Fast Forward

Saving Weeks in Time-to-Market

The time saved by not waiting for the conversion processors to convert the content from InDesign to various ebook formats was a few days, but that’s not the only production process Atlas streamlines.

Before Atlas, “conversion from Word to InDesign probably took 1½–2 weeks,” Dan says. “And entering edits could take 4–5 days—there could be literally thousands of edits—in addition to 3–4 days for conversion to MOBI and EPUB.”

With Atlas, authors can easily write directly into the Atlas editor and the content can be converted to designed “pages” with the push of a button, eliminating 1½–2 weeks from the production cycle in that one step alone.

Collaborative, Concurrent Copyediting

Editors, technical reviewers, copy editors, and proofreaders can all be invited as collaborators and make their changes directly in Atlas. Atlas’s version control allows Dan’s team to review all suggested changes and approve them (or not). They can see who instituted each change. And they can compare the latest version to any previous version—and revert to a previous version instantly. This saves 4–5 days of painstakingly entering edits, and prevents most of the version-control headaches that working with multiple revisions can evoke.

One-Step Conversion and Output

With the push of a button, Atlas renders content into print-ready PDF, web-optimized PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and website (every major format in the market today). This saves 3–4 business days, which O’Reilly’s production team formerly spent sending the final files to an outside vendor to be converted to ebook formats and waiting for their return.

With traditional production processes, producing subsequent editions can be even more cumbersome. “When you start a second edition, you have to take the content all the way back to Word, which can really be quite expensive,” Dan explains. “And then you start the production process all over again. It’s a shame, really.”

With Atlas, O’Reilly’s production editors simply “fork” the last version of the book in Atlas, revise it, and push a button to convert it into a range of print and ebook formats, saving weeks in the process.

Ease of Errata

Atlas’s push-button publishing also makes corrections easy.

If an error is found in an ebook, for example, Dan can simply go into the Atlas source file, make the correction, build the new formats (by selecting the desired formats on a checklist and pushing a button), and then review the output to confirm that the correction is made as desired.

The corrected version of the ebook can be available for sale on oreilly.com within 24 hours of the discovery of the error. (It might take longer for it to appear on other sites, like Amazon, depending on the internal workflows for those distributors.) If it’s an egregious error, once it’s fixed in the files Dan can build a print PDF with the same button push, and a new version will be on its way to O’Reilly’s on-demand printer the same day.

Time is money. And money is money.

Dan estimates that in addition to the time saved using Atlas, he saves at least 5–6 dollars per page in initial conversion costs (Word to InDesign) and another 75 cents per page for conversion to MOBI and EPUB. His books average about 350 pages, so he saves roughly $2300 per book in hard costs alone.

Traditional backward conversion for subsequent editions (from production files back to Word) can range from $2 a page for standard text content up to $6 a page for more complex content. With Atlas, backward conversion is no longer necessary.

The Learning Curve

“I was really surprised how quickly Atlas was adopted here,” Dan says, “Particularly since we were using the command-line version of Atlas. A couple of people started using it, and the floodgates just opened. It really swept through production. I anticipated a steeper learning curve and more resistance.”

To use Atlas, O’Reilly Media’s production team had to switch from using DocBook XML to AsciiDoc. Dan says it wasn’t a particularly difficult change, as AsciiDoc is a bit more intuitive than DocBook XML. Because they began with an earlier version of Atlas, Dan says the most challenging part of converting to Atlas production was bringing indexers up to speed in AsciiDoc. (That’s no longer an issue, as the current version of Atlas has robust indexing tools built in to enable embedded indexing and dynamic cross-referencing.)

Easily Customized Templates

Atlas comes with professionally designed templates, but publishers can easily create their own, using CSS to match their existing branding and interior designs.

“If you were coming from a traditional publishing production process, you would probably have every skill set you need, except possibly CSS,” says Dan. “CSS is pretty ubiquitous, so it wouldn’t be hard to find the training or employee you need, or to have your templates set up in CSS by a contractor. There may be some page template or design element that you can’t re-create in CSS, but we haven’t run across it yet.”

Once a customized template is created, formatted content is built with the push of a button, and each format—print, ebook, web—will render instantly with those unique branding, style, and design elements.

Atlas also enables embedded video, audio, interactive data visualizations, code, interactive widgets, etc., in any format that supports them. So, for example, it’s easy to insert a video in the web version of the content, while in the printed book, it will appear as a static image (with, perhaps, the URL for the video). It’s a simple selection within the Atlas editor. “The author doesn’t need to be a geek to embed non-text content,” Dan says. “It’s a pretty friendly, easy process.”

New Publishing, New Tools

The plethora of new reading platforms has been a boon to readers, who can now access content on any device and in any format they prefer. But publishing to so many new reading platforms has introduced challenges that make traditional publishing process much less efficient and more expensive.

Atlas allows traditional book production to catch up to new digital formats and the breakneck speed of modern publishing.

“If I was still using the traditional book production process, I would be making the case to management that we need to invest in resources to move toward Atlas,” Dan insists. “The traditional processes are inefficient, expensive, and ill-suited to digital-first products.”