Recent years have seen the invention of a plethora of new digital media, from self-marking activities to smart ebooks, from podcasts to animations and games. But even now, the print components of a course are often favoured by teachers and students as the crucial hub of a course, even when enhanced by these digital innovations.
Avallain has great respect for print, partly in recognition of educational tradition, and also acknowledging, as engineers, the technological superiority of print as an undemanding, always operational, visual and haptic carrier of information. Nevertheless we understand that for publishers, the duplication of effort between print and digital production creates a significant strain on time and budgets. It stands to reason that removing this duplication would enable the industry to give greater focus to creativity of commissioning, authorship and design, and to make full use of the strengths of each medium, separately, and in combination.
With these as our principles, we have long researched the ideal blend of print and digital workflows. This journey led us to our partner Seinet, a provider based in Madrid that has its origins in editorial content management systems for print magazines, but now provides smart content management to support the diverse needs of modern publishing. Their outstanding Xtent solution is centred upon an abstracted content database, and achieves flatpanel layouting, InDesign integration and many input and output transformations at scale and speed. Combining this power with Avallain Author, our authoring solution, provides something unique: transparent editing, output to print and digital, with the kind of version, state and permissions control you would expect from an advanced content management system.
Consider, then, a typical multi-component course involving textbooks and accompanying interactive content for apps and a learning platform. Discover a typo? One intervention fixes it for reprint, for download and immediate use online. Need to modify a heading in the app and carry that change through to the learning platform and the next print edition? One edit does it all. Keen to create new ancillary content for digital and then print a loose-leaf edition to go with it? We have you covered. And all this within a controlled, tracked workflow that retains the quality and editorial rigor expected in great publishing.
This integration of Avallain Author and Xtent is already being piloted at our major publishing clients, and we are excited by early results. If you would like to join the blended publishing revolution, please contact us to enter the program.
Ignacio Megasias, CEO of Seinet, says: “We are delighted to be working with Avallain to bring the best of content management to a new kind of educational publishing: one which frees authors and editors to focus on the quality and creativity of the content, while intelligent tools manage publication to a range of media and devices. In this way we hope to make educational publishing more efficient, more responsive, and at the same time, more innovative.”
Max Bondi, Product Manager of Avallain Author, says: “The pioneering blend of Avallain’s expertise in dynamic digital authoring, and Seinet’s pedigree in smart content management, promises a new era in educational publishing. Our integrated service provides publishers with new efficiencies, while extending their reach across print and digital. We are looking forward to involving other clients in our pilot project over the coming months.”
Seinet is an independent, privately owned company based in Madrid, providing publishing platforms to the global education and media industries. Founded in 2001 with the mission to deliver a “create once, publish anywhere” content management solution, Seinet has moved from traditional print media to become the only content management system provider to integrate both publishing and e-learning functionality.
InDesign is a Trademark of Adobe.
Contact
Daniel Seuling, Head of Communications, dseuling@avallain.com
