Pkmadhu's Blog

At a conference on Publishing BPO services organized by CII in Chennai on 30^th October 2009, Bruce Johnson, Vice President, Pearson Education briefly mentioned about content development being the next outsourcing opportunity in his keynote address in the inaugural session. The rest of the conference did not dwell upon this interesting new opportunity.

Traditionally, acquisitions editing or sponsoring editing and marketing were considered core domains of publishers—and therefore a sacred in house activity, and beyond the  scope of service providers. The demarcation is a lot blurred today. Publishers of educational content have redefined themselves as being in the education or learning segment. Content per se has taken many forms and in many media beyond paper or print. The churning is on many fronts and the purpose of this post is not to dwell on the reasons for it.

Publishers will continue to decide on what to publish, how much to invest, how to exploit the IP rights assigned to them by authors and how to deliver content to their designated markets. Functionally, publishers have been outsourcing the value-add to content process, while retaining the sourcing of content aspect completely in house.

So what does sourcing content entail? In a nutshell, the twin goals of acquisitions editing (or development editing or content development) in educational publishing are content credibility and content marketability. So when a publishing company signs up an author or decides to work with an author in its area of focus, the acquisitions editor decides on the quality and suitability of the authorship. In addition, the entire process involves working closely with authors to develop content beyond the first draft of the author’s submission with respect to style, level, adequacy, need, additions, deletions, pedagogy and so on.

The process of acquisitions editing involves 1. Pre-publication peer reviews 2. Research into Syllabus, Competition, Content and Market. 3. Preparing Project Feasibility reports and 4. Working on and helping with marketing collaterals of the project.5. List Management. Of this 1, 2 and 4 are likely to be outsourced by publishers while retaining 3 and 5 as an in house activity.

But perhaps the biggest opportunities for outsourcing content development services are in the following:

1. Pre-publication peer reviews: This is perhaps the single most important validation function performed by publishers. Identifying reviewers, organizing the review, interpreting it, reporting feedback to the author, reviewing the author’s incorporation of changes are all part of the acquisitions function that can be successfully outsourced.
2. Research: The educational market for some topics is global and for many others very local. But with improved communication facilities, the analysis and comparison of a project in terms of syllabus, competition, market and content can be done from any location.
3. Pedagogical features: Publishers would require content in the nature of review questions, cases, caselets, application exercises, summary, and abstracts, and so on to be authored / sourced for their various projects.
4. Supplementary Material: This is a major requirement. Test banks, question banks, instructors guide, student guides, transparency masters, and so on.
5. Custom Publishing: Major publishers have realized the need to adapt, modify, alter, translate, and offer content to suit market requirements. Easy to adapt formats and utilizing master content to the fullest would be mantras for publishers and ideal opportunities for providing timely solutions for service providers.
6. Collaborative content development: The learning material of the future could be modular multi-format, multimedia offerings to cater to specific requirements of learning organizations. Publishers would look to leverage their content as well as collaborate on such content development. Herein is the opportunity for service organizations.

Can Indian firms handle development editing outsourcing? Yes, in the educational publishing segment, and better than we have handled copy editing thus far. We have the analytical talent to succeed in this sphere. Larger outsourcing companies especially those providing end-to-end solutions could easily gain the trust of publishers, work with them and evolve appropriate sign-offs to get cracking on this function.