Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

Fall 2023 Conferences and News from Westchester

epub

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

headshot of Tyler Carey2023 has been another busy year here at US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services, as we continue to expand our stateside and offshore operations to further support our clients’ editorial and production needs. In addition to our standard editorial and production work, we are supporting numerous clients who are expressing increased interest in scanning backlist titles, print-on-demand file requirements, accessible ePubs, developmental editing, permissions, and author support tasks.  Across our global operations based in the US, UK, and India, we now support approximately 600 clients around the world. We appreciate the feedback from these partners that has helped us better understand how we can work with publishers and content providers to resolve their problems and deliver quality publications to their readers. 

To best support both client growth and the additional services we are providing, we announced two promotions earlier this Summer.  Deb Taylor has been promoted to our Chief Operations Officer, and Christober Masilamani has been promoted to our Managing Director for our Chennai, India production operation.  More information about their new roles can be found in this press release.  Let me know if a discussion with Deb or Christober about incorporating your needs into our plans and direction would be helpful. You can Contact Us anytime to schedule a discussion with your sales point of contact and our leadership team. 

We enjoy having an ongoing dialogue with the market about topics impacting our industry. Here are a few discussions that may be of interest to you: 

  • Last month, I spoke on the Publisher Nation podcast with Digital Book World’s Bradley Metrock – and industry thought leaders Lorraine Shanley (Market Partners International) and Andrea Chambers (NYU Masters in Publishing) – about how publishers are exploring AI within their workflows. You can watch the YouTube feed of our discussion. 
  • On October 10th, I will be presenting on the “Amplifying Impact” panel at Dropbox’s Work in Progress conference in New York City. I’ll be speaking about how we partnered with Dropbox to build out our Client Portal, and how both of our organizations continue to explore ways publishers and media organizations can leverage tools and technology to make their work more efficient.  You can sign up for this one-day event on Dropbox’s site. I’ll also share a blog post afterwards with info about the day’s content and any best practices that may be worth tracking. 
  • Most exciting of all, our next Publishing Now webinar – launched in partnership with Publishers Weekly – is coming up on Thursday, October 26th.  Speakers include Marina Padakis Lowry from Union Square & Co., Diem Bloom from Johns Hopkins University Press, and Bill Rojack from Midland Paper and Two Sides North America. Our panelists will be exploring the ways books are being produced in our new normal, including topics related to AI, workflow, and working with partners. You can sign up here. 

If there are any areas where you have questions, contact us to schedule a brief Zoom. We always like to help, even if that means connecting you with our partners who may be better able to support those needs that are outside our area of expertise. I would welcome the chance to hear from you, and learn more about what you’re exploring with your 2024 publications program. 

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

It has been longer than I would have liked since I last shared a post-conference blog post. I am glad that NYC’s Digital Book World (DBW), held January 16-18 at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue, afforded me the opportunity to reconnect in person with many of Westchester’s partners and those of our clients who were able to make the trip to New York for the meeting.

As noted by Lorraine Shanley in her coverage of DBW in MPI’s Publishing Trends newsletter, the attendance was a bit upside down with far more vendor and industry types than publishers, it appeared. That said, the panels presented provided more than a little food for thought on topics ranging from the role of AI in publishing, to how to market books effectively online in the current landscape, to where we’re all headed as an industry.

Screenshot from keynote speechIt was on that latter topic that Margot Atwell, the executive director and publisher of The Feminist Press, provided an insightful session. She revisited a presentation she had shared at London Book Fair in 2019, in which she had identified a number of trend lines in the industry – including equity, consolidation, and the financial health of the industry – and updated her analysis and predictions for 2023. Whether you were representing a vendor, a large publisher, or a start up, her insights on how to foster equity, continue to adapt to a distributed workplace, and navigate the financial and societal challenges in our industry resonated.

Aligned with another one of Westchester’s core principles was the panel on accessibility hosted by Bill Kasdorf, who was a panelist on our September 2022 webinar about accessibility and sustainability. Joining Bill were Michael Johnson from Benetech, Madeleine Rothberg from WGBH, and Richard Orme from the DAISY Consortium. As a Benetech GCA-certified partner, Westchester is keen to help amplify the messaging around not just the needs for accessibility but also the best practices that publishers can adapt into their workflows. Each panelist shared a headline and several discussion points with one another to help further discussion about the needs for publishers to accelerate their adaptation to support readers requiring accessible content. As the coverage of Day 1 of the conference in Publishers Weekly emphasized, Michael Johnson laid out numerous examples of the prevalence within the population of individuals who need or use adaptive technology to consume content. With an estimated 20% of the world’s population having a need, this isn’t a nice to have, it’s a necessity for ensuring as many readers can consume your content as possible.

Bill Kasdorf put perhaps the finest point on the subject by pointing out that due to the European Accessibility Act, if you plan on selling any ePub content in Europe by 2025, that content has to be created accessible or converted to accessibity standards – including backlist content – or it will be illegal to sell within the EU. But, to the point of everyone on the panel, that doesn’t necessarily mean a gigantic investment of resources or a total revision to how you create content. Micromoves internally and with partners can help pick away at the pile quickly and affordably. One key topic that seems to frustrate many publishers is that of alt text. While there are commonly accepted practices, the ‘right’ alt text is not codified the way that say metadata rules might be. As Michael Johnson pointed out, the same image could have different tags depending on its use. An image of the Eiffel Tower in a cookbook about crepes may be ornamental – not relevant to how to make a crepe – so it could just be labeled as “Ornamental” in its alt text entry. In a book about Paris, perhaps a few brief sentences describing the image of the Eiffel Tower would be appropriate. In an engineering book, the Eiffel Tower image might be being used to augment some content about the tensile strength of steel so a different, brief entry would be called for. But in none of these instances is a thoroughly written, revised, and breathtaking narrative called for – alt text entries are there to tell a reader what is in the image, not replace the content that is already in the text that the image is intended to augment. And to Madeleine Rothberg’s point, there is a metadata field called “Accessibility Summary” in each file that allows you to make notations re: pieces that are works in progress, absent, etc., understanding that there will be exceptions and things that may need further attention after initial creation or conversion. We’re all learning new things regarding accessibility – even those of us who are deeply involved in accessibility – and this field serves as a placeholder to indicate where we think something may need to be revisited.

To help us all navigate the world of accessibility, and better plan for the looming EU deadline referenced above, a number of resources were shared by the panel that Bill Kasdorf consolidated here. I highly encourage you to review these resources and share them with any of your team involved in working with authors, editing content, and producing digital files.

Other excellent sessions included Ingram’s presentation about its Ingram iD platform, which allows for direct-to-consumer marketing, sessions from Scribd and Spotify about different revenue models for content distribution, and sessions from AI firms showing how audiobooks and more can benefit from AI.

Westchester’s Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, Deb Taylor, attended DBW as well, and provided this commentary about ChatGPT coming out of a session hosted by another vendor in our space.

Deb shares:

DBW’s sessions were typically not company/product commercials, although like most conferences, a few did lean that way. When the Trends in Content Creation Using AI and Smart Technology session by PageMajik started, I think most expected it to be a carefully disguised commercial about their services. It turned out to be a micro master class in how to think about AI and, in this case, the “controversial” open source AI, GPT3 (or ChatGPT). Keep in mind, PageMajik wasn’t the only one discussing AI and how it has many places in publishing – we learned about interesting uses of AI in audiobook production workflows, and in the use of synthetic voice, too.

So while ChatGPT has been banned on some school networks due to fear of plagiarism, this session reminded us that this is just technology – clever technology, mind you – but still just technology, and we, as humans can make a choice in terms of how to use and deploy it.
“We can be lazy, or we can be productive. The choice is ours.” And yes, we should be mindful that clever technology like GPT, does need some guardrails so it can be harnessed with positive productivity, not laziness or malintent.

For those who are wondering how ChatGPT can be purposeful in the publishing industry, here are a few thoughts:

1. One potential use case is for content generation, where the model can be trained on a specific topic or writing style, and then used to generate new articles, blog posts, or other written content. Additionally, ChatGPT can be used for editing and proofreading by identifying grammar and style errors in existing text. It can also be used for summarizing long articles or books, creating headlines and summaries for news articles, and even writing personalized responses to readers’ questions or comments. Overall, ChatGPT offers a powerful tool for automating and enhancing various aspects of the publishing process.

2. Another area in the workflow that often requires much back and forth with authors and copyediting teams is the reviewing, checking, and correcting of references and citations. ChatGPT can help with reference citation checking in manuscripts by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to identify and extract citations from the text. Once the citations have been identified, the model can then compare them to a database of references to ensure that they are accurate and properly formatted. Additionally, ChatGPT can also be trained on specific citation styles, such as MLA or APA, to ensure that the manuscript adheres to the appropriate guidelines. It can also be used to check for missing references or duplicate citations in the manuscript. Overall, ChatGPT can provide a powerful tool for automating the reference citation checking process, which can help to save time and improve the accuracy of the final manuscript.

I’ll leave you with this final disclosure: Both the paragraph on use cases and reference citations were written by ChatGPT, in seconds. Would that be categorized as lazy? No. I believe it was incredibly efficient, however, the best use may be more in the middle. Let ChatGPT be the tool to help you formulate your idea but perhaps not be used verbatim. After all, it’s just technology, and it’s using what it has access to. You still need to validate the information. Try it out for yourself here. And then make sure to ask what its limitations and challenges are.

In general, these new aspects of technology are exciting and ones that we should not be fearful of, but figure out how to use to improve and advance our industry as a whole.

While there was a bit of humor artfully weaved into Book.io’s session, Digital Ownership, NFTs and Revenue Streams for Publishers, there were some interesting things to think about as it relates to the personalized marketing opportunities and the new potential revenue stream that blockchain could offer. eBooks, as we know, are meant to be licenses to the individual to “view, use and display” without any permissions to sell, rent or distribute otherwise. Digital books on the blockchain change that paradigm, and also enable the publisher to experience an ongoing revenue stream from books sold here. Per Book.io, it will increase the intellectual property value of the content. There is also the opportunity for the publisher to direct market the owner since there is more visibility in the digital ownership – think here about gating content with permissions, and even price points to owners vs non-owners. There are efficiencies (multiple languages), interesting design opportunities (different cover designs), unique targeted marketing ideas, and more here. As with all new technology, let’s not dismiss or fear it, but rather let’s get to know and harness it to continue to advance our industry.

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Further coverage of DBW 2023 is available in this post from Publishing Perspectives that provides thorough coverage of keynote speaker Karine Pansa’s presentation about her mandate and expectations for her term heading the International Publishers Association, as well as this article from Publishers Weekly highlighting information for publishing start ups.

As always, US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services is keen to learn more about which portions of your book production workflow you are navigating, in the hope that we can help. Over 500 publishers rely on Westchester for services ranging from manuscript preparation to editorial services to quality, on-time printer file production and accessibility remediation. Contact us today to talk about your publications and how we can help.

ebook in front of open textbooksAmazon has announced that effective June 28, when uploading ePub content for new books or updates to previously published content on their platform, mobi files will no longer be supported.

Scott Keeney, Westchester’s Senior Composition and Digital Production Manager, outlines what Amazon’s changes mean for publishers:

In late 2020, Amazon recommended using ePub format for publishing new titles and updating previously published titles for users who loaded mobi into Kindle Previewer (KP3). Though it did not state it in that message, it was applicable to reflowable ePubs. Over the last several months, when clients have asked, Westchester has been recommending only receiving the ePub. With Amazon disapproving of sideloading to their devices as a means to preview files, the need for a mobi for review purposes had become obsolete. We do have a few clients with their own, independent need and use cases for mobi, and we continue to create and provide the mobi for them.

Amazon has accepted ePub as an input format for at least a decade, and Westchester has always built our clients’ ePubs with Amazon Kindle compliance in mind. While Amazon did allow some variance from Kindle guidelines, by 2014 Westchester’s standard ePub was entirely compliant.

To ensure quality and functionality, Westchester conducts automated validation using EPUBCheck 4.2.5 (all ePubs), and ACE by Daisy, along with using proprietary tools. We also conduct manual spot-checking of content and items including navigation and table of content links. Quality checks are conducted by reviewing in ADE (not an endorsement, ADE simply remains the most common reading system used by our clients to check ePubs). Most titles are also reviewed in Kindle Previewer 3, and titles may be checked in other reading systems as needed. Westchester also includes some content-based items that ACE can’t check for such as properly marking context breaks (aka space breaks or scene breaks) and decorative images/ornaments. We include alt text if supplied or we have internal resources who can create alt text as one of our additional services.

Westchester has continued to evolve our ePub offerings to support market needs over the years, and has been providing Amazon-compatible ePub3 files for quite some time. We also offer a variety of services to ensure your ePub and digital products are fully accessible, including alt-text writing capabilities, tagging content, XML file creation, 508 compliance, and accessible WebPDF files.

Talk with Westchester Publishing Services about how we can help ensure your new ePub content meets accessibility and platform requirements, and ways we can update your previously published content to be in compliance with current standards.

George Baier IV is Media Industry Principal at Dropbox, responsible for communicating the company’s unique perspective on how Dropbox can transform work and IT infrastructure for customers in the media vertical. George works closely with customers to deliver product features and solutions that meet specific media customer needs.

Westchester:  George, Westchester is excited about our partnership with Dropbox which has resulted in several positive developments including upgrades to our internal technology, and further enhancements on our Client Portal. Can you share with readers a little about your background in publishing, and how that led to your current role with Dropbox?

George: I’ve worked in the publishing and media industry for over a decade, across different leadership roles involving technology, content, and design. Prior to Dropbox, I served as a VP in IT at Macmillan, where I helped deploy tools that the organization’s teams and employees still use today. One of those tools was Dropbox, which consolidated the applications people organically brought to work, and gave teams the freedom to collaborate under a common platform. Seeing employees get excited about technology like Dropbox ultimately led me to the role I currently hold — Media Industry Principal — in which I help even more media customers deploy tools to help them do their best work. 

Westchester: What makes you so passionate about publishing in particular, and how does that inform the work Dropbox is doing with companies in the media sector?

George: Trade publishing continues to evolve but its business model still operates on the creation of content, and the consumption of that content by readers that are willing to pay for it. Unlike other forms of media, the straightforwardness of the relationship between publishers and audiences is something I’ve always found appealing. In this spirit, Dropbox helps creators move their process forward, and is designed for any author to use as a means to enable creativity at scale. It’s also part of the reason we continue integrating with tools that are industry-standard within publishing while seeing increased adoption overall.

Westchester: What is the potential Dropbox sees in the media space – specifically in publishing, during the next couple of years?

George: Teams and users in the publishing, media, and entertainment space created and saved more than a billion files in Dropbox last year. Every day those teams — especially in publishing — are under pressure to create more content in less time. As a result, there’s a growing need to manage complex projects at scale, as content often becomes trapped in silos and spread across teams, tools, and devices. We see an opportunity for Dropbox to continue serving as a home for content and the collaboration around it. 

In parallel, we see an opportunity to support authors through a platform that unifies documents, rich media, and the exchange of ideas. Those with talent and creativity should be enabled to tell stories with less friction, wherever and whenever inspiration may strike. I observed firsthand at Macmillan how unique tools like Dropbox can be additive to an author’s creative toolkit, which ultimately led me to Dropbox itself — I wanted closer involvement in helping other organizations benefit from our platform.

Westchester: We came to Dropbox with several situations we needed to resolve – including upgrading our own internal infrastructure, working with our operations teams around the globe, version control, handling large files, and the development of our Client Portal.  Walk us through the approach Dropbox took to evaluate our requirements and propose specific solutions.

George: We worked closely with several stakeholders at Westchester to offer guidance on a Team Folder system that met their needs and matched their investment in our product’s deployment, while ensuring no data loss occurred throughout the migration and deployment process. In general, our approach was to make a transition to Dropbox as seamless as possible, helping them maximize the full benefit of our platform to support large volumes of content and launch their Client Portal. This also involved listening to input from production, editorial staff, and ensuring we could follow through on the capabilities promised as part of our deployment. Interestingly, as we continued working together, we uncovered even more ways that Dropbox could support Westchester, whether it be handling large files, version control capabilities, or expanded Dropbox previews of file types like ePub. 

Westchester: Are the challenges that we brought to Dropbox consistent with what you see from other media firms? What other types of issues do you and your team help resolve for companies in the media industry?

George: Westchester is a great example of organizational vision and execution facilitating the full promise of Dropbox, from start to finish across migration and deployment phases — adoption, integration, workflow enablement and, ultimately, transformation. We weren’t surprised how quickly Westchester did it, given the strong leadership and cross-functional partnership, but it became clear that Dropbox was additive to Westchester’s holistic philosophy to technology, content management, and infrastructure migration. Our goal is help replicate the success of Westchester’s IT maturity model for other customers that want to mature their business through the capabilities of our collaboration platform. 

Westchester: Many publishers have their own in-house architecture or use other file transfer and archival systems. How does Dropbox differ in its ability to support the ways publishers handle projects with multiple stakeholders, versions, and large files?

George: Over the past few years, we’ve evolved from a place to store your files to a place where collaboration gets easier. We’ve released several new products and features like Paper, Smart Sync, Showcase, and Team Folders that have made it incredibly easy for publishers to adopt our platform, specific to projects involving multiple stakeholders, versions, and large files. These build upon our core product capabilities including best-in-class file sync/share, previews, and unlimited file size uploads. 

More specific to file transfer and archival systems, we see patterns of work that still rely on inefficient methods of content transfer — FTP, email, file attachments — across businesses today. The products and features I’ve mentioned, especially Showcase, can help modernize those legacy tools, the use of which can result in lost time and focus away from the content itself. In addition, Dropbox also integrates natively in digital asset management (DAM) tools like Widen, nicely complementing archival systems of record that store IP. This integration facilitates our larger platform strategy, in which Dropbox can work with tools and systems customers have already purchased, as opposed to creating another ‘walled garden’. 

Westchester: We’re excited about the new release of our Client Portal, because it uses the Dropbox API integrated with the DBX platform to provide clients with a secure, cloud-based file management, and communications hub for their projects (see video). How do you see our ability to extend the use of the Dropbox platform to clients as a change in the way publishers of all sizes are able to interact with their vendors?

George: The Client Portal is an impressive example of leveraging the power of DBX Platform to customize specific publishing workflows for both internal and external audiences. As more and more content is produced, it often goes through key stages of creation, feedback, and distribution — which can, unfortunately, lead to lost time searching for the latest versions, or “work about work” if not properly managed. Ultimately, we think our APIs can serve as the connective tissue for collaborative work among Dropbox, publishers, and vendors, facilitating a unified home for work across the entire content lifecycle.

Westchester: Tell us more about the new features that Dropbox has rolled out recently that would be of interest to our clients and publishing partners.  Are there additional developments on the horizon that you’re able to share with us?

George: Recently, Dropbox announced expanded partnerships with Canva, Final Draft, Frame.io, Getty Images, Shift.io, Marvel, and Widen to bridge content silos, in support of teams that continue creating content at an exponential rate. These integrations complement core Dropbox product capabilities like best-in-class file sync/share, no-download shared links to protect IP, expanded preview capabilities like EPUB, ZIP, RAR, and enhanced previews of PPT and PDF. Especially as rich media and visual assets become ingrained in traditional and digital publishing, we’re focused on giving authors and teams more flexibility to bring Dropbox closer to the tools they already use. In the future, we’ll be looking for more ways to expand our relationship with those seven partners, and other publishing-optimized tools like Scrivener, that integrate with our collaboration platform meaningfully.

Westchester: For publishers interested in exploring the solutions Dropbox can offer for their own particular challenges, what’s the best way to reach you?

George: You can always connect with me on LinkedIn (George Baier IV), or check out our Flow Together eBook if you’d like to learn more as well.  

Westchester: George, thank you for taking the time to share your insights about publishing and technology. For clients and prospective partners interested in learning more about our Client Portal, and our editorial and production services, please Contact Us.

by Michael Jon Jensen – Director of Technology

Michael Jon Jensen, and the software development team at Westchester’s Chennai office

I recently returned from my third visit to our offices in Chennai, India. The first trip seven months ago was an adventure and a revelation; the second, three months ago, was a return for strategic development. This most recent trip was a reunion with colleagues who I now consider friends, to refine our mutual long-term plans.

My first ever trip to India, in late April of 2017 — was a cultural whirlwind. The intersection between an ancient civilization, the impacts of a few hundred years of colonization, and 21st-century modernity means that Chennai lives all of them simultaneously. Their day-to-day traffic manifests that complex intersection: handcarts, bikecarts, scooters, motorcycles, three-wheelers, autos, small trucks, panel vans, and big trucks interweave constantly, usually gracefully (if terrifyingly hair-raisingly), blithely ignoring lane markings and traffic signs. I tried to put my foot through the floor so often that my right calf ached at the end of the first few commutes.

During that first visit to our Chennai offices, I discovered a depth of skill and capability that I’d only halfway understood. I found a desirable Indian workplace comprised of good jobs which were well-staffed, and a production workflow focused on quality-control at every stage, across the board.

I shouldn’t say I was “surprised” by anything I saw in our Chennai offices on that first trip. Before joining Westchester Publishing Services, I’d done due diligence by talking with a lot of publishers I knew to confirm their reputation before signing on, and to be sure that their Indian staff were well treated. I heard nothing but support.

What I saw on that first trip exceeded my expectations, and delighted me. I also reveled in the reality that at the Chennai offices we have our own software development team, who were already deeply knowledgeable about data transformations, typesetting nuances, as well as XML, EPUB, and textual presentations. These are things I’ve done and loved my whole career, and I realized that we could insource a lot of development, building internal strength, and creating some amazing tools together to serve our clients’ needs, and to expand what’s possible behind the scenes.

My job just got more exciting at that point.

My second trip, in August of 2017, was a solid week of engagement, bookended each day by that brief, routine commute in Chennai’s hair-raising traffic. That time, I complimented myself on only freaking out about the traffic once or twice per commute, such as when a family of five on a motorcycle swerved successfully around the three people on a scooter who were swerving around a slow-moving bicycle cart.

During that second visit, Elan and Christober (Development Chief and Head Architect, respectively) and I strategized out the next 18-24 months. From immediate priorities to stretch goals, we laid out what might be achieved given our existing strengths and client needs, and given our capabilities. Such fun, imagining what we could build. What kinds of hires would we want to make to achieve specific goals? What steps should we take now, to enable certain kinds of analysis a year from now?

Regarding this most recent third trip, begun when the January winter storm began?  Apart from my luggage finally arriving the day of my departure from India (a story for another day), it was sheer delight.  I was returning to meet with friends, people I had worked with to devise some radical improvements of already-streamlined production services, and to re-envision data infrastructure. Only geeks can get excited talking about the user interfaces for our backend workflows, which will also feed data to our client-facing Portal. And we were trans-Atlantic geeks, to be sure.

We’re already working out how to design a “scholarly EPUB” format optimally suited for scholars; refine image and textual analysis tools to flag possible problems like rivers, or stacks, or a disproportionate degree of “feathering”; identify the richest 25% of the document’s content; auto-categorize publications, via multiple frameworks (Amazon, BISAC, LC, etc.); identify most-related titles within a publisher’s WPS ouvre; and on and on.

Of course, we work on this stuff together daily from across the ocean, via Skype, phone, and email. But there’s nothing like being in the same room with really smart developers, brainstorming ways to enhance the quality, the beauty, the processes, and the value of the work we produce.

Best of all, during this visit’s daily commute, I didn’t slam on my “virtual brake” at all. I can’t say I was calm, but clearly, some part of me had become acculturated to Chennai’s traffic.

On my next visit to Chennai, we’ll hammer out the strategic structural necessities, and the required scripted processes to enable our next leap forward.

I can’t wait for that next trip!

– Michael