The traditional publishing process is a complex and cumbersome one. Over the years, technology has revolutionized the workflow by automating several processes.
However, the demands of content creation have significantly evolved due to various consumer shifts.
For instance, K12 education learners are tilting more towards interactive eBooks. K12 publishers will need to upgrade their strategies to keep pace with this trend. For instance, they may need to revamp all existing content and reimagine how the etextbooks of the future are conceived and published.
One way to free up more bandwidth and drive results is to outsource the entire editorial function. Businesses can leverage prepress editorial services by specialists with extensive experience in marrying technological innovation with a deep understanding of the editorial process.
In this blog, we delve into the upcoming market challenges and how companies can benefit through prepress editorial services.
Key Prepress Challenges in The Market
Today, specific types of publishers, such as those producing books, journals, textbooks, and periodicals, are facing a host of challenges, as follows:
- A massive amount of existing content needs to be upgraded to make it interactive and stay relevant. However, publishers may not have the taken able solutions to infuse interactivity into their products.
- Publishers are looking to make their content more relevant to a wider demographic, including senior consumers, those with mobility and learning limitations, and consumers facing language barriers.
- Prepress editorial processes can also be manual in nature and hence, be time-consuming. Editorial teams may not have the know-how to leverage technology to expedite processes and produce error-free, optimized digital content at scale.
This is where the support of specialist prepress editorial services can help publishers bring efficiency and cost-effectiveness to their operations via a tech-enabled and outcome-focused solution to the table.
What Are Prepress Processes?
Publishers are continuously looking to simplify the workflow in their production operations. They can significantly do so by leveraging prepress editorial services.
These services cover a spectrum of tasks and responsibilities associated with content production before it is ready for publishing.
The shift to digital content has triggered the evolution of digital prepress, which is replacing the traditional ways of producing pages for printing. Here is a snapshot of the main key prepress tasks:
- Copyediting ensures that the content is presented in an accurate, engaging, and optimized manner.
- Typesetting comprises designing layouts using various design applications. It also includes touching up images and finalizing them.
- Proofreading is a necessary step to ensure an error-free copy. Aspects like formatting and other types of errors are also corrected.
- The text needs to be digitally structured for the final presentation using a text-coding system called display. This is done using Markup language, which is a means to give instructions about the layout of how the text of the document or book will be displayed.
- Publishers need to ensure that all data meets the printer’s requirements. For instance, high-resolution PDFs are required to produce high-quality print copies.
Outsourcing Prepress Editorial Services
Today, publishers can outsource the entire prepress editorial operations to a specialist. Publishers can outsource workflow as a whole or some aspects of it. Here is a rundown of popular prepress editorial services:
- Full-service project management: This entails the complete end-to-end management of a project, covering all aspects of the prepress editorial services.
- Pre-editing and copy editing services for eBooks, including formatting, cleaning up, hyperlinking, styling, and indexing of content
- Backend XML conversion services that enable conversion of eBooks existing with multiple DTDs (Document Type Definition) and schemes with utilities developed for the project
- Artwork and designs, which entails adding illustrations and edited images to the final pages before publishing
- Typesetting by using relevant design software to design superior layouts for the content
How to Choose a Specialist
There are several stakeholders involved in the publishing of eBooks and other formats of content, including authors, production teams, and consumer lists.
Manual coordination takes up an extensive amount of time, reducing efficiency. Specialists who offer prepress editorial services understand these challenges and leverage tech-enabled, automated solutions to streamline all aspects of the process.
Their team brings a mix of editorial, design, publishing skills, and tech-savviness to help customize solutions.
Impact of Outsourcing Prepress Tasks
Here is a snapshot of the potential impact:
- Reduction of manual processes, which take up the extensive time of publishing teams. By outsourcing these functions, a team member can instead understand their markets and be more invested in content development and business strategy.
- The use of technology brings down costs and saves time.
- Another key outcome is the superior quality of content, which is produced to enhance the readability of content. Better layouts, high-quality images, and placement of text are s key deliverables.
- With interactive eBooks becoming more popular, publishers can bring out embedded videos, animation, audio, and hyperlinks, to improve engagement. This is a valuable enhancement across all kinds of books, from travel stories to children’s books and science textbooks.
The Takeaway
The benefit of outsourcing prepress editorial services is that publishers have a lot of flexibility to decide how much to outsource and how much to keep in-house. Your prepress partner will work collaboratively to value-add to the process and keep pace with digital content trends.
However, your chosen partner offering prepress editorial services must not merely be an editorial process specialist. They must essentially be an innovative technology company that brings tech-enabled solutions to the table.
Such a partnership ensures that all the tech and editorial gaps are plugged in. This will be an ongoing journey because consumers will keep involved, and publishers will need to keep evolving.
If your business is looking to revamp its prepress services, Hurix Digital is geared to support you in meeting all your company’s content creation needs. Our state-of-the-art digital publishing platform is available as a licensed version (one-time buy) and via a subscription model.
Get in touch with us to start a conversation.
