Skip to main content

U-Cal Press, Calif. Digital Library Partner to Build Open Source Academic Publishing Platform

4726628019_a297db9b67_bThe consumer trade ebook market may get the majority of the press attention but it’s not the total sum of the digital publishing industry.

In academic publishing, for example, the print book is dying off, and taking college bookstores with it. This has lead to the development of new digital publishing tools, including a new platform, Editora, which was announced a couple weeks back and should be launching sometime next year.

From the University of California Press blog:

We’re excited to announce that the University of California Press and California Digital Library have partnered with Collaborative Knowledge Foundation to develop, Editoria, a new open source, digital-first  book production platform.

UCP and CDL sought a highly flexible open source platform that could be easily adopted by other publishers. CKF began development on its PubSweet technology framework in October 2015 and early versions of key components are discoverable on GitLab. The platform is component-based, which means that it can be assembled in many different ways to meet the needs of book or journal workflows.

CKF, UCP and CDL are taking a collaborative approach to product design and development and will be launching a site to make this methodology transparently available to the public in the coming weeks. The Editoria project will progress through 2016 with a launch in early 2017.

What with footnotes, endnotes, complex illustrations, and a bibliography, your average academic title functions under different constraints than the typical ebook.

While free apps like Sigil can be used to make an academic title, they’re not the best tool for turning a manuscript into a monograph. And with most academic publishing using paid apps and services from the likes of Adobe, there’s plenty of cost-savings to be had.

InfoDocket

image by Jude Doyland

Similar Articles


No Comments


Write a Comment