The Business Problem

Publishers nowadays are facing unprecedented challenges as their customers have changed their reading habits dramatically in recent years due to the impact of the Internet and the convenience of obtaining contents from the Internet.  According to three consecutive surveys  conducted by the Chinese Publishing Research Academy, traditional paper-based contents has constantly lost the market share while readers now claim that they obtain more than 51.7%  of contents from  online sources.  

At the same time, non-traditional publishers are taking up the majority of the online market due to their technology superiority to traditional publishers.  At the end of 2004, the market size in China alone exceeded 3.5 billion RMB.

Traditional publishers still have content advantages over emerging publishers. However, traditional publishers are typically conservative with technologies and this advantage cannot be leveraged without the support of modern internet technologies.

The most formal approach to online publishing involves the following steps:
1.Converting existing contents into a standard electronic form typically as a standard XML document format.
2.Storing all the contents into a centralised Content Management System (CMS).
3.Produce online products from the CMS (via an online publishing platform)
4.For paper products, one needs to combine the XML contents with a set of templates and then uses an XML typesetting engine to produce high quality PDF file, which can then be used to produce paper books.

However, this approach is expensive and takes a long time to implement.  Typical cost is in the range of 6M US$ and implementation time is 3 years plus.   With our XPE technologies, we can reduce the cost significantly to around 2M US$ but the implementation time is still significant because it involves organizational changes.


So, is there any simpler and quicker way to do online publishing?