Why XML Is Important

This blog is probably most interesting to the editorial folks at Thomas Nelson, because it will affect their jobs more than others’ jobs. Marketing will be the next most affected; XML will be an important tool to help them market our books. Finally, sales will love it, because XML will drive greater volume across multiple formats.

But you ask, “What is XML?” It’s Extensible Markup Language, of course. And then you ask a bit more irritated, “What is Extensible Markup Language and why do I care?” Here is why you care: XML allows us to create content once, and then nearly simultaneously turn that content into many different formats. We are more consumer-friendly. By launching all those formats, we sell more of our content more quickly.

Yep, we will be able to “tag” the content once, and then make a printed book, e-book, Iphone app, Ijournals and other formats that might be interesting to our changing consumer much more quickly. While there are many advantages to XML, here are three big advantages:

Multi-formats - Ability to produce multiple formats quickly, as indicated above.

Marketing – As online marketing continues to drive book awareness, XML allows for fast retrieval and delivery of relevant content to promote the book in a variety on online communities and marketing tools.

Productivity – Productivity gains come in several ways. For traditional books, Debbie Eicholtz finds that she cuts her department’s processing time on a typical trade book. It is too early to tell how much productivity can be gained, but it could be as much as 40-50% in some functions. Most companies consider an annual 4% productivity gain a good year, so even if the savings is a fraction of the 40-50% throughout the process it’s a good thing. That, however, is just the start. With XML, it is also much less expensive to create other formats.

So, how does XML provide all of these benefits? XML identifies all the content components in a manuscript. XML is “format agnostic”. That means it identifies the content’s components, and then can feed those components to the various tools that create other formats much more easily. Or, maybe we want to publish a custom or new book on Christian parenting. If our books are in XML, we could quickly create a new product based on searching the exsiting titles in Thomas Nelson's catalog for related content. There will be much we can do with XML. If you want to learn even more click on this blog for additional information.

Note that we have to “tag” the content to gain the advantages of XML. And, this is where there is some extra work for our editorial folks. Editors have to spend more time initially to prepare a title’s content. This is accomplished by simply working in the editor’s currently preferred native format of Microsoft Word. The editors apply more structure to the document. The additional structure allows the publishing process to easily separate the content from its presentation. This separation is important for simultaneously accommodating the different displays, for example, for various e-book formats.

We have had several successful pilots preparing our content in format-agnostic XML. Bryan Norman, Michael Stephens, Jennifer McNeil and McKenzie Howard have all participated in pilots for the company. It is additional work for them, but we are beginning to see the benefits. Many thanks to these pioneers for leading this important initiative.

The day is coming when we will be 100% XML on new titles. In addition, we have a company in India converting many of our backlist titles to XML as well. Why do this? Because more and more our consumers want our content in other formats besides the 600 year-old book. The consumer is always right.