Tracking the Relentless

Digital Momentum
in India

N
Nonstop process umbers do not lie, but they often vary, especially from

n at r ot / i s to c k . c o m
one industry research paper to the next. But two indica-
automation, content tors are consistent when it comes to the digital pub-
lishing industry: the projected market value is huge and
enhancement, and

©
its growth, exponential. Now, that’s the good news that

i l l u s t r at i o n
everyone likes to hear.
technology adoption are According to the Business Research Company, the global digital
publishing market, valued at $36.29 billion in 2021, is poised to
the ways to meet grow to $41.64 billion this year and hit $68.81 billion by 2026. A
more conservative study from Insight Partners puts the market value
evolving publishing and at $37.94 billion by 2028. On the other end of the spectrum,
Technavio forecasts a massive growth of $105.96 billion between
consumer demands 2022 and 2026, of which 41% will come from Asia Pacific. The edu-
cational segment is set to expand by $10.55 billion over the next four
years, with K–12 leading the charge.
Meanwhile, consolidation in the publishing industry continues,
seeing numerous big deals in 2021: Wiley bought open access journal
publisher Hindawi, Clarivate purchased ProQuest, Platinum Equity
acquired McGraw Hill, HarperCollins took over the trade division of
By Teri Tan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Hachette Book Group snapped up
Workman Publishing. Also in the news was the exit of Follett
Corporation from the education business after nearly 150 years, with
the sale of its school solutions and higher-ed divisions and Baker &
Taylor. All eyes are now on the upcoming court battle between
Penguin Random House and the U.S. Department of Justice over the
publisher’s plan to acquire Simon & Schuster.
This feature is published with the support of the For digital solutions providers in India, the name, or ownership, of
vendors covered in these articles a client may change, but the needs of the publishing industry remain

32 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
 Digital Solutions in India
constant: greater efficiencies in production processes, shorter
project-turnaround time, faster time to market, and more
unique and enhanced deliverables to offer consumers. Tweaking
their tech tools amid the constant changes and challenges is par
for the course.
Ensuring content accessibility for all
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), at least
one billion people, or 15% of the global population, have a
recognized disability. But the number that grabs the attention
of publishers and vendors is likely to be this group’s cumulative
spending power, which is estimated to exceed $6 trillion.
Catering to this group, however, requires additional planning
and careful execution. Increasing text color contrast, adding
alt-text to images, labeling form elements, offering a simple
website navigation, and describing links, for instance, will
make content more accessible to those with cognitive difficul-
ties, vision impairment, and auditory issues. These efforts to
ensure content accessibility and create “born accessible” con-
tent—which will also help support digital equity—require
publishers and vendors alike to take a step back, look inward,
and reconfigure their internal processes.
Publishers who serve the European market, or intend to do
so, will definitely need to take a hard look at accessibility and
rework their processes by June 2025, when the European
Accessibility Act takes effect, says Deb Taylor, business devel-
opment director at Westchester Publishing Services. “This is
going to push for accessibility standards to be adopted in more
markets, especially where such standards do not yet exist.”
More countries are certainly putting in place stronger acces-
sibility legislation, with the vast majority choosing Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA as the stan-
dard, says Tony Alves, senior v-p of product management at
HighWire Press, now owned by MPS Limited. “Recently, we
have had many clients requesting WCAG 2.1 AA Voluntary
Product Accessibility Templates [VPATs] for their sites to
enable them to sell licenses to their own customers, including
libraries, educational institutions, and corporations.” Each
VPAT, Alves says, “is time-intensive, and we supply a generic
VPAT as part of our standard platform offering. Some clients
have us develop a dedicated site-specific VPAT to offer as a paid
service.”
Additionally, the MPS team has developed a solution whereby
the VPAT is created and customized for clients who host their
content on proprietary platforms. “For such a solution, we
always do both automated and manual testing against the
WCAG standards,” Alves says. “Automated testing gets you
most of the way there, but the added manual testing makes a
huge difference to the actual accessibility of a site.”
For websites that derive from MPS hosting platforms JCore
and Scolaris, a standard VPAT is provided to explain how the
specific platform meets each criteria in WCAG 2.1 AA, Alves
says. “For publishers, a plan should be in place to maintain
compliance as new updates are continuously rolled out.
Additionally, we offer a mix of automated and manual processes
to assess accessibility gaps and help publishers to detect and
prioritize the enhancements they need to administer.”
There is currently a high demand for digital titles, with a
growing request that they meet accessibility requirements,
specifically WCAG 2.0 AA and EPUB Accessibility 1.0
Conformance and Discovery specifications, says Taylor, of
Westchester Publishing Services. “Publishers are focused on
converting their backlists, whether they are from older EPUB
versions or from print titles, in order to provide digital content
for all users to access.” This movement, she says, was one of the
key drivers of the company’s decision to invest in Benetech’s
Global Certified Accessible (GCA) certification process.
Publishers are starting to evaluate their workflows in terms
of how to address accessibility in their frontlist titles from the
beginning—rather than at the end—of the production process,
including how to develop guidelines and processes around alt-
text development, Taylor says. “Most publishers recognize that
by thinking about accessible design early on, they can minimize
or even eliminate additional steps at the end.”
As a GCA-certified vendor, Westchester is now “seeing cli-
ents turning to us for best practices and to perform digital
conversion and accessibility checks for them as well,” Taylor
says. “And as digital compliance standards continue to become
more complex, publishers will need to determine whether they
invest in expensive and highly skilled resources to add to their
teams or rely on partners who can offer that expertise at scale.”
Like time, accessibility standards and requirements certainly
do not stand still. WCAG, for instance, has gone from 1.0 to
2.0 and 2.1, with 2.2 expected to be released by September; 3.0
is being drafted as we speak to address color contrast issues.
What’s more, there are different conformance levels—A, AA,
and AAA in the 2.1 guidelines—to consider during the content
creation, production, and delivery processes as well.
With these changes in accessibility requirements comes the
need for constant training in various standards and guidelines
as well as third-party screen reader tools. “We are training our
staff in advanced accessibility services such as audiobooks with
synthesized voice, that is, text-to-speech, and embossed braille,”
says V. Bharathram, president of Lapiz Digital, who sees a huge
demand for services such as audio/video captioning, alt-text
writing, and creating accessible PDFs and PPTs going forward.
“Our accessibility services now extend from alt-text to acces-
sible graphics. In one of our recent projects, we had to use
EPUB3 accessibility features to produce the digital content and
describe products provided to retailers.”
“We are talking a lot more about accessibility with our
clients,” says Jo Bottrill, managing director of Newgen
KnowledgeWorks in the U.K. and U.S. “As a Benetech-accredited
vendor, we support the efforts to make all content accessible,
and through membership of organizations such as W3C, we are
taking an active role in helping to form new standards and
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 33
 Digital Solutions in India
processes to improve the accessibility journey. Through our
team of accessibility experts, both onshore and in India, we
provide consultancy and advice to clients on crafting their acces-
sibility workflows.” Newgen KnowledgeWorks recently held a
webinar titled “Digital Accessibility: A New Era for Academic
Publishers” that brought together several industry experts to
talk about the latest thinking in the world of accessibility.
“Remediation of backlist titles continues to be an important
aspect of our work in accessibility,” Bottrill says. “But the con-
versation is now about perfecting frontlist workflows to
produce truly born-accessible content. Increasingly, we are
supporting editorial teams and their authors around issues such
as alt-text creation and accessible content design. And it does
not stop with accessibility. Reading content for aspects of diver-
sity, inclusion, and equity is a growing need, particularly for
education and English-language publishers as they review their
backlists and look to adapt content for new markets.”
Contemplating interactivities, AR, VR,
and the metaverse
The latest Research and Markets report indicates that the global
market for augmented reality (AR) in education was around
$760.4 million in 2020 and will grow to $41.8 billion by 2027.
In the K–12 segment, AR has a 74.1% CAGR to hit $14.1
billion in 2027. These numbers and revenue potentials are
fueling a whole new game.
Enter the metaverse, the virtual reality (VR) version of our
Revamping and Developing Platforms at DiacriTech
Version 4.0 of XEditPro, DiacriTech’s cloud-based SaaS editorial
and production platform, underwent a major architecture
upgrade last year. A downloadable option, for instance, was cre-
ated based on a client’s request. “The on-demand widget encrypts
and decrypts content on the fly as the user scrolls through it,”
says executive v-p A.R.M. Gopinath. “It is most useful for staff
and clients who are still in WFH mode and do not want, or need, to
be online at all times to access or work on the platform.”
The latest iteration also addresses one major issue that pub-
lishers grapple with: fonts. Only fonts preapproved by the pub-
lishing clients will now be used for their respective projects, and
a font report will be generated for compliance purposes.
Customizing content from multiple titles within the XEditPro
system is also possible and easy. “One client has been using,
and benefitting from, XEditPro’s capability to customize their con-
tent for the past three years,” Gopinath says. “We have integrated
XEditPro with their digital delivery systems, thus enabling their
products to get to market faster and at lower cost with little fuss.
Floating bars, customized functions, and other cosmetic changes,
for instance, make the process faster and the user experience
more fluid and friendly. The enhanced XEditPro features further
facilitate collaborative content editing while allowing contributors
to add chunks of content as well as attachments that they can
refer to at later stages of the process.”
34 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
present-day internet. Global spending in the metaverse, which
includes remote learning and gaming, could reach $5 trillion
by 2030, according to a new report from McKinsey & Co. Tech
players such as Adobe, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm,
Sony, and W3C have recently joined forces to launch the
Metaverse Standards Forum to develop industry guidelines for
ensuring that immersive VR worlds are compatible. Apple,
absent from the group for now, is poised to debut its long-
awaited immersive AR/VR headset in January 2023. With so
much buzz, hope, and hype surrounding the metaverse, it is
definitely the topic du jour and one that digital solutions
vendors have to prepare for.
Impelsys, for instance, is in the process of convening a
Mahesh Balakrishnan (l.) and A.R.M. Gopinath, both executive v-p at
DiacriTech
School and university course content and assessments with
related HTML5 assets, audio, and video files can now be created
within XEditPro. “The files can be populated directly from XEditPro
into popular LMS platforms such as Moodle and Canvas using
APIs [Application Programming Interfaces] or the Common
Cartridge export option,” Gopinath says. “These features and
enhancements are aimed at making the publishing process
easier and faster while generating high-quality products.”
Then there was the launch last September of Eazy Author, an
authoring platform that streamlines and simplifies the manu-
script-writing process. Eazy Author’s creation was driven by the
twin goals of meeting the rising global demand for OA publica-
tions and assisting authors with their OA content. “This full-
fledged platform lets the author focus on just the content
without the fuss of tedious formatting or technical know-how,”
Gopinath says. “It enables collaborative authoring with tools for
file sharing, reviewing, and commenting. The WYSIWYG equa-
tion editor makes entering equations super easy, and there are
ready-to-use templates to quickly output content in different for-
mats, including EPUB, HTML, XML, PDF, JATS, NIMAS, and DAISY.
Several templates designed to meet OA publishers’ require-
ments are also available. Authors can prepare and publish on
their own, as well as use this platform to kickstart the publishing
process.”  —T.T.
 Digital Solutions in India
research team to identify a metaverse learning solution. “Our
team currently offers the development of complex interactive
EPUBs and read-aloud audiobooks,” says Uday Majithia, v-p
of products, platforms, and technology services division. “We
are also focused on creating state-of-the-art learning solutions
as well as interactive and engaging e-learning solutions.”
At DiacriTech, interactive publishing has been gathering
strength during the pandemic. One publishing client, upon
seeing a slowdown in print sales, asked the team to populate its
e-learning platforms with digital content. Within 75 days of
the approval of suggested storyboards, more than 430 videos,
750 animations, 120 slideshows, 350 infographics, and 680
interactive widgets were created. The project also involved
ingesting the LMS content and quality-checking the rendering.
All of these processes were accomplished without affecting
ongoing classes. “After assessing the benefits of the interac-
tive content, the publisher’s client had us revamp some of the
existing titles with additional rich media when the classes
went on a break for a few weeks,” says executive v-p Mahesh
Balakrishnan, who notes that the demand for rich media inter-
active products are set to increase further with more traditional
publishers jumping onto the bandwagon.
DiacriTech’s AR/VR/MR product, Immersive Gaze, is now
Cloud based single
source unified
authoring, editorial
and production
platform
www.xeditpro.com sales@diacritech.com
helping trade publishers to turn manuals, training processes,
field implementation guides, and troubleshooting procedures
into interactive technology-driven solutions. “With travel cur-
tailed and social distancing the norm during the pandemic,
the adoption of MR and VR had increased significantly,”
Balakrishnan says. “We just completed a complex self-training
project for a multinational company for use with HTC Vive and
Oculus Quest. The client is now exploring the idea of adding
modules to test technicians on their training effectiveness with
simulations in the VR environment.”
But fear about costs is holding back wider adoption.
“Publishers see interactive publishing as one that comes with a
hefty price tag accompanied by uncertain returns,” Balakrishnan
says. “The task for us is to convince them to give it a try and to
work around their budgets. While VR and MR is no doubt
expensive, the publishers—and vendors—that can adapt to
changing consumer expectations and market demands with the
right interactive content are the ones that will lead the market.”
Spending on interactive publishing “can be limited to and
capped based on the business model and prospects of a project,”
says A.R.M. Gopinath, executive v-p of DiacriTech. “We always
tell clients not to spend more than necessary. We also suggest
that solutions and developments for interactive publishing
Web/Mobile Publishing
Editorial Management
Journal/Book Services
Accessibility Solutions
Custom Publishing
Collaborative Editing
Math Authoring and Editing
AI/NLP based Cleanup
Common Cartridge -Moodle/Canvas
On Demand PDF, ePub, XML, Word
Boston, USA Chennai, India www.diacritech.com
 Digital Solutions in India
projects—or other projects, for that matter—should be
upgradeable and adaptable for the foreseeable future.”
“Now we are talking about the metaverse, NFT, block-
chain—a whole new world out there—with the next generation
of consumers speaking that language,” Gopinath says. “And all
of us will be seeking to create and distribute content made for
these consumers. So unless we plan for the future, the content
that we create and distribute will not be engaging anymore.”
Adopting automation and AI
Deploying chatbots as virtual assistants to serve customers,
using predictive algorithms to personalize content and recom-
mend authors and books, and applying natural language pro-
cessing to refine content and create text-to-speech audiobooks:
these are just some of the common uses of cognitive technolo-
gies, the umbrella term that includes AI, machine learning,
expert systems, and robotic process automation. For publishers,
adopting AI and automation makes perfect sense in terms of
reducing turnaround time, lowering production costs, and
speeding up time to market while simultaneously creating and
enhancing their content.
Increasing the automation and efficiency of its processes is an
ongoing commitment at Westchester Publishing Services. “But
we also make sure that we have the human QC protocols
embedded throughout—not just at the end, as is common in
other digital solutions providers,” Taylor says. “This combina-
Impelsys Focuses on Digital Transformation
Rapid growth—30% in 2021 and with 40% projected for 2022—
has seen Impelsys add 750 employees in just 18 months. “We
support more than 250 clients across the globe,” says Uday
Majithia, v-p of the products, platforms, and technology services
division. “We have also established an Innovation Lab, added a
near-shore development center in Porto, Portugal, and launched
a software development center with Laerdal Medical.”
Impelsys, a Great Place to Work–certified company, has been
busy helping societies, associations, STM publishers, health-care
companies, and enterprises become sustainable and future-ready
through digital transformation. “We deliver integrated technology
solutions—process transformation, data-driven insights, and secu-
rity measures, for instance—that enable our clients to deliver value
to their end-users through a unified experience across all channels,”
Majithia says. “Digital transformation for us is not just a buzzword:
it is our core competency.”
Impelsys’s flagship platform, iPC Scholar, is the engine driving
much of its digital transformation projects. The latest version—3.0,
which launched in October—rides on strong AI and machine-learning
infrastructure to create innovative tools specific to the business of
e-learning.
“We now have Scholar AI Cloud, which as the name suggests is
an AI-powered cloud-based platform, and Scholar LMS, which offers
a comprehensive learning management system with enriched user
experience,” says Majithia, whose team has further enhanced
36 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
tion of automation technology, human production, and edito-
rial expertise ensures that our clients’ titles meet the budget,
production deadlines, and high-quality targets every time.”
The nuanced skill of copyediting, for example, still requires
a human eye, says Balakrishnan, of DiacriTech. “Contextual
copyediting is a manual process. So is language refinement and
alt-text writing. These cannot be entirely automated at this
moment, nor do we plan to do so in the near future.” But file
tagging, content conversion and composition, reference
editing, and Digital Object
Identifier (DOI) checking
are highly automated on its
production floor. “Mundane
copyediting tasks, graphic
conversions, and sizing pro-
cesses as well as indexing
and glossary-making are cer-
tainly automated to shorten
the turnaround time and
reduce production costs,”
Balakrishnan says.
Process automation and
tool development are going
strong at Lapiz Digital. Uday Majithia, v-p of the products,
“This is one of the Key platforms, and technology services
Result Areas for our staff, in division at Impelsys
Scholar LMS by leveraging the power of AI, leading to the creation
of Scholar ALS (Adaptive Learning System). This drive to con-
stantly improve and create novel solutions won Impelsys the
Amazon Web Services ISV Innovation Cup last year.
Recently, one major STM publisher partnered with Impelsys on
its digital transformation journey, with the goal of digitizing and
automating 80% of its business processes. “By using our solu-
tions that offer a single view of customer and business opera-
tions, the client can make informed and time-sensitive decisions,”
Majithia says. “Our team brings domain understanding, tech-
nology expertise, and market-tested digital solutions that have
helped nearly half of the Top 20 global publishers to unleash their
untapped revenue potential.”
And when a civil aviation agency came looking for solutions to
support its distribution of regulatory publications to members
and subscribers, iPC Scholar was ready with the answers. “The
platform’s freemium business model is the perfect fit, as it sup-
ports free anonymous access as well as paid business models
while making the content free for online consumption for all
users with access to discovery, citation, sharing, and tools,”
Majithia says. “It has search functions and the ability to offer
related documents as well as ancillaries to the main content.
Furthermore, multilingual iPC Scholar supports six languages,
including right-to-left and double-byte languages such as Arabic
and Chinese.” —T.T.
 Digital Solutions in India
which they are tasked with generating ideas that improve
work process productivity or quality,” says Bharathram. “In
the conversion side of the business, we have automated most
of the processes. But there are still areas where manual inter-
vention is required, such as device view checking. And there
are certain areas where we have no intention to automate,
given the wide variety of plug-ins and tools available in the
open market to help with the processes and tasks involved.”
Over the years, the Impelsys team has built a significant
level of automation into digital conversion and print-related
projects. “Our create-once publish-everywhere model allows
our clients to go digital-first and print on demand, saving
them a considerable amount of cost and inventory while short-
ening time to market, which are all critical for their busi-
nesses,” says George Oommen, v-p of learning and content
services division, whose innovation team is busy automating
question-authoring and text-summarizing processes. “We will
continue to invest in automation, pass on the savings to our
clients, and help them reach their markets faster, thereby
keeping the cost of education low.”
The Impelsys team has also increased automation in its soft-
ware-testing cycles. “Testing of tailor-made software products
and apps requires a wide coverage of test scenarios to ensure the
desired product or app is meeting all requirements, including
functionality, performance, security, and user accessibility and
Lapiz Digital Leverages Its Core Market Expertise
Traditional typesetting continues to be the main strength and
identity of Lapiz Digital. “We have built and leveraged our skill
sets, especially in mathematical and engineering journals and
educational titles,” says head of operations Meena Prakash.
“Flexibility in production scheduling to meet tight deadlines,
stringent quality control, and meticulous project management
capabilities are our main selling points.”
More small and medium publishers have approached Lapiz
Digital for typesetting combined with e-book conversions in recent
years. “Although cost remains the deciding factor for these clients,
our project management team has been instrumental in making
the publishers comfortable from the moment they approach us,”
says Prakash, whose team is used to onboarding and supporting
new, and nervous, independent publishers looking for help with
their titles. “This enables us to build long-term relationships with
them and generate more revenues in return.”
A higher demand for e-book conversions saw the Lapiz team
working on EPUB2-to-EPUB3 projects, enhanced audio e-books,
and accessible EPUB3 content. “We have processed well over one
million pages in the past six months, covering both English and
non-English content,” Prakash says. “The huge volume and rising
demand have prompted us to develop various tools for finding and
fixing errors accurately, effortlessly, and speedily.”
Educational projects requiring content authoring with mul-
tiple functionalities—such as interactive games and activities,
puzzles, and quizzes—are also in high demand. “Our team is
38 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
experience,” Majithia says. “But such automation remains a
challenge, as each publisher comes to us with unique opera-
tional needs and processes. Since no one product fits all, devel-
oping and implementing bespoke apps while ensuring that
each of our client’s businesses continues as usual is the path
forward.”
The driver of the automation and design of more effi-
cient workflows and processes is simple common sense, says
Bottrill, of Newgen KnowledgeWorks. “But now, with the
tight labor market, wage growth, and the potential for an
economic reset on the horizon, automation is no longer a nice-
to-have. It is a neces-
sity. Publishers must
quickly adapt to the
changing economic
conditions, bring effi-
ciency to their opera-
tions, and ensure that
their systems and plat-
forms are producing
great content quickly
and get it directly into
the hands of their con-
sumer with as little
effort as possible.” V. Bharathram, president of Lapiz Digital
trained in various content-authoring tools, including SoftChalk,
Media Library, and H5P Activity, which are mostly compatible
with numerous devices, thus making content rendering that
much easier,” says Prakash, whose team has been busy gener-
ating interactive elements and working on K–12 projects, espe-
cially those in English and Spanish.
Though VR and MR projects are more popular than ever, their
adoption has been markedly slower than that of other technolo-
gies. “Prohibitive costs of hardware and development aside, get-
ting skilled and creative staff to produce appropriate content is a
big challenge,” Prakash says. Her team recently completed one
VR project involving simple but engaging learning apps that stu-
dents can use to easily learn and understand mathematical
concepts.
Software solutions have gained a lot of traction since the
start of the year. Lapiz Digital’s proprietary Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) application, for instance, is a user- and
mobile-friendly solution that keeps track of transactions and is
applicable across different industries. Deep customization has
enabled the app to be integrated with a client’s existing ERP,
and new features and tools continue to be added and upgraded.
Digital products are here to stay and grow, Prakash says. “To
better serve this trend, we continue to upskill our staff in new
content management platforms, build teams specializing in
image and alt-text, and develop tools and automation for e-book
conversions.” —T.T.
PUBLISHING
BEST DELIVERED
Project Management

InDesign and Latex

Editorial Services

Ebook/XML Conversions

Interactive HTML5

Accessibility Compliance
Conversions (508)
Co

www.lapizdigital.com

contact@lapizdigital.com

+91 44 4290 1300

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 Digital Solutions in India

Seizing opportunities in OA and OER
The numbers were just in: more than half of the transformative
journals that signed up with Plan S, the European-led initiative
for scholarly publishing to transition to the open access (OA)
model, had missed their first-year targets in increasing OA
content. The publishers literally ran into paywall issues,
because, let’s be honest here, adding more pressure to their
traditional revenue models during these tough economic times
of rising costs and wages is a bit too much to ask. So the plan
did not deliver the shock that its “S” suggests, but we remain
hopeful for the sake of open science.
For the vendors, working on OA articles and
journals is about further lowering production
costs and reducing turnaround time while main-
taining the quality—hey there, AI and auto-
mation—necessary to make the whole Plan S
proposition viable for publishers. The same
applies to open educational resources (OER),
whether these are open textbooks, courseware,
learning modules, or digital learning objects.
“Open” is a business model, not a content
model, says Rahul Arora, chairman and CEO at
MPS Limited. “Whether the content is behind
a paywall or is openly available, the articles and
resources must still be easy to access and well- Rahul Arora, chairman and CEO of publishers to innovate the process and cut costs
indexed for maximum discoverability with tools MPS Limited
and features that assist readability, allow accessibility, and
enhance engagement. The value we offer to our publisher part-
ners when working with OA content or OER does not differ
much from the value we offer with regard to subscription
content.”
But there are some unique opportunities that MPS’s publisher
partners can take advantage of when it comes to OA and OER.
“We have products, such as our Sigma access management
system and our Vizor analytics tools that track OA content and
OER for reporting and understanding usage and usability,”
Arora says. “We have mechanisms that allow for
‘freemium’ offerings, where the main content is
free and the user can opt in to pay for additional
content such as video or interactive learning. We
see significant interest in this hybrid solution,
where some content is open and some ancillary
content has associated fees.”
As more publishers embrace OA—for jour-
nals and books—the ability to provide excellent
service systematically and at scale becomes more
important than ever, says Bottrill, of Newgen
KnowledgeWorks. “Whichever OA model is
followed, the economics of the publishing pro-
cess are turned on its head and the pressures on
grow even stronger. We have helped to launch

Unlocking Synergies Between Segments at MPS Limited

At MPS, all three of its business segments—corporate, education,
and research—are poised for growth. “Requests for immersive
solutions came in early and with sustained traction when the pan-
demic forced everyone to go digital overnight,” says chairman
and CEO Rahul Arora. “Our corporate clients, for instance, were
looking for digital onboarding and virtual solutions to deliver a
livelier experience to their workforce.”
The partnership between Swisscom and MPS Europa is a
case in point. “The goal was to reinvent the shop onboarding for
their sales staff with digital twins of their retail stores,” Arora
says. “Our team developed a cloud-based VR solution to power
an immersive and highly interactive experience that enabled
Swisscom to onboard new employees during the pandemic.”
Other clients, including two major European railroad organiza-
tions, used MPS’s AR-Living Paper solution to bring static
content to life via mobile phones.
Phenomenal growth in MPS’s e-learning business is projected
over the next 12 to 24 months. “There is an inherent momentum
across simulations, serious games, digital onboarding, and
eXtended Reality [XR] solutions,” says Arora, whose company is
also seeing great traction in its workflow, analytics, and subscrip-
tion management platforms. “Our recent acquisition of e-learning
company E.I. Design further strengthens our expertise in this
segment.”
The 2020 acquisition of HighWire Press has been a significant
event for MPS and for the scholarly publishing marketplace. “It
positions us as the provider with the most comprehensive product
suite across peer review and workflow, production, hosting, ana-
lytics, access management, and subscription management,” says
Arora, who has combined all of his company’s technology offerings
under the HighWire umbrella brand. “It offers the marketplace a
serious independent option that is not tied to a single publisher
and that will actively invest in its product suite while developing
an unbiased product strategy. This acquisition has improved our
revenues due to its recurring nature as a SaaS and has increased
our strategic alignment with clients.”
The pandemic, Arora says, “has created significant lines of dif-
ferentiation between content solutions players that delivered
with resilience on their robust business continuity plans, and
others that faced headwinds and faltered. This differentiation has
led to vendor consolidation and volume expansion across our
client base.”
It has also propelled MPS into a new growth phase that Arora
calls “building scale.” “I want to create a compelling learning com-
pany at a meaningful scale that helps the world learn smarter,”
says Arora, who is seeing major growth in Asia Pacific and some
tailwinds in the U.K. and Europe; North America remains its big-
gest market, with about 65% of its total revenues. “We aspire to be
the provider of choice in our markets for powering experiential
learning with the latest technology innovations.” —T.T.

40 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
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 Digital Solutions in India

several new OA publishing initiatives in the past year, all of
them experimenting with different approaches to the challenge.
Whether it is a niche OA journal or an enterprise channeling a
proportion of revenues into OA projects, we are helping pub-
lishers to innovate by finding new models, not just for content
production but also in the business of publishing.”
With OER and free solutions, the need to be cost efficient
during the production process is critical, Majithia, of Impelsys,
says. “Our automated processes and network of subject-matter
experts available on demand have helped to keep our costs low.
This, in turn, has led to a significantly higher volume of proj-
ects requiring quick and scaled-up access to experts, and so the
ability to turn them around quickly is
crucial.”
“As an intelligent and intuitive con-
tent delivery platform, our iPC Scholar
3.0 has been an amazing solution
catering to all aspects of management,
distribution, and monetization of
e-learning contents irrespective of their
format,” says Majithia. “Its modular
architecture is scalable as the business
grows. The back-office administration
of the platform provides the flexi-
bility to identify the OA contents and Jo Bottrill, managing director of Newgen
manage them accordingly. This is fur- KnowledgeWorks in the U.K. and U.S.
ther strengthened by the platform’s built-in DRM capabilities
that provide the freedom to our customers to manage the granu-
larity of restrictions on the content, types of users, and number
of devices.”
Pondering the pandemic impact
Between 2019 and 2021, there was an additional 800 million
internet users, according to the International Telecommunication
Union, and Gartner reported that, in 2021, global smartphone
sales grew 6%. At the same time, the e-learning and mobile
learning (m-learning) market, valued at $18.23 billion in 2019,
saw a growth spurt projected to reach $58.5 billion by 2025,
reports Market Data Forecast.
In Indonesia, the number of internet
users jumped 45 million in the last two
years, as its population turned online for
their daily activities, work, school, and
shopping. Halfway across the globe,
online learning platform Coursera added
27 million and 21 million new students
in 2020 and 2021, respectively; in com-
parison, its annual new registrations
were between seven and nine million
prior to the start of the pandemic. The
m-learning market, which exceeded $20
billion in 2019, is set to grow at 13%

Newgen KnowledgeWorks Strives to Meet Client Needs

Newgen’s launch of its English language learning (ELL) division in
September was a direct response to the rising demand from pub-
lishers, learners, teachers, and parents for resources in this seg-
ment, says Jo Bottrill, managing director of the U.K. and U.S. oper-
ations. “Add the dramatic shift to digital learning to the equation,
and our considerable expertise in digital development, academic
publishing, and the wider education business gives us the unique
skill set to support ELL publishers,” Bottrill says. “By partnering
with e-learning platforms such as Avallain, we are able to deliver
engaging content built by our in-house ELL editors and learning
designers and supported by a network of trusted contributors.”
Several recent projects have called for the adaptation of
existing ELL materials for use in Latin America and the Middle
East. “The content is often tied to significant commercial deals,
which require immediate attention and short turnaround,” says
Bottrill, whose team writes and develops new materials, adapts
digital assets for new platforms, and brings diversity, equity, and
inclusion expertise to the content review process. “The involve-
ment of multiple stakeholders, often including international minis-
tries and corporations, underlines the importance of expert project
management.”
On the production side, the Newgen team is busy rolling out its
online proofing tool, Impact, which enables book and article
authors to correct their content in the browser in real time.
“Impact, which requires zero software downloads and comes with
innovative collaboration and validation features, helps publishers
differentiate their author services by putting content creators and
editors more in control of the production and correction cycles,”
Bottrill says.
Meanwhile, Newgen’s publishing platform, Nova, has been
instrumental in helping to launch several new publishing ventures
that provide reading platforms for books and journals. “Publishers
are learning the benefits of partnering with us for their content
delivery,” Bottrill says. “By changing the business model and
focusing on well informed and structured content through a
simple user interface, we are able to deploy Nova quickly to put
the publisher in direct contact with their customers, thus allowing
them to keep more of the revenue and sell content in new and
innovative ways.”
As for Newgen’s project management work, much is channeled
through its next-generation workflow management tool, Pubkit.
“With dynamic auto-scheduling, email management, and file and
asset storage all under one roof, Pubkit’s task-based system gives
project managers complete control over their projects,” Bottrill
says. “It improves handoffs between teams and provides real-time
data to everyone involved in the publishing process. Integration
and interoperability are the watchwords for systems these days,
and Pubkit intelligently links up with publisher and other third-party
systems to ingest and disseminate data, including publishable
assets as well as metadata.” —T.T.

42 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
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Make your content visible before a vast audience.
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 Digital Solutions in India

CAGR between 2020 and 2026, according to Global Market there, from Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics, for
Insights. By 2027, this market is projected to hit $80 billion. instance, that tout increased productivity, happiness, and
On the publishing side, Bloomsbury reported record sales job satisfaction—with companies benefitting directly from
and profit in 2021, which its chief executive attributed to the a significant decrease in employee turnover, operating costs,
pandemic reading boom and a reacquired reading habit. Wiley and workplace stress.
just announced that revenue from its fiscal 2022, which ended The pandemic “has given us the opportunity to test alter-
in April, topped the $2 billion mark for the first time in its native working models,” says Bharathram, of Lapiz Digital.
215-year history, with 83% of it coming from digital sales. All “For now, we will continue the hybrid model where our staff
four major trade publishers in the U.S.—HarperCollins, comes to the office two or three days a week. We have imple-
Lagardère, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster— mented a multilevel security and encryption system to ensure
posted gains in 2021 over 2020. The Association of American zero compromise in the confidentiality, productivity, quality,
Publishers further reported that a strong rebound and turnaround time in delivering the projects
in sales of K–12 materials and trade books had led to our clients. This hybrid model has in fact
to a 12.2% increase in publishing sales in 2021 resulted in increased productivity and quality.
compared to the year before. At the same time, we have built in ‘me time’ for
So while the pandemic brings about major staff with regular online team meetings to check
challenges—supply chain issues, for instance— on their and their families’ well-being.”
the increased appetite for books, reading, and On the consumer end, the pandemic has pushed
learning is clear and significant. For the digital more people to go online, and this is the biggest
solutions vendors, the new “normal” has led to long-term change, Bharathram says. “The con-
discovering alternative ways to work, tweaking ventional method of generating sales has also
tools to ensure data and process security, shifted during the pandemic, with more indepen-
improving telecommunication and video confer- dent and digital-savvy publishers bringing new
encing capabilities, and helping clients to meet ideas for digital solutions providers to explore.”
shifting consumer habits and demands. And for Deb Taylor, business develop- Over at DiacriTech, staff have returned to its
those wondering if working from home (WFH) ment director at Westchester Chennai, Kottayam, and Madurai offices. “But
is effective, well, there are plenty of reports out Publishing Services we have copy editors, indexers, and project man-

Westchester Publishing Services Expands Further

Investment in technology solutions for helping clients with their
projects is continuing, says Westchester’s business development
director Deb Taylor. “We have expanded our API capabilities,
broadened our use of the Dropbox platform and tools, increased
automation in our composition processes, and enhanced the
user experience of our Client Portal,” Taylor says. “We are also
developing more tools to enhance the services we provide to
our clients.”
Westchester obtained the Benetech Global Certified Accessible
certification last September. “Our team has proven capabilities to
produce accessible EPUBs for clients, and this certification gives
our clients the assurance that their EPUBs will meet accessibility
standards wherever their content is distributed,” says Taylor,
whose teams have combined their expertise to establish custom
e-book conversion workflows and services for Ingram distribution
clients. “Additionally, clients who do not have the resources or
modified workflow to create alt-text for their digital products can
rely on us for such content.”
In the past year, an additional 100 or so publishers of all sizes
have come to Westchester for help with their accessible digital
workflow and with creating digital content from print titles.
“Publishers are working on maximizing the number of titles that
meet EPUB and WebPDF accessibility guidelines,” says Taylor, who
is seeing an increased demand for interactive content and
embedded audio and video within the digital titles that her teams
produce for clients. “So we will continue to build on our accessi-
bility solutions and help clients to meet their goals.”
Adding more cloud-based services to the Westchester Client
Portal is one way of meeting rising client demands. “This will move
more of the project workflow onto the Web, thus increasing the
efficiencies around project initiation, collaboration, and review of
titles in progress,” says chief revenue officer Tyler Carey. “Our
team of developers recently created a customized solution that is
essentially an extension of our Client Portal. The request came
from a legal publisher who wanted to chunk their content into mul-
tiple products and formats via an XML workflow. We had to pull pri-
mary data from multiple licensed sources and feed that into an
online tool, where editors can upload Word documents, and then
finalize the manuscript for both print and digital editions.”
Education content development needs are also increasing
globally, especially with the learning gaps caused by the pan-
demic, Taylor says. “Our expertise in this segment has expanded
beyond supplemental and Core 4 subject development. We expect
to see growth in all subject areas for print and digital platforms,
with even more focus on social-emotional learning and culturally
responsive reviews and remediation. All these demands will need
to be translated and transadapted as well. Our teams are ready to
meet these demands and grow with our clients.” —T.T.

44 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
Our digital workflow solutions ease
printing challenges downstream.
We can create your content in formats that reach your
customers more quickly.

As a Benetech Global Certified AccessibleTM (GCA) Vendor, we have

proven processes to ensure your ePubs meet WCAG 2.0 AA and
EPUB Accessibility 1.0 specifications.

Our digital conversion services include:

Remediation of older ePub versions to current ePub3 standards

Alt-text creation
Accessibility reviews for your ePub files
Print-ready or WebPDFs
Reflowable or fixed-layout ePub3 files with your print titles
Loading digital files to your printer or distribution platform of choice

Reduce workflow stress by putting our technical acumen and decades of pre-press
experience to work on your projects.

info@westchesterpubsvcs.com
westchesterpublishingservices.com | +1 (203) 658-6581
 Digital Solutions in India
agers, for instance, who prefer WFH and will drop in at the
office twice a week,” Balakrishnan says. “We do see a better
work-life balance with WFH and have thus implemented an
‘on-request WFH’ policy that staff can utilize for up to six days
per month.”
The Covid-19 lockdown has made small and medium-sized
publishers realize that outsourcing and digitizing their content
is the way forward if they want to remain relevant in the industry,
Balakrishnan says. “Numerous small publishers approached us
for assistance when their supply chain was not able to manage
large-scale WFH operations. Somehow, these publishers seem
to think that working with only 10 or 50 titles annually does
not interest offshore digital vendors like us. On the contrary, we
are here to help and make their workflows better.” Working with
smaller companies, he says, “allows us to provide bespoke solu-
tions. The work is also interesting as we find their passion for
their content, though much smaller in volume, to be very high.
Such projects keep us on our toes, forcing us to innovate and
operate within their tight budgets.”
At Newgen KnowledgeWorks, there is “an increased engage-
ment in technology—from workflow management to new
platforms—as publishers are poised to take on new projects
and renew tired technology post-pandemic,” Bottrill says.
“Interoperability is essential. Having multiple systems that talk
to each other creates a more modular and flexible approach,
enabling different parts of the organization to communicate with
each other and cut down on rework or inefficiencies.”
Charting their next steps
With more sophisticated and demanding publishers and end
consumers, not to mention new gadgets and technologies,
digital content must be fluid and mobile. As for the platform
solutions offered by vendors, they are increasingly becoming
modular, with potential enterprise-wide implementation to
make them more cost-effective, robust, and scalable. For ven-
dors, being innovative and nimble makes the difference between
just surviving and leading the pack. To this end, each of them
has unique business strategies and paths for forging ahead.
Over at MPS, rather than trying to sell products and ser-
vices that it has acquired via eight companies—including E.I.
Design and HighWire Press—the team is focused on driving
46 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ J U L Y 1 1 , 2 0 2 2
business impacts and solutions for its customers in each of
the three markets—research, education, and corporation—it
serves. “Our products and services in the content, e-learning,
and platforms business segments are simply tools available to
us but not what we are restricted to,” says Arora. “We solve
client and marketplace problems. We do not want our clients
to work to have us working for them. Our customer interac-
tions—that is, our outside-in market-based approach—are
focused on leveraging multiple capabilities across our business
segments to better address client needs instead of deploying our
previous traditional product-based approach.”
For Majithia, of Impelsys, the adoption of digital solutions
is no longer a good-to-have in the strategy road map but a
must-have. “We see demands from our existing services as well
as those from areas such as AI, Managed Content as a Service
(MCaaS), solutions to curate and provide bundled content,
usage of Experience API (xAPI) specifications in LMS to track
learner progress, e-learning, simulations, and social learning,”
he says. “While adaptive learning has been around for some
time, it is now coming of age, and the next few years are set to
be a turning point for the e-learning industry.” For more on
this, check out the Go Digital webinar series on the Impelsys
website, including the latest, “Adapting Businesses to the New
Normal Using Digital Transformation.”
Users, particularly those in the vibrant library and institu-
tional markets, “now demand richly linked and certified acces-
sible digital content that can integrate seamlessly with their
existing platforms, including learning management systems
and virtual learning environments,” says Bottrill, of Newgen
KnowledgeWorks. “While the up-front cost of producing a
book may seem higher for a truly digital-first workflow, pub-
lishers need to factor in the cost of conversion and the benefits
of improved time to market that taking a digital-first approach
opens up. Accessibility is another important factor that requires
publishers to take a digital-first structured-content approach.”
Being close to clients helps too. Having offices in Germany
and Malaysia “has been a key part of our business strategy for
some time,” Bottrill says. “These hybrid services, particularly
in the realms of content creation, and where design and product
development are required, have long benefitted from having
people in the local markets to listen to, support, and engage
with the communities that we serve. Having experts in the
market will remain an essential instrument in our toolbox,
especially as we form closer and more meaningful partnerships
with our publishing colleagues.”
Publishers, says Taylor, of Westchester Publishing Services,
are evaluating their workflows and staff workloads to identify
where their internal resources are best dedicated to growing
their titles and revenues and where their partners can be
used to offload some of the work that still needs to be ful-
filled. “At the same time, many publishers, having to focus on
supply chain and workforce challenges while also managing
changing market and distribution needs, are turning to us to
 Digital Solutions in India

handle more of their prepress and digital conversion tasks,”
Taylor says. These industry challenges were discussed at the
“Publishing Now ’22: Driving Business Forward” webinar,
which Westchester cohosted with PW in March.
Digital solutions are moving toward more ancillary content,
says Balakrishnan, of DiacriTech. “Online and blended learning
are here to stay, and publishers want to monetize that. And
with newer technology, systems developed in past years are
being revamped and made more powerful and flexible, thus
accelerating publishers’ speed to market while increasing
cost-effectiveness for their products.”
Small and medium-sized publishers cannot afford to ignore
the digital, especially in key academic, education, and English-
language markets, says Bottrill, of Newgen KnowledgeWorks.
“While major publishers were sold on the benefits of XML
long ago, there are still scores of smaller publishers for whom
postproduction digital conversion is the norm. Not only does
this slow down the production process and time to market, but
it limits the quality and function of the digital content.”
Bottrill expects to “see publishers for education and English-
language learning markets continue to embrace the benefits of
outsourcing, offshoring, and our hybrid solutions. And with
the labor market tightening around the globe, our ability to
access staff globally will help publishers flex and scale their
operations as required.”
Speaking of the English-language learning market, it is one
area that has garnered more attention from vendors and
publishers. After all, this market is set to grow by $14.37 bil-
lion, progressing at a CAGR of 16.78% from 2021 to 2026,
according to a recent Technavio report. Around 45% of this
growth will originate from Asia Pacific, with China and India
as the key markets.
Meanwhile, Bharathram, of Lapiz Digital, is seeing a growing
trend toward audio products, where text-to-speech technology
is crucial. “We see more books being converted to audiobooks
that publishers distribute through multiple digital platforms to
achieve a global reach,” he says. “At the same time, AI in digital
publishing is becoming the norm and is used to detect plagia-
rism of copyrighted works, correct grammar, and mark complex
errors. It also helps in auto-tagging unstructured data to reduce
turnaround time and overall cost in the production process.”
The Lapiz team also expects to see more self-publishing
activities as well as the rise of independent publishing groups.
“In the educational publishing segment, media-rich digital
products will continue to grow over the next two years,” says
Bharathram. “Here, we see distinct needs for proper content
management and authoring tools and the capability to develop
interactive content.”
For Oommen, of Impelsys, there was “a significant increase
in demand for personalized and adaptive learning solutions,
interactive e-books, and print-on-demand services. The
demand for digital content in regional languages is also
increasing rapidly, and we are building capabilities to cater to
this emerging market.”
And that brings us to this: the “create once, publish every-
where” principle of content digitization, while it sounds simple,
is actually getting tougher and more complex to execute, thanks
to the plethora of devices, platforms, standards, and workflows
available out there. Bespoke apps and platforms are getting
popular as publishers, and vendors, eschew proprietary products
in favor of customized, modular, templated, and XML-first solu-
tions. But most importantly, for publishers, the authored,
designed, and structured digital content must be agile and
mobile, and it must be delivered seamlessly via engaging and
intuitive user interfaces to the end consumers.
Which means that lower production costs, shorter turn-
around time, and enhanced e-deliverables are the norm, not
the exception. So too is keeping the workflow energized, audi-
ences engaged, and content quickly discovered and monetized.
And, yes, that tall order is growing taller by the minute. But
for the six digital solutions vendors featured in this report,
along with their many counterparts out there, reengineering,
rethinking, and revitalizing any asset, content, or list is just
another day at work—from home or at the office.  ■

This coverage is also available online at publishersweekly.com/digitalsolutions2022.

Articles in the Expert Series, penned by vendors themselves, examine critical topics impacting both publishing and digital solutions industries:
● A Unified and Cloud-based Publishing Solution is the Future by A.R.M. Gopinath, executive v-p at DiacriTech
● Digital Transformation Services To Navigate the New by Uday Majithia, v-p of the products, platforms, and technology services division at
Impelsys
● Web Accessibility Broadens Participation and Improves Discovery by Oliver Rickard, product director at HighWire Press

Related Reads from PW:

● AI Influence on Audiobooks Grows—As Does Controversy
● As Digital Comics Surge, Comics Plus Takes Off in Schools and
Libraries
● Bologna Webinar: Reaching Kids and Teens in the Metaverse
● Digitization Can Support Publishers with Decision Making
● New Report Accesses Global Trends in Digital Book Sales
● OverDrive: Record Number of Libraries Hit Million Digital Lend
Mark
● The Past 25 Years of E-books
● Readmagine 2022: Publishing Faces Its Future in Madrid

Visit publishersweekly.com/digital-marketplace to find out more about the vendors featured in this coverage.

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 47