Developments in technology mean new methods and varied preferences on how content is represented and delivered and with what degree of immediacy, how it is accessed, how interactive it is and how much it costs. Moreover, the different sets of standards used across platforms and devices need the content to be portable across all of them.

Four of the key challenges that the digital publishing industry faces today are:

1. Creating content quickly – Creating unique and interesting content has had recurring challenges since publishing began. The added challenge for digital publishers is to generate content more quickly to match the faster digital distribution channels as compared to the traditional medium for print content.

2. Converting content into multiple formats – Currently there are a host of presentation formats in the market to choose from including Flash, HTML5, EPUB, PDF, Mobi and iBooks. The challenge here is making content available across all these formats with ease and minimum cost.

3.  Securely distributing content – Due to extensive digitization, it has become easier to gain access to content. While this can be seen as a benefit, it has also increased security problems related to content. Piracy, replication and theft of content are major concerns that need to be addressed and hence content needs to be protected and delivered to the right users, which is quite a challenge in itself.

4. Delivering content across multiple devices – From the first set of Kindles developed and marketed by Amazon, to the current wave of tablets, iPads and smartphones, and lately Android and Windows 8 tablets, there have been many quick leaps in technology. This demands the same speed from the publisher’s end to support these devices.

Creating, converting, securely distributing and delivering content is definitely a daunting task in this fast-paced digital era. As we move further towards more technology developments rapidly taking place, there may be additional challenges that digital publishing companies would need to tackle with efficient and effective solutions.