The client
The Taylor & Francis (T&F) Group is a UK-based academic publisher with offices across the UK, the US, Australia and South-East Asia. It publishes more than 2,500 books and journals every year with annual sales of more than £150 million.

The challenge
E-publishing was a new concept, which promised fresh opportunities for delivering content to readers in a variety of business models. After publishing academic books for two decades, the transition to e-books was a natural step. T&F had no digitization or e-publishing strategy and there was no online content distribution precedent for comparison or association.

T&F engaged Digital Publishing Solutions (DPS) in India to digitize the entire T&F frontlist and backlist—amounting to more than 20,000 books. The digitized books were to be sold online over a secure environment.

DPS was required to provide services pertaining to:

• Creation, processing and management of all digitized content
• Multi-layer preservation and management of publisher content
• Archival and retrieval of content in a wide range of formats
• Innovative business models for the sale of content, which benefits the publisher in driving revenues and customer satisfaction

The solution
The solutions that DPS (www.dpsl.net) implemented were scanning, digitization to DX XML, content management and e-commerce. The entire gamut of conversion and digitization activities was processed using DX Content Factory, the DPS content production workflow framework.

The team for the project consisted of skilled e-publishing professionals who were trained to handle rare and dated documents.

In addition, DPS used the latest scanning equipment and technology; input formats included printed books and e-files/PDFs.

Once scanned, content was deliverable for Print on Demand, which enabled T&F to revive their out-of-print books and archived content back to mainstream. DPS also provided mass online storage services for handling high volume archival. All scanned content is stored in the DPS scan repository from where it can be re-purposed at any time.

The T&F eBookstore
(www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk)
To digitize scanned content, DPS used optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and proprietary proofing processes and software. (DPS’s quality assurance statistics have revealed an accuracy rate of 99.996%.) After the text was digitized, it was tagged using DX XML, a proprietary commercial format to convert back and front catalogue books to the XML format.

DX XML—based on XML—is a meta-language that provides a structural backbone to documents making content easily convertible to any electronic format.

To make the digitized content commercially available, DPS implemented T&F’s eBookstore. It developed a functional and customizable front-end interface, equipped to facilitate online sale of content to customers. It also partnered with Microsoft, Adobe and Mobipocket for their encryption and distribution servers, and with WorldPay for its secure online payment processing solutions. So, T&F was guaranteed the security of its content and customers were assured a secure payment gateway.

The eBookstore is a virtual bookstore where customers can browse more than 4,000 titles that cover a range of nearly 50 subjects. What’s more, the bookstore even has a “Browse Before Buy” feature, which allows the customer to see a facsimile of the actual book page to read before making a purchase decision.

DPS is currently hosting and maintaining the T&F eBookstore, adding new titles and formats everyday. In addition, it provides helpdesk services to eBookstore customers.

The advantage
After launching the eBookstore, T&F has been able to reach out to customers across the world and has obtained a new means of sales and revenue. Thus, in the given timeframe, T&F has been able to demonstrate leadership in the market for its e-book strategies.