Publishers’ journey towards digital has involved a paradigm shift. Digital channels offer easy access to audiences, diverse content that engages learners & consumers, and the capability to track content consumption.
With the right tech in place, content creators, publishers, and instructors can easily amplify their content reach, deduce content preferences, and measure the performance of their content and the learners.
Today, digital content is often the preferred choice of consumers. Its benefits for publishers are numerous - cost efficiency, content diversity, ease of providing an enriching learning experience to users, greater customer reach, new revenue streams, and more.
The ease of creation, distribution, and reach and the additional benefits mentioned above provide publishers with another avenue of engaging with customers along with traditional publishing.
A robust, feature-packed, and future-ready digital publishing platform is the key to effectively adapting to and streamlining the continuously changing process of quality content creation, publishing & distribution.
The secret to staying at the edge of the curve in the competitive publishing industry can often come down to several system attributes.
Here are five key capabilities/features you should look out for in a digital publishing platform:
Content-first
Content is the key to getting the industry's pulse and delivering on expectations. While traditional ways can divert the focus, digital publishing allows publishers to have a content-first approach where the prime factors behind success are quality and diversity of content.
Your publishing platform must be flexible and dynamic enough to accommodate varied content types (eBooks, documents, presentations, flashcards, videos, etc.) to help you produce the most effective and engaging content that sets you apart as a leader in the industry. The platform should evolve with the changing content type needs over time.
An effective digital publishing platform will equip you with the necessary features to create high-quality content that is engaging, informative, interactive, and versatile for the audience.
Personalization
Digital publishing platforms are widely used to create digital learning content, courses, modules, etc. A key feature of successful digital learning courseware is that it should allow students to learn at their own pace. Make sure your publishing platform not just enables you to create good digital content but also allows you to offer the same at the convenience of the users.
The capability of your digital publishing platform to deliver content that adapts to the learner's pace and learning abilities can make a difference in your brand as a successful digital publisher.
Analytics/Insights
Unless we measure performance, there is no way to tell how effective a particular program or platform is. The same applies to online teaching, eLearning, and digital learning programs. Unless you can track users'/learners' learning, progress, and content consumption, you can't say for sure how effective and impactful your courses and your platform are.
A digital publishing platform that equips you with learning analytics and insights about your content and its consumers can be a great value add.
Such tracking can generate actionable insights that can lead you to make the right decision around your content, your content consumer, or the market.
A typical use case example would be the comproDLS publishing suite. It uses advanced data architecture and an analytics engine that captures a wide range of data points.
With key performance data points around engagement, learning depth, learner performance and preference, user activity, etc., you can check the performance of your content and for which learner.
Access to such data enables you to make decisions like changing the content and content type, assisting the learner with supplementary material, or changing the pedagogy for a set of learners who show a particular learning pattern.
With such learning analytics data, your users will see value when your platform guides them through identifying possibly weak areas and how to improve.
Open Standards/Interoperability
Cross compatibility, integrations, and interoperability are a must-have in any tech solution today. We use many tools from different vendors to create, store and move information and data from point A to point B. Sometimes these specialized tools can be expensive, especially if they are uncommon or the requirement is very niche.
Your digital publishing platform must allow you to integrate and incorporate other tools and options for greater functionality - like content creation, design, digitization, publication, circulation, etc.
Sometimes our content sources are scattered, or our resources are hosted on 3rd party storage platforms. It becomes necessary to have third-party integration options that simplify information access, transfer, management, and use from multiple streams in one convenient place.
Pro Tip: Having Open Standards like IMS LTI, TinCan, OpenID, etc. saves time and money by allowing you to use non-restrictive, non-proprietary, and non-premium technology to connect to existing user information systems, payment processing systems, management systems, data lakes, etc.
Accessibility
A massive gain of "digital publishing" is the number of people you can engage. With traditional print publications, content creation, circulation and consumption are restricted. However, with digital production, you can reach a larger user base globally who may have different learning abilities and special needs.
As a digital content provider, it becomes your responsibility to ensure maximum learner compatibility.
To make your content accessible to people with varied abilities, ensure you look for a platform that offers "accessibility" features to support all kinds of learners. You can check if your chosen platform complies with the internationally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Accessibility features like Keyboard Navigation (compatible with assistive technologies that'll ensure that all keyboard users can interact with the content like touch users), Transcripts, and Closed Captions (allows you to present content in multiple forms to support varied learning ability needs such as large fonts, speech or symbols), Accessible Color Palette User Interfaces (to support contrast requirements of the WCAG 2.1 guidelines); and Screen Reader Support (to ensure accessible content creation even via 3rd party tools).
With the "Accessibility" features built into your Digital Publishing Platform, you can start focusing on creating quality content that can serve the globe and target a wider audience, including people with different challenges and learning abilities.
While working on this piece for you, we researched some globally used Digital Publishing Platforms and noticed one particular platform – comproDLS. It is a next-generation publishing solution - a ready-to-deploy digital publishing suite packed with these essential features and many others.
It's a delight to know that brands like Cambridge University Press & Vista Higher Learning use the comproDLS suite to power their publications.
So, we highly recommend you check it out here: www.comprotechnologies.com.
