1. Implementing XML Workflow:
The Road Taken
John Atkins
Professional & Trade Group
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
June 2, 2010
1

2. About John Wiley & Sons
 Professional and Trade Group
 Annual Books:
1500 titles; ~600,000 pages
 Annual Journals:
65 titles; 527 issues; ~23,000 pages
 Subjects:
 Business, Technology, Travel, Cooking,
Architecture, Psychology, Education
2

3. Our Goals
 To have structured content available
 Immediate customer use
 For future retrieval and reuse
 To integrate XML into the editorial and
production process
 XML is as much a priority as the printed
content
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 3

4. Our Strategy
 Get organized!
 Began with multiple DTDs
 Books, journals, online books, articles
 We spent several years developing one
solution for everything: Schema
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 4

5. Considerations for Developing
Business Requirements
 What does the customer want?
 What would I want to be able to search,
retrieve, and reuse?
 Am I taking into account all variant content
structure (books, MRWs, journals, etc.)
 Can I standardize like elements across
publications to create custom publications?
 How granular do I need to get? (rights,
pedagogy, marketing)
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 5

6. How to Get XML?
 Up or down stream?
 Write manuscripts in XML?
 Pro – you have valid XML through entire publishing
cycle
 Con – infrastructure/resources/training - $$$$
 Convert content to XML later?
 Pro – leaves more of editorial process intact;
experts handle the XML
 Con - Separating editorial processes from XML
requires reinterpretation.
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 6

7. Word Up-stream!
 Most authors comfortable with Word
 Developed templates to help structure manuscripts in
production
 Word is ubiquitous
 Styling manuscripts more similar to traditional
typemarking
 Style names describe semantic function
 Formatting provides visual cues but does not reflect
book design
 Editorial focus on content, not designing in Word
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 7

8. Word
Mss
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 8

9. Design
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 9

10. Where’s the XML?
 Created by suppliers who specialize in
XML preparation
 Expertise doesn’t have to be in-house
 Use style names in our template to
automate/facilitate conversion process
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 10

11. XML
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 11

12. John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 12

13. Two books in one?
 Processing full-text XML can be nearly
equivalent to another book production
cycle
 How do you streamline the process so that
book and XML are updated in parallel?
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 13

14. Our XML Solution
 All titles go into XML workflow
 Template provides skeletal structure to
facilitate XML creation
 Weconvey special XML considerations
separately
 Compositors create XML file first, and use
it to drive book layout
 XML is ready at/near publication
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 14

15. Advantages
 XML is on-hand when needed most
 Post-processing on request takes several
weeks longer
 Process is predictable and manageable
 And less expensive
 We’re building an extensive XML library
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 15

16. Trade-offs
 Word is flat, XML is multi-dimensional
 Conversion requires some decision-making
for the compositors (interpretation!).
 Quality control must be considered
 Not everything is used
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 16

17. Where We Are Now
 >90% of our content is converted to XML
for future use
 Editors are trying alternative publishing
formats
 Custom publications
 Premium Web content
 Whatever comes next…
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 17

18. Words of advice…
 Try to get the most accurate business requirements from
the start
 What do you need? How much detail? How will you
get it?
 Updates are complicated and time-consuming to
implement
 Capture semantics – not design
 Be flexible: There will be changes, so allow for them
 Build relationships with suppliers with expertise - we
didn’t get here on our own
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 18

19. Above all…
 Get organized
 It will save you lots of time downstream
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 19

20. <slide position=“last”>
<p> THANK YOU </p>
<p> And good luck!</p>
</slide>
John Atkins/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, June
2, 2010 20