Book Publishing in the Cloud is a new program unveiled by Easypress Technologies and seeks to offset some of the cost in typesetting and editing digital books. The company claims to be able to save publishers roughly 50% of the outsourcing costs associated with producing digital books and has just signed up HarperCollins UK as its first big client.
Instead of big publishers outsourcing the editing, typeset, book layout, and the normal editing involved in making sure the total package looks solid, Easypress connects those facets. The company only got into digital books about five years ago and has been developing a solid infrastructure to appeal to larger companies. Book Publishing in the Cloud is a workflow and collaborative system for the production of print and digital books. This will allow editors, typesetters, and production to access, view, edit, proof, suggest changes, and approve books securely through a web browser.
Easypress Technologies CEO James Macfarlane said that Book Publishing in the Cloud has already been working with HarperCollins UK, allowing the publisher to avoid completely outsourcing physical typeset production to a third party and generating a “50% savings in direct costs and dramatically reducing the time to publish for both print and digital products.” According to Macfarlane, using Book Publishing in the Cloud, publishers can “resize” any layout for a new format in minutes “with no manual intervention,” as well as access the work, edit it, and approve corrections through a web browser. In addition, the publisher can publish digital editions from the print book formats immediately in seconds.
James Graves, global production sourcing director at HarperCollins UK said, “the new Easypress Book Publishing in the Cloud technology will substantially cut our external costs and bring considerable benefits internally in terms of improving our workflow.” Graves added that, “we can now have access to any print format or digital product in seconds rather than weeks, this gives us the ability to challenge the traditional route to market, if we choose we can publish our content digitally first then re-flow into hardback or paperback book formats for any English-speaking market in seconds.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
