Automating digital book layout: towards a digital first model

Print and digital books in education

Digital book reading is on the rise¹. According to the 2024 Book Usage Barometer published by the Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE), around 12 million people in France read at least one digital book in 2023. Digital formats now coexist with printed books in reading habits.

Meanwhile, students continue to mark their attachment to printed books. A 2018 study showed that students who used a tablet for reading were in the minority². More recent studies confirm that while reading practices are diversifying (print, digital, audio), print remains the preferred medium for long-form reading and studying. Printed books are still largely dominant in reading habits in France, even among younger audiences. Today, formats are seen as complementary rather than competing.

Digital technology has its advantages, particularly in terms of the “active engagement” necessary for learning³: exercises such as quizzes with immediate answers can help both the student and the teacher.
It is no longer a question of opposing the two media, but of considering that they complement each other. Some publishers specialized in the academic domain have requested that we provide a Print-Digital workflow so that teachers can bring readers to the relevant content regardless of the medium used.

Publisher’s challenges

Digital transformation is a major challenge for book publishers in the education sector who have to conciliate the need to:

• Generate revenue, still mostly related to the sale of printed books;
• Evolve their offer to meet the growing expectations of digital media;
• Maintain margins by optimizing production processes.

The ability to produce print books, ebooks and digital content simultaneously is now a key competitive factor.

Digital First: producing print and digital books from a single source

J2S helps publishers implement a “Digital First” approach, a true multi-channel solution that consists in generating the different media from the same digital content, as we have done with our partner Gutenberg Technology for publishers such as Cengage Learning, Vista Learning, Pivot Point, etc.

The promise of Digital First is to cut in half the time required for the print and digital publication of a book. With a traditional production model that deals sequentially with print and digital, the publication of a book takes about 17 months.

With a Digital First approach and automated digital book layout, this timeline can be significantly reduced.

Automating print and digital book layout

As far as print is concerned, the main lever for optimizing production is to automate the layout of the content as much as possible so that editors, or even authors, can see the result of their work without having to call on the typesetting department. Thus, the work of composition will start when the contents are validated to reduce as much as possible the exchanges of PDFs sent by email.

This editorial layout automation generally relies on:

• structured content;
• editorial metadata;
• composition rules embedded in InDesign;
• automated document generation.

Illustrated books and automation

Automating the layout of illustrated books in InDesign? Impossible, people often think, until we prove it!

How can our solution handle complex layout variations in long documents?

It all starts with the metadata: when content is properly formalized in the content management system (which is also necessary to produce EPUB-compliant ebooks), authors and editors unknowingly deliver the necessary information that will allow us to trigger the correct layout of the elements they create.

The authoring interface of the MEF solution from our partner Gutenberg Technology.

According to the editorial guidelines, it is the presence of a content category in the data stream that triggers the layout control in the InDesign document. Thus, the main text flow can be interrupted by:

• a box;
• an image with caption and credit;
• a definition;
• an educational block.

For example, the definition of a term created during input in an authoring system such as MEF⁴ will be positioned next to the defined term, in the margin of the generated InDesign document.

The magic lies in our know-how and technology⁵ which come together to produce complex documents automatically from a single structured content source.

Layout automation: beyond digital books

While automating digital book layout is now a key lever for publishers, these technologies can be applied to many other types of publications.

The same principles can also be used to automate the production of:

• magazines;
• editorial brochures;
• training catalogues;
• reports and institutional publications;
• multichannel educational content.

From structured content and composition rules, it becomes possible to automatically generate multiple publication formats, while maintaining editorial and visual consistency.

This approach enables publishers and organizations to produce faster, across more channels, with controlled production costs.

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If you are also interested in automating the layout of your content from your information system, please contact us , we will be pleased to share our experience!

R. Loubéjac

Cofounder of J2S