what they saw,
especially the underrepresentation of cultures and the dated and
offensive language that persists in some content.”
Through this proprietary CRE rubric, publishers and content
68 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ N O V E M B E R 2 2 , 2 0 2 1
education unit. As the father of three kids in dif-
ferent stages of development, it is very empowering
for me to see our team working alongside publishers
to foster the healthy emotional and social growth of
the younger generation.”
During the pandemic, Westchester’s Client
Portal dashboards have become even more useful for
tracking ongoing projects. “Our close collaboration
with Dropbox to implement the latest technologies
and address emerging client needs is ongoing,”
Carey says. “Most recently, we hired Deb Taylor,
who has extensive background in software develop-
business development to work proactively with
clients to explore further use cases for our Client
Portal, as requests for editing tools and various added services
become ubiquitous.”
Ongoing trends and emerging market
opportunities
Automation, says Bottrill, of Newgen, will continue to push
efficiency and speed in academic content production. “It will be
vital in helping publishers adapt to the shift to Open Access,”
he says. “While the craft of copyediting will still see editors
polishing language and helping authors communicate clearly
and concisely, tools for automating parts of the editorial process
will reach maturity quickly.” Newgen’s language assessment
tools, for instance, are already helping publishers assess and
creators are able to identify, and address, the errors of omission,
representation, or insensitivity and improve their content. “The
open dialogues and recommendations have helped our clients to
not just ‘fix’ their backlists but also create more relevant and
appropriate new content going forward,” Carey says.
The team has been busy working with trade book publishers
worldwide, including Bloomsbury (U.K.), Macmillan, and Crooked
Lane. “Increasingly, when we typeset a trade book, we are also
generating digital galley files, POD files, ePubs, web PDFs, and
accessible ePub files,” Carey says. “Publishers are using these dif-
ferent file types to minimize their risks and prepare for future and
emergency use cases. For instance, if there is a backlog at the
printing companies, they have the POD files to go for digital print-
ing. Or they can do a digital release using ePub files while awaiting
an initial print run. They now have all the file formats they might
need, ready to go.”
Then there was the acquisition of U.K.-based River Editorial in
March, which has been “transformative,” Carey says. “We can
now offer U.K. clients onshore project management and editorial
services. We continue to look out for strategic opportunities and
key hires to expand our services and capabilities and offer our
best to the publishing, education, media, and communications
markets.”
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 Digital Solutions in India

validate language quality, ensuring that resources are directed
to content that will most benefit from editorial intervention.
Publishers are looking at how more of the production and
editorial processes can be automated, Bottrill says. “Our innova-
tive workflows and platforms are helping to unlock automation
while leaving the publisher, project manager, and author in
control of their content. We are rapidly integrating in-house
tools such as Pubkit [for workflow management], Redshift [for
automated typesetting], and Nova [for content publishing and
distribution] to provide an end-to-end solution for publishers
across academic, trade, and professional publishing segments.”
Nova, for instance, allows publishers to form direct relation-
ships with their customers, build important communities of
users, and retain more of the revenues from their direct sales.
(Check out the Expert Series online article, “Improving
Outcomes Using Agile Learning.”)
Meanwhile, supply chain woes, printer backlogs, and paper
shortages have created a renaissance in digital products. “Now
that print products are having their supply chain challenges,
backlist and frontlist ePub files are becoming increasingly
important for distribution,” says Carey, of Westchester. “Many
publishers are seeing ePubs contributing more to their bottom
lines in the past 18 months. This was raised in our recent webinar
cohosted with PW about the state of the supply chain and ways
to navigate getting products to market. This wider usage of
ePubs has also revealed the lack of support for communities that
use adaptive technology to engage with the content.”
So Westchester is now working with the nonprofit organiza-
tion Benetech, which operates the largest library of accessible
e-books in the world and acts as a third-party evaluator for
accessible content, to become a GCA-certified partner for cre-
ating accessible digital files. “We are upping our game to create
better and more accessible ePub 3 files that will help to address
the needs of all readers, no matter how they engage with their
content,” Carey says. (More in the Expert Series online article,
“Accessibility and Digital EPubs.”)
“We see a continuing trend toward end-to-end project man-
agement and a greater focus on offshore project management,”
Bottrill, of Newgen, says. “At the same time, publishers are
partnering with us on more upstream services, including devel-
opmental editing, pre-production support, and even content
commissioning.” The company’s media-related services (cov-
ering audio, video, and animation) and manufacturing services
(including print and asset management) have also grown rap-
idly, he says. “There is a growing interest in accessibility among
publishers, and anyone with digital content is waking up to
their legal obligations to make content accessible.”
And for publishers looking to access the vibrant and diverse—
and challenging—Southeast Asian markets, Bottrill and his
team are ready to assist. “Our deep market knowledge across
this region coupled with our network of sales agents and dis-
tributors put us in a great position to confidently open up this
market for academic, trade, and K–12 publishers,” Bottrill says.
“We have the capabilities and expertise—having sold legal
content across this market for many years—to support a wide
range of publishers in this region.”
Over at Lapiz Digital, the demand for online testing and
assessments from both overseas and domestic markets in the
publishing segment is growing fast. “There is also a huge
demand for online training courseware from corporate clients,”
says Bharathram, whose team is also busy auditing projects done
by other vendors to ensure both quality and content accuracy.
“This pandemic has essentially accelerated the implementation
and adoption of online education in different industries.” (Read
the Expert Series online article, “The Audit Process Prior to
Publication.”)
These digital solutions vendors and their counterparts are
continuing to aggressively automate, innovate, reengineer, and
transform to meet the moment. The times are tough and the
competition, tougher.
For publishers, going digital is a must—not an option—for
long-term survival and healthy bottom lines. Publishers must
have their best products available in both print and digital
formats to maximize revenues. They need to ensure that “XML,”
“HTML5,” “ePub 3,” “accessibility,” and “discoverability” are
integral parts of their business, strategy, and process lexicons.
While such transformation doesn’t happen overnight, no one
can afford to ignore the digital path. As Stewart Brand so aptly
said, once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of
the steamroller, you’re part of the road.  ■

This coverage is also available online at publishersweekly.com/digitalsolutions2021.

Articles in the Expert Series, penned by vendors themselves, examine critical topics impacting both publishing and digital solutions
industries:
● Accessibility and Digital EPubs by Deb Taylor, director of business development at Westchester Publishing Services
● The Audit Process Prior to Publication by Meena Prakash, head of operations at Lapiz Digital
● Improving Outcomes Using Agile Learning by Jo Bottrill, managing director of Newgen KnowledgeWorks in the U.K. and U.S.

Related Reads from PW:

● AI Comes to Audiobooks ● Publishers Need to Think Digital First
● Digital Marketing Will Become Central for Publishers ● Why 2021 Is Setting Up to Be a Pivotal Year for Digital
● The Power of UNICEF’s Learning Passport Content in Libraries
Visit publishersweekly.com/digital-marketplace to find out more about the vendors featured in this coverage.

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