Planman Technologies, global leader and pioneer in content digitization, has successfully completed a large scale project involving the digitization of all backlist titles for one of the leading academic publishers in Europe, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

The project required Planman to provide full suite of digitization and conversion services to convert the entire backlist of Books and Journals into PDFs and XML formats for John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Being a large and complex project, it required a high level of expertise in digital conversion, says Pieter Lamers, Production Manager, John Benjamins, Planman Technologies years of experience and world class infrastructure equipped with latest technology was helpful in converting our large number of titles in a short span without compromising on the quality of work. This will help us immensely in extending our reach to consumers digitally.

We are delighted to work with John Benjamins on such an important project, says Pawan Narang, VP Operations, Planman Technologies, Publishers today identify the value of e-content and hence choosing the right partner with demonstrable capabilities has become very important. To complement John Benjamins short and long term requirements, we devised specific workflows to accommodate multiple input formats and complexities in the conversion process in order to successfully deliver large number of titles in time sensitive deadlines.

About Planman Technologies: Planman Technologies is a global outsourcing firm with offices in US, India and Singapore. They collaborate with publishers and provide complete content services to include editorial development, page composition & design, proofreading, photo research & permissions, illustration development, and digital content creation and conversion services. Their specialties include K-12, Textbooks, Children's Reference, Library, Graphic Novels, Art & Illustrations, Flash Animation, e-content, Editorial development, Page composition & design, NIMAS conversions, Kindle & ePub, Newspaper Digitization. Some of their clients include OUP, Marshall Cavendish, Pearson, McGraw Hill, HMH, Harper Collins and many others.

About John Benjamins Publishing Company: John Benjamins Publishing Company is an independent, family-owned academic publisher headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, founded over 40 years ago. Over the years JB has been firmly rooted in every imaginable subfield of Language and Linguistics. Further fields of focus are Cognitive Science, Psychology, (Contemporary) Philosophy, Terminology, Information Design, Literary Studies and Art History. In the past decade, JB has been building a significant list of print and electronic publications. JB publications are selected under expert academic editorship and peer-reviewing by and for academic researchers and trainers, and include, in addition to works of pure research, excellent university-level course books.

For more information contact:

Planman Technologies Inc.
110 Boggs Lane Suite 100
Cincinnati, Ohio 45246
USA
Phone: 513-376-8370 (Office)
Email: sales@planmantechnologies.com
www.planmantechnologies.com

John Benjamins Publishing Company
P.O. Box 36224
NL-1020 ME AMSTERDAM
The Netherlands
Tel. +31-20-6304747
Email: customer.services@benjamins.nl

Planman Technologies, leaders in educational publishing solutions have teamed up with Strictly Spanish, leader in K–12 Spanish editorial development and translations. This partnership aims to offer a broader range of services to educational publishers while providing high quality, cost effective publishing solutions and services in English and Spanish languages.

“Strictly Spanish array of Spanish Translation services and 20+ years of experience in this field makes them aptly suited to be partnered with. Their expert Spanish language translations and/or adaptations would help our customers by expanding their products’ reach into the Spanish market. Strictly Spanish is a company that brings to the table an extremely rich experience of working with top-of-the-line educational publishers for a long time. Their expertise in handling time constraints and adding value to their client’s organization will be immensely valuable in this association,” says Orville Dykes, Director of Publishing Services, Planman Technologies. says Orville Dykes, Director of Publishing Services, Planman Technologies.

“Planman Technologies vast market experience, impressive range of capabilities, attention to detail and quality have placed them at the forefront of the production and page composition segment and make them a perfect company for Strictly Spanish to partner with in order to be able to offer our clients the benefits of a complete editorial/production solution. This association works because it brings together two very strong companies staffed with highly experienced people who share a common goal—passion for quality! For our clients, the workflow will be seamless and will look and feel like they are dealing with just one company,” says Susana C. Schultz, Senior Managing Director and Vice President of Editorial at Strictly Spanish.

About Planman Technologies: Planman Technologies is a global outsourcing firm with offices in U.S., India, and Singapore. They collaborate with publishers and provide complete content services to include editorial development, page composition & design, proofreading, photo research & permissions, illustration development, and digital content creation and conversion services. Their specialties include K-12, Textbooks, Children's Reference, Library, Graphic Novels, Art & Illustrations, Flash Animation, e-content, Editorial development, Page composition & design, NIMAS conversions, Kindle & ePub, Newspaper Digitization. Some of their clients include McGraw Hill, HMH, Pearson, Marshall Cavendish, Harper Collins, and many others.

About Strictly Spanish: Strictly Spanish is a business-to-business Spanish translation company located in the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area. They have been providing quality services to clients in need of professional English-to-Spanish translations and/or adaptations for over 20 years. Strictly Spanish Education, a Division of Strictly Spanish, is a leader in K–12 Spanish editorial development and translations and it is widely recognized for developing high-quality products, as well as for being one of the few U.S. companies with editorial offices in the U.S., Mexico, and South America staffed with native-speaking bilingual project managers, translators, editors, and writers. Some of their clients include McGraw Hill, HMH, Benchmark Education, Intel-Assess, TIME for Kids, and many others.

For more information contact:

Planman Technologies Inc
110 Boggs Lane Suite 100
Cincinnati, Ohio 45246
USA
Phone: 513-376-8370 (Office)
Email: sales@planmantechnologies.com
www.planmantechnologies.com

Strictly Spanish LLC
5714-D Signal Hill Court
Milford, Ohio 45150
(T) 513-248-2890
Email: info@strictlyspanish.com
www.strictlyspanisheducation.com
www.strictlyspanish.com

Planman Technologies is pleased to announce its new US market initiatives for the Year 2011 and beyond. The initiative includes the opening of its new office in Cincinnati, Ohio in July 2010 and the deployment of a strong and experienced Editorial & Project Management team with a view to enhance customer experience to complement the “Full Service” partnerships with Publishing Customers in USA.

We are also pleased to announce the appointment of Orville Dykes as Director of Publishing Services. Orville has worked in educational publishing for the past 40 years. With his extensive knowledge of the educational publishing business, his ability to set priorities and to establish schedules, he is experienced at leading both large and small publishing teams to success.

In his current role, he works closely with customers and operations teams to provide industry-leading services that meet the particular requirements and challenges of the K-12 market. A veteran in the field, he is experienced in all stages of production of complete basal programs, individual textbooks, ancillaries and supplemental materials, audio programs, CD-ROMs, videos, and online learning products.

Orville brings a strong combination of industry experience through his years of various experiences in the educational market. He has worked as Senior Buyer at McGraw-Hill, an owner of a pre press operation as well as Vice President of Customer Service with setting Pace.

Amit Vohra, VP sales of Publishing Services adds, “We opened the Cincinnati office in July with a new office and a robust team. We are encouraged by the response and intend to further expand the editorial development, photo research, and technology and composition capacities. Our ability to handle high volume, complex projects with demanding delivery schedules is key to be truly a “full service partner” to our clients. The developments are a key step towards building a strong presence in the U.S. market place."

About Planman Technologies: Planman Technologies is a global outsourcing firm with offices in U.S., India, and Singapore. They collaborate with publishers and provide complete content services to include editorial development, page composition & design, proofreading, photo research & permissions, illustration development, and digital content creation and conversion services. Their specialties include K-12, Textbooks, Children's Reference, Library, Graphic Novels, Art & Illustrations, Flash Animation, e-content, Editorial development, Page composition & design, NIMAS conversions, Kindle & ePub, Newspaper Digitization. Some of their clients include McGraw Hill, HMH, Pearson, Marshall Cavendish, Harper Collins, and many others.

For more information contact:

No other vendor has so much going on in the library space. With a clientele consisting of national libraries from around the globe, Planman offers end- to-end services ranging from microfilm scanning to data crunching. “We provide digital library support and portal development, metadata cre- ation, and schema conversion, taxonomy, METS/ALTO output and even cataloguing services.

We will be launching consulting services in devel- oping digital libraries soon,&rdquo says Vishal Salgotra, v-p of business development, adding that the demand for high quality content in different formats has increased two- to threefold in recent years. “Traditional book publishers are now more open to technology and are making strategic moves into the digital space in order to maintain their market leader- ship. At the same time, there are niche digital publishers that are seeing double- digit growth within just a few years of operation.&rdquo Naturally, Planman is investing heavily in crucial new technologies and software knowledge.

Among the new technologies thrown into focus are HTML5 and Flex. “There is huge interest from the U.K. and U.S. markets in these. We have done several interactive whiteboards [IWBs] and e-book projects using Flash/Flex in which our team handled everything from story- boarding, content writing, animating, illustrating, to programming. Develop- ing mobile and tablet apps is another area that we are working on aggressively,&rdquo says v-p of sales Amit Vohra. One recent proj- ect, Learn & Draw, aimed at eight- to 10-year-olds, effectively illustrates Plan- man's capabilities. The team developed digital components such as IWBs with interactive videos, background music, and animation to give kids a fun-filled experi- ence as basic facts about various subjects from the print product were included.

Last July, Planman opened a new office in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a strong and experienced editorial and project man-agement team to provide full-service sup- port to American publishing clients. One recent project in literature for grades six–12 fully illustrates the team's exper- tise. “For this project, our Cincinnati edi- torial team worked with the Delhi pro- duction team using a K4 InCopy work-flow,&rdquo says Orville Dykes, director of publishing services. “We will expand our Cincinnati office, enhance editorial devel- opment expertise in core subject areas, and continue building technology devel- opment capabilities, in our ongoing effort to be a valued partner to our clients.&rdquo

Planman Technologies in collaboration with xml-tekst developed 'ida-reader' for the dyslexic and visually impaired community. This product was launched at the 26th Annual CSUN Conference 2011 at San Diego.

The ida-reader is a user-friendly software product that has the ability to read aloud text content from a variety of file formats like Daisy 2.0/2.02, Daisy 3.0, HTML, RTF, XML or original book pages. The ida-reader reads full-text with TTS and also recorded audio.

The reader application has attractive features such as read aloud & text highlighting, bookmarks, text search, library etc., which have been incorporated keeping in mind the special needs of the people faced with challenges in reading text, like dyslexia.

From a publishers and institution standpoint, the software does file encryption at multiple levels and protects content which is critical to copyright laws.

Please visit www.ida-reader.com to learn more about the product and its unique features.

Planman Technologies has appointed

Orville Dykes

director of publishing services in its Cincinnati office. Dykes has been in educational publishing and manufacturing for 40 years and his appointment is part of Planman’s expansion in the U.S. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, Planman is a content solution provider in all aspects of developing and managing content in books, digital media, scholarly works, newspapers, journals, and magazines.

Random House Publisher Services announced two personnel changes in its sales and marketing group.

Chuck Errig

has been promoted to v-p, imprint sales director. In his 20 years at Random House, Errig has had a range of positions, from children’s production to telephone sales. Additionally,

Lane Jantzen

has been appointed v-p, sales director.

A robust and efficient single-source multichannel publishing system? That's the promise of the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) workflow. Now the question of XML adoption is no longer when or whether, but how soon. There is much urgency to digitize backlists and join the e-book bandwagon, to turn static pages into multimedia e-learning modules to interest the growing MTV fans and  read more

A robust and efficient single-source multichannel publishing system? That's the promise of the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) workflow. Now the question of XML adoption is no longer when or whether, but how soon. There is much urgency to digitize backlists and join the e-book bandwagon, to turn static pages into multimedia e-learning modules to interest the growing MTV fans and video gamers out there, to convert content into NIMAS/DAISY-compatible formats for the learning disabled and to reuse content to maximize its worth. For publishers, the XML workflow means efficiency, neutrality, flexibility, multiplicity, consistency and portability. It means the possibility of creating content once and publishing it in whole or in part in different platforms simultaneously.

The case for XML is overwhelming, and its dynamism has been tested and proven.

At Planman, some 200,000 pages have been converted into DAISY-compliant files for libraries in Europe and Australia. The company has also won a two-year DAISY conversion contract from a public library. “We are now actively promoting DAISY conversion services to major libraries, organizations and publishers worldwide,&rdquo says Amit Vohra, v-p of sales. In addition, Planman and its U.S.-based joint-venture partner, settingPace, completed close to 75,000 NIMAS-compliant pages for one publisher last year. “We have also converted MS Word and PDF into NIMAS-compliant XML for books, Web sites and handheld devices.&rdquo

As for interesting projects, Vohra recalls a geography series that required 35 ancillaries as well as transparencies. The tasks included designing maps, charts and graphs, and researching and writing original content and enrichment activities. “We had to find reliable sources of information and reference, maintain editorial consistency with the student book, manage the large volume of pages and, of course, meet the tight deadline. It involved the full scope of our content services--design, development and production.&rdquo

Library services and newspaper archiving are huge, too. Its team recently transcribed scanned images of bibliographic records in various languages into a customized record format with 99.995% accuracy. “We have been selected by the World Bank to undertake postproduction work that includes conversion of printed pages to XML and e-book formats such as PDF, ePub and MobiPocket, as well as files ready for on-demand printing. Our team converts about 5,000 printed pages into these formats every month,&rdquo says director Sourav Chatterjee, whose strategy for 2009 is to consolidate existing businesses through acquisitions. “Our success in winning several major projects in different segments, such as newspaper digitization, DTB production and creative services, should buffer us from the impact of the economic downturn.&rdquo

Over at Planman Technologies, also in Delhi, its design team is hard at work on an ongoing k--12 project chronicling the lives of icons such as Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. “Each title requires about 20 lifelike paintings with three weeks to deliver the final artwork. We have completed about 80 since the project commenced in May 2007,&rdquo says v-p of sales Amit Vohra, whose team is highly experienced in biblical and ancient history illustrations, such as of the Vikings. “We have handled more than 130 creative projects of varying sizes and levels of complexity. Take this five-book series that uses biblical stories to teach toddlers counting and shape identification. Since the initial client input was sketchy, we carried out detailed research on the various characters, costumes, habitats, etc. We then provided penciled illustrations to our client for comments, implemented the changes and did coloring. Three more rounds of corrections followed before delivery of final artwork. Usually, we finalize the art in the second round, except for complex projects like this.&rdquo

For greater efficiency, Vohra's 50 illustrators are task-specialized. A typical project team consists of illustrators who pencil the drawings; inkers and tracers who ink the penciled artwork; and coloring artists who do either digital or manual coloring. “Proper training is the key. We prefer to hire fresh fine arts graduates and postgraduates and have our art directors train them for specific tasks. It can take several months to a year to fully train a new artist--a long process indeed--but we can mold them according to our specific needs.&rdquo

Despite the challenges, more Indian content services vendors are adding creative services to their portfolio, thus complicating vendor selection. Starting with pilot projects would allow publishers to assess a vendor's experience, capabilities and market knowledge. Equally important is choosing a vendor that is focused on design and art services. Otherwise, the necessary creativity may be missing.

India's content services industry continues to buzz, loudly. For many multinational publishers, an average cost saving of 30% and a pool of top-notch Indian vendors are just what they need to survive the eat-or-be-eaten competition. For vendors, the latest statistics on the outsourcing business are music to their ears: a predicted 35% annual growth until 2010 and a still largely untapped $4 billion educational publishing market.

At Planman Technologies Image digitization is big , and one recent 225,000-image project says it all. “The images came from one of the world's largest archival houses, and the varied formats proved to be the greatest challenge. There were A4 and A3 prints, 6cm x 6cm and 35mm negatives, scrapbooks, transparencies and gaslight paper,&rdquo says v-p of sales Amit Vohra. “We put together a highly specialized team of image editors and photographers to finish this project within six months.&rdquo Planman has also digitized and converted about four million pages of newspapers, manuscripts, books and journals. “The deliverables were issue- and page-level PDFs, JPEG2000 and TIFF images, and XML files (in METS and ALTO). With such projects, the biggest hurdle was the non--English-language and the consequent large file size of the pages.&rdquo One of the largest newspaper digitization vendors around, Planman plans to scale up capacity from the present four million pages per annum to 7.5 million.

Digitization aside, a project from a leading k--12 publisher showcases the company's illustration and creative capabilities. “We were contracted to develop creative art for mathematics products targeting grades 9--12. About 14,000 art pieces were commissioned: 4,000 creative and the rest technical. We assigned a team of 10 illustrators to get through 100 to 150 creative art pieces and about 1,200 technical illustrations within four to five days,&rdquo adds director Sourav Chatterjee. Another k--12 job required composition, design and creative art services for a series of grades 3--6 books. “In total, there were 1,500 art pieces in this 2,400-page project. We also had to key in text from old editions as well as restyle and compose the pages. Maintaining design fluidity was crucial, as the client's requirements--design as well as editorial--kept changing throughout the project. Eventually, we deployed a team of two designers and 14 illustrators along with 30 production staff and completed this project within 12 weeks.&rdquo

Meanwhile, its state-of-the-art media studio is focused on 3D animation (feature films, TV series, short films, docudramas and home videos), games and multimedia products. Says Chatterjee, “We offer animation services for the medical, architectural, legal, and educational segments as well as virtual reality and game design for handheld devices, computers and game consoles. This segment is growing rapidly.&rdquo

Meanwhile, multinational publishers, now experienced in offshoring to India, are shrinking their vendor pool and consolidating accounts with mostly those offering full-service capabilities. It's definitely a great time to be one of the bigger vendors. But buyers are out there, not necessarily from the top 10 publishing houses. Smaller publishers are often more comfortable dealing with like-sized vendors giving their projects highly personalized attention. So, for vendors big and small, there are always plenty of fishes of different sizes out there.

Content services jobs heading for India used to be 100% in English. But with globalization and localization on every astute publisher's mind, releasing co-editions of core products and ancillaries is becoming commonplace. At the same time, English-language publishers aren't the only ones seeking out Indian vendors: Asian, Middle Eastern, Eastern European and Scandinavian publishers are following in their footsteps. As a result, languages with double-byte character sets (Chinese, Japanese), elaborate hyphenation and diacritics (Thai, Croatian), and right-to-left or bidirectional text (Arabic, Hebrew) have ceased to be as perplexing as they were a decade or so ago. For vendors, anything that is recognizable by computers and can be tagged in XML is fair game. Language-specific rendering scripts have made it possible.

Non-English newspaper conversion/digitization has long been a niche segment. V-p for international sales Amit Vohra recalled, “One of our earliest projects involved producing 50,000 pages of Arabic text, and we hired 30 linguists to ensure that both language and content were accurate. More recently, one 200,000-page Danish news agency project arrived at our door with a six-month deadline. We extracted the text using OCR technology and integrated Danish-language dictionary and hyphenation support into the QC workflow. The content was then converted into XML.&rdquo

Planman has also been digitizing Norwegian newspapers--the daily Aftenposten as well as Adresseavisen and Trondades--for the National Library of Norway. “We usually receive microfiches, which are scanned at 300 dpi grayscale. We process the scanned pages according and deliver the final output in several formats: issue-level PDF, page-level PDF, JPEG2000 compressed image and XML,&rdquo explained director Sourav Chatterjee.

Every month, Planman processes about five non--English-language projects--two newspaper digitizations and three general content conversions--which make up roughly 40% of its output. Besides the languages mentioned above, it has also tackled French, German, Welsh, Swedish and Hebrew projects. “Text extraction and quality assurance are the biggest challenges in non-English projects, especially when special characters and diacritics are involved,&rdquo added Vohra, whose team has just completed two Spanish-language el-hi projects comprising a total of 2,500 pages that require the full treatment: composition, formatting and proofreading.

On Planet Content Services, your asset is sliced, diced, spliced, structured, dechunked, formatted and channeled through a variety of platforms. In between, it also gets animated, fattened (or trimmed) and slicked up for optimum results. That's Content Transformation 101: (Over-)Simplified, skipping the veritable alphabet soup teeming with mostly three-letter acronyms (XML, PDF, DTD, CSS, OCR, TeX-get the drift?)

Understandably, it's hard to retrofit a print-centric model into one primed for multichannel publishing and capable of absorbing the slew of new technologies bombarding the industry. But you don't have to go the whole nine yards into XML universe right from the get-go and break out in hives. Logically, not every publication needs to be deep-coded to the nth layer. (Okay, now take a deep breath and relax.)

The most important thing is this: you can depend on your vendor to hold your hand, wipe your brow and add value to your content. And once you decide to jump into the outsourcing wave, you are in fact in excellent company (literally).

Planman's threefold growth in publishing projects over the last 12 months is no accident. "Basically, toward end of 2005, we identified a potential segment and we aimed for it. We expanded our graphics and illustration capabilities and gave our designers and artists intensive training in publishing requirements. What happened next was a surprise: our new capabilities started pulling in full-color elhi projects in bigger volumes. A case in point: in January 2006, we were doing about 800 to 1,000 pages per month for one client; today, we're delivering an average of 5,000 pages. Another elhi client has also increased its volume to about 5,000 pages during the same period," says v-p of sales Amit Vohra. "The expansion has resulted in more editorial and other developmental services being offered to make up an A-Z range of project management support." Thus said, Planman gets projects involving illustration and creative services aplenty. "We recently completed one 252-page full-color book in which 184 of the 268 pieces of artwork had to be created from scratch," says director Sourav Chatterjee, who has 50 illustrators and designers among his 800 staff. "Another project involving copyediting and typesetting of 229 full-color pages required approximately 200 illustrations."

On the editorial side, Planman is taking on writing of technical reports and conference proceedings. "The latter are time-critical projects allowing little to no margin for error or delay. Upon receipt of the project, our team makes a detailed analysis of the client's requirements and prepares the style sheet," says Vohra. "Next, we check the formatting, generate the abstracts, keywords, references and headers, and produce the author index and table of contents. The files then go through a final quality audit before being uploaded."

Over at its newspaper publishing section, its imaging team handles image archiving and data processing from microfiche, while another 500 personnel convert legacy data to XML. So far, over 400,000 pages of newspaper content have been converted, and these projects come from mostly European publishers. But Planman does not stop at just conversion. "Take the case of the Manchester United soccer team photobook: it was not in our client's original plan, which was just to archive the newspaper pages. But the potential for such a book became apparent as the project progressed, and we brought it to our client's attention," says Chatterjee. "Helping clients create new revenue streams from their content is one value-added service that Planman offers. As the enabler in the content transformation process, we are in a great position to help identify the opportunities as they arise."

In the publishing BPO world, everything is contentcentric. Using XML technologies and standards, you as the publisher can now create the content once and publish that same content--in different forms--over many channels, such as via your Web site, on CD-ROM or as e-book files.

With its New York office soon to be opened, Planman is shifting from being U.K.-centric--90% of its clientele is British--to seeing more North American activity. Says senior manager for business development Amit Vohra, "About 65% of our revenue comes from the publishing sector with the rest from other BPO transactions. The publishing projects, 70% books and 30% journals, are handled by our 200-strong Okhla publishing division."

At Planman, part of India's largest multi-interest consulting and business services corporation, its e-paper solution for the newspaper publishing industry is unique in the marketplace. "We are the first India-based company to offer an e-paper solution that addresses conversion of both current and archival content for the Arabic newspaper market. We are currently contracted by a leading U.K.-based newspaper publishing group to convert about 1,500 pages daily from 17 tabloids. The project cycle time is tight: the PDFs would be FTP-ed across at around 4 a.m. Indian time, and we have a four-hour window to deliver the XML files. So we structured the work flow to have most of the XML tagging and special characters converted automatically, and at a very high accuracy level. We also created the digital edition for Web publishing using customized XSL/T, which is then transferred to a user interface specifically designed by our Web development team."

For one monthly project of two secondary-level textbooks, Vohra's team takes on the design and prepress tasks. "We have about three weeks from receipt of edited manuscript to first InDesign-based PDF proofs. Each title has over 250 illustrations, and we often have to either redraw or color according to the artwork brief provided. Upon completion, the pages would go to our on-site project manager for approval before they are FTP-ed to our client. We have four days to incorporate the changes, if any, before printing the second proofs." Planman also offers e-book conversion, abstracting and indexing, nondestructive book scanning, photo research and syndication liaison, as well as content development.

Operations-wise, the company is comparatively small, but therein lies its strength. "It allows us to personalize our service to suit each client's needs. We have the advantage of knowing up close and understanding our client's projects and the markets they serve, and being able to conduct our own research to help them work better and generate new products using existing content. By the same token, our team presents a cohesive single-control operation, thus streamlining the work flow, eliminating redundancies and keeping costs low. We are now focused on further developing the relationships we have with the existing clientele, increasing our international presence and strengthening our publishing services capabilities."