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Outsourced e-publishing slated for rapid growth

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: India is becoming a hot destination for outsourced e-publishing work since the country's firms are charging a sixth of the prices prevailing in the West, an seminar organised by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has found.

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The industry is growing at an annual rate of 35 percent, experts said.

"Our outsourcing opportunities in the value-added and core services such as copy editing, project management, indexing, media services and content deployment will help us make the publishing BPO ventures worth $1.46 billion by 2010," said Sriram Subramanya, vice-chhairman of CII Puducherry.

Despite India becoming a highly sought after destination for publishing majors abroad, the available human resource is one of the major constraints, Subramanya told IANS.

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"My organisation is developing talent amongst homemakers in Puducherry to combat dropouts from jobs after extensive training. Our in-house training facilities turn out at least 1,000 fully equipped persons."

"The entry level pay of Rs.10,000 is very good and this quadruples with the passage of time and acquirement of skills. Thanks to our success, Chennai too is becoming a sought after destination." 

The publisher is not, however, confident enough to commission authors. "We do not wish to upset the applecart by trying to be independent. Let us face facts. We cannot match the business acumen in publishing of foreign countries because the quality of our finished products is still not up to international standards. But, thanks to our IT skills, we are surging ahead," he said.

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Despite the handicaps, premier publishers of the world like Oxford University Press and Springer Verlag outsource work to India.

"As newspaper industry in developed countries are grappling with dwindling advertisement revenues and shrinking circulation base, they would eventually being to outsource to countries like India," said K. Venugopal, joint editor of Businessline, a daily newspaper published by The Hindu group.

The total size of the newspaper industry in the US and Britain is estimated at $75 billion. "Even if publishing processes worth five percent of this value is to be outsourced to India, we are talking about a $3.5-billion market," said Venugopal.

According to another professional in a private publishing company, Guruvinder Batra, cost savings, offshore production savings, technology driven efficiencies, cost-effective multi-channel publishing, faster 'time-to-market', use of parallel publishing, process improvement due to expertise and technology are some of the key advantages that publishers gain when they outsource to India.

Source: IANS