The idea behind the conclave was to encourage publishers to embrace the emerging technologies in the digital space to find new avenues to market their content and find hitherto untapped customers.   

The conclave was moderated by Dr Shantanu Ganguly, fellow, knowledge management division, TERI and the presentations were made by Garima Babbar, head of strategic alliances, education and skill development, South Asia, Adobe Systems and Dr Priya Rai, university librarian, National Law University.  

The use of digital in publishing has gone through a sea-change since the first Kindle was launched some 11 years ago. Now, eBooks are just a small component of the story. Now, the buzzword is interconnectivity. Now, publishers need to develop content which are platform-neutral so that the same content can be read or heard or viewed, in print or mobile phone or laptop or other digital devices. Now, the focus is on Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (AR).

It’s especially important for education publishers to embrace these emerging technologies as a majority of the students today are digital natives who are more adept in finding information online on their devices than reading a printed book.

“Therefore, it’s paramount for publishers today to explore the emerging technologies and harness their benefits to their advantages,” Prasad Rao, CMD, MAP Systems, said in his welcome address.

The fourth industrial revolution is upon us and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There will be disruptions and its time publishers learned to work with it.

“The way knowledge is consumed has changed today and this can lead to exciting possibilities. With the emerging technologies, there will be new players in the value chain. But there will also be new products and processes for publishers to explore,” Group Captain PA Naidu, additional director general, Prasad Bharati, said.

Displaying the possibilities of what the emerging technologies can do, Subhasis Ganguli, director, MAP Systems, demonstrate a visiting card embedded with AR image recognition, which can be scanned by a smartphone to view the details.

Saying that with digital technologies we add more data in two days than what humanity has produced from the beginning until 2017, during his presentation on ‘An agile roadmap for the future,’ Ganguly stressed on a customer-oriented approach to business.

Meanwhile, Babbar spoke about the approaches to educating students for the future and Rai spoke about issues on digital rights management.  

MAP Systems offers services in domains such as digital conversation (book conversation, XML conversation, XBRL conversation, digital achieving); virtual reality (AR and VR); digital pre-press (typesetting, indexing, document scanning, OCR conversation and digital graphics, including 3D services.