Visitors to MPS Limited’s (booth DZ2412) are going to see something familiar yet totally new this year. For chairman Nishith Arora, integrating many of the company’s tools and products that were built in the past and expanding them to create a digital-first workflow makes perfect sense. “This publishing solution can be used to paginate, publish, and distribute books for on-demand printing, online retailing, the Web, and mobile devices. As cost and time-to-market become ever more critical, we expect to see a part of the publishing world migrating to this platform soon,” says Arora, whose team is leveraging on MPS’s established experience in book production, digital services, and publishing to develop the end-to-end digital-first workflow for content production and distribution. He counts Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Wiley, McGraw-Hill and Wolters Kluwer among his major clients.
The digital-first workflow services many segments, including k-12, college, and professional. There are pre-production tools for authors, collaborators, co-creators, and teachers such as WELite for manuscript management and authoring; ARTLite for graphics origination and validation; and OPS and autoCOMP for collaborative proofing. Then there are eNET (for project management), WEPro (content structuring, editing and enrichment), Ams (graphics & multimedia production), XIn Pro (for design, product and technology development), Cserv (digital conversion), eLearn (e-learning solutions), Xplod (content distribution), ContentStore, MPSInsight InstantBookStore (hosting and online production) and MPS360 (fulfillment and BPO services) that make it easy for publishers to prepare and distribute content whichever way they want.
Of the many tools, ContentStore merits special mention. A hosted e-book delivery and distribution platform with features for converting, showcasing, marketing, and distributing multichannel content, it also drives e-book sales over the Web and mobile platforms. “ContentStore is totally flexible: you can create your own e-bookstore or choose from the available feature sets. You can sell content at book, article, or chapter level. It is also multilingual, thus enabling publishers to penetrate new markets and increase their revenue by supporting multiple languages.”
Publishers have the choice of retaining their own payment gateway or use the built-in checkout function to sell online. Librarians can create and subscribe to book bundles and implement a library loan service. “Both publishers and librarians can access COUNTER-compliant [which tracks usage of electronic network resources], and other usage statistics including access via SUSHI,” adds Arora. ContentStore, he says, is perfect for dealing with online content sales. “A library sales module for books has been added and its capabilities expanded to cover delivery to online retailers as well. We see this platform emerging as a digital-first distribution interface for small and mid-sized publishers.”
Known for its highly automated workflow, technical expertise, and large capacity (of more than 2,500 staff spread out in six facilities), Bangalore, India–headquartered MPS is capable of converting content from any input into multiple digital formats. XML automation tool, for instance, automatically updates all elements and attributes of consolidated XML files, while QC tools capture inconsistencies in XML and PDF files, and auto-compress only error-free files. So established is MPS’s technical expertise in journals and STM segments that its interactive learning and multimedia solutions are sometimes overlooked. Adds Arora, “Clients are not aware that our team also offers services such as storyboard creation, redrawing, retouching, 2D and 3D animation, and conversion of print books into digital versions with voice and music elements.”
MPS also offers consultancy services. In these days of rapidly changing technology options, Arora and his colleagues are looking forward to a busy BEA. Come by our booth to find out more about our services.”
