The rise of social media, smartphones, e-mails, and blogging proves that the world is becoming more digital. While the traditional form of paper books holds strong with book-lovers who appreciate tangible books’ nostalgia, many readers are switching to e-books. Likewise, many authors are deciding to publish e-books alongside traditional paper copies of their books; some even publish their books solely in the electronic world.

As more publishers take a digital-first approach to content creation, we’ve seen several trends dominate the academic publishing space over the last ten years.

 The shift in the publishing sector towards the digital medium has brought about a revolution in how content is created and consumed by the audience. As more publishers take a digital-first approach to content creation, we’ve seen several trends dominate the academic publishing space over the last ten years.

The digital road requires that they take a comprehensive look at their products, operating models, incentive structures, and other central elements of the business. The move towards digital opens the door to a vast range of opportunities for the publishing sector. It gives access to the global market, multi-platform distribution, and greater consumer engagement.

The Benefits of Going Digital:  

• Content Distribution: Multi-format/multi-platform distribution creates opportunities by offering consumers access to content everywhere; this also provides a new monetization model.
• Better Products: Because subject matter experts are now collaborating to create both digital and print products, you’ll have your best people working hand-in-hand to build your digital products.
• Shorter Production Times: With all of your content creators collaborating in real-time in the cloud, they won’t need to wait for teammates to complete tasks, and you’ll see significant turnaround time.
• Cheaper Content Production Costs: Time is money. Cutting production times will save costs in internal personnel and external vendor costs. Maintaining a repository of content in the cloud also allows re-building any print or digital outputs at a moment’s notice, saving the enormous conversion costs you’re paying your vendors today.

The industry has several advantages that it can use to transform its operating model and how it goes to market but has become extremely valuable in a data-driven digital learning environment. For the publisher prepared to experiment with new content forms, the payback will be a clear vision of the future of digital publishing.

Several academic and legal publishers have deployed high-end conversion services that had benefited their whole organization. For instance, a leading academic publisher required XML and e-book conversion services for both ePub and Mobi formats for its line of digital products. With over a million pages to be converted in a short time and stringent QA requirements, a customized toolset was designed to ingest multiple source formats & a standard style sheet was created to generate e-books for the publisher being able to offer a swift turnaround of 8–10 days as against the usual time of 15 days for the complete production lots. This enabled them to cater to their readers’ needs by producing more eBooks for consumption and taking a finite step towards a digital future.

The increased extensiveness of technology in today’s society and its impact on digitization will transform the publishing industry. The old saying goes, “keep up or fall behind.” The publishing industry and consumers are moving into the digital world. Those who don’t move with the trend run the risk of losing relevancy with their readers.

Sources :-

• https://www.thebalance.com/digital-marketing-defined-3515308
• https://www.slideshare.net/Actionpaper/top-10-advantages-in-going-digital-with-your-publications
• https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/Good-News-for-Digital-Publishers-Audiences-Are-on-the-Rise-Thanks-to-Mobile
• https://www.bcg.com/publications/2014/media-entertainment-digital-disruption-of-education-publishing.aspx
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