The Publishing Industry and Automation

 [Approximate Reading Time : 4 mins]

Process improvement is something many companies strive for regardless of the industry. From manufacturing to marketing, streamlining and innovating can increase productivity and lower costs. The publishing industry is no different. Beginning in the 1970s, the introduction of pagination products helped reduce the price per page costs by building multiple pages and flowing the classified liners quickly and automatically.

Not Just Digitizing — Automating

While employees with hardcopy newspaper, book and magazine publishers have taken a hit, the publishing industry as a whole continues to thrive. This is to a large extent as a result of automation. Digital information can be filtered, augmented, processed and routed quickly, in countless ways. Authors see their creations come to life and reach the target audience faster than ever before. Readers have a more extensive selection of materials to choose from, at a reduced cost.

Benefits of Publishing Automation

In the past 10 years, advancing technology has revolutionized publishing. Complex production processes are necessary to customize the required output, from web content and learning resources to ebooks, to meet consumer demand for diversity in platforms and devices. Automation enables the production of a variety of material quickly. All aspects of production can take place in a single platform, including the following:

• Authoring
• Multimedia infusion
• Stylesheets
• Editing
• Final proofing
• Artwork
• Metadata management

By eliminating manual intervention throughout each stage, production time and costs are significantly reduced.

Increased Employee Productivity

The publishing industry can learn from today’s startups, which need to hit the ground running and maintain high-quality results while increasing productivity. Streamlined processes and greater efficiency can come from publishing automation. When the more basic tasks are automated, employees can spend their time strategizing and attending to their core job duties and focusing on business priorities.

At Amnet, our end-to-end production application can enable authors to easily write fresh content while copy editors can be assigned individual or groups of chapters. The dashboard and analytics offer visibility to the entire project, with live updates, performance metrics and key milestones in an easy-to-interpret graphical format. Contact us today for more information or to request a demo.