Advanced Publishing Technology: How Can Publishers Leverage it to Thrive in the Digital Age

We are living in a digital age where advanced publishing technology has changed the way we interact, communicate and experience the world. Publishing technology, which took roots about two decades ago, has steadily gained ground, allowing publishers to extend their audience reach among other benefits.  

Digital publishing gained greater momentum on the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic which forced governments worldwide to implement stringent lockdowns to restrict people’s movement and activity. As a result, numerous business activities shifted to the online environment, including education, and learning, and training. Online education and training require to a large extent – online resources, a fact which forced even the traditional publishers to adopt digital technology in order to survive. Digital publishing is here to stay – in this article, we look at how advanced publishing technology is shaping the future of publishers.

Distribute content at a faster pace:

The cutting-edge publishing software technology enables you to reach your target audience in seconds or minutes, and not hours. With a print publication, your audience reach is limited. Production and shipping costs can limit your circulation numbers. Also, with your print runs you can get a good estimate of how many people will actually be able to purchase your book. Advanced publishing technology, on the other hand, allows you to create as many digital copies of your content to distribute globally, making it available online to a larger audience.

Update access over reprints:

Your physical book may have an error, or that you have to update your educational content. With traditional print technology, you would have to reprint the editions, leading to added overhead costs. However,  in the case of advanced publishing technology, you get to edit and update content. You can simply open your master file, make and save the changes, and create as many copies as you want. You can make your eBooks available for sale on your website. Moreover, it is affordable and easy to pay for web hosting services than ship thousands of copies across the country or even beyond borders. 

Also Read: 10 Point Guide to Selecting the Best Digital Publishing Platform

Interactive content for better engagement:

In the case of a print book, you can at the most play around with format and photos. However, advanced publishing technology allows you to make your content more engaging and interactive. So apart from images, you can add audio-video files, allow your audience to hover over certain words or phrases to learn more, or even hyperlink content to internal and external resources. For young readers, you can add games, and for more adult readers, you can add virtual reality and augmented reality features to simulate the content and make it more contextual, immersive, and relevant.  

Understand your audience:

Advanced publishing technology makes it possible to know more about your audience and how the readers interact with your content. This kind of information is useful in that you can understand what type of content works and which doesn’t. To illustrate this with an example, assume that you are selling your books on your websites. There are web analytical features to trace who is accessing your content, from which country, the pages they spend more time on and the ones they flip through. Then again, how many people actually make a purchase or the time they spend browsing through your content. 

With print publishing, you can at the most collect demographic information about your readers. With digital publishing technology, on the other hand, you can actually gain insights into what works with your readers, and accordingly, you can tailor your content for greater appeal. Then again, readers tend to leave reviews and feedback on the books they read, and this too provides valuable information to tailor your content.

Reduce costs of publishing:

With advanced publishing technology, you can greatly reduce the costs of publishing that are associated with print media, including the cost of paper, payments to printers, and shipping and storage charges, among others.  Advanced publishing technology helps reduce overhead costs to a large extent. This does not imply that it eliminates them altogether. You still have the costs to design and format the book, but once that is done, you can store it on your computer or on the cloud and then create any number of copies you want without any additional charge. So, you can do away with the cost of paper, printing, and storing the eBooks.

Amplify sales through optimization:

Online advertising is more cost-effective than offline advertising. Besides, it is more target-oriented, enabling you to showcase your content to your audience right at the time they are searching for it using a set of keywords. In other words, you can make your content search engine optimized, enabling the search engines to list it in the search results for specific keywords. Further, take advantage of Google advertising, and other social media advertising to spread the word about your ebook and even provide links to buy and download them online.

To thrive in the highly evolving age, it is important for publishers to adopt advanced publishing technology. Traditional publishers are faced with a decline in print sales. Besides, they have to compete with free content available online and various other content distribution forums. All these factors have led to a decline in sales. Forward-looking publishers will not only have to cut costs but also adopt modern technologies such as learning management systems and digital authoring tools to create and distribute their eBooks and other forms of content.

Digital technology has drastically changed people’s content consumption habits. For instance, more and more people are consuming content on their mobile while on the move or even in the comfort of their own space. This means that publishers must make their content mobile-ready. Moreover, with so much content clamoring for attention, publishers would have to leverage digital technology to make their eBooks contextual, immersive, and engaging.  All this puts together the need to adopt advanced publishing technology for surviving in the increasingly competitive digital world.