After lunch, I attended a great presentation from Ian Williams of John Wiley & Sons, a publishing firm that serves the higher education arena and differentiates itself from the competition by providing a customized publishing solution called Wiley Custom Select. The solution, which runs on MarkLogic Server, provides professors with an online portal where they can create custom textbooks for their courses by remixing both content from previously published books in the WIley catalog and materials provided (perhaps created) by the teacher.
From the perspective of the instructor, the site works much like SafariU, another MarkLogic-powered custom publishing tool.
Williams started the presentation with a hysterical video demonstrating the old school way of reusing content from previously published books to create custom textbooks. In the video, innocent books have their spines sliced off, their guts ripped out, and then the dreaded 3 hole punch! LOL You get the picture [and I’ll post the video here later].
Customization is a drag-and-drop function, no coding or specialized knowledge is needed. The service provides a cover-building feature that allows teachers to design a book cover, preview it in near real-time.
Content is output to a variety of formats, and styles and the site supports both black-and-white and full color printing options. Completed books can be printed or delviered as e-Books to the students.
XML guru Norm Walsh, whom I interviewed recently, also addressed the audience briefly, explaining exactly how Wiley Custom Selects works behind the scenes. He made it clear that much, if not nearly all, of the processing takes place with XQuery and MarkLogic Server and does not rely on some of the many tricks others use to attempt to accomplish similar feats.
Need additional information? You can reach Ian Williams at iawillia@wiley.com or via telephone at +1 201-748-8703.
