To celebrate Academic Book Week, we’re running a series of posts on Academic Publishing. This is a guest post by Zeba Talkhani who works for production and editorial project management agency, Out of House Publishing. Out of House help publishers produce the best possible print and digital content in the education and academic market, and was set up to fill the gap in the industry by providing effective production assistance to busy publishers.

As a team, we thrive on working with complex books while keeping workflows simple and efficient. Our aim is to meet publishers’ needs while making them aware of the various options at their disposal. We work with both print and digital formats and plan to expand further into digital and print management, interactive content development as well as workflow design and optimisation. This is an exciting time to be part of the scholarly and education book industries and we are keen to work with publishers on a consultation level to help them with emerging digital markets.

It’s no longer sufficient to simply convert printed products to digital at the end of a workflow. We believe in the need for placing structured digital content at the heart of every production workflow to allow publishers to make the best use of digital platforms.

In addition to our editing and project management skills, the Out of House team has skills in commissioning, design, event management, languages, cartography, development editing, business growth and networking. We stay up-to-date with industry news and are constantly looking for opportunities in which we can enhance our clients’ product offering.

As an industry we are changing drastically, and adapting to open access and digital opportunities is vital. While funding is being discussed at length, we believe that the demand for academic work has not diminished. The goal now is to fill a new gap in the market and try to figure out the best way to serve academic readers in the most cost-effective way.

We are also exploring how we can support academic self-publishing and the peer-review process in order to assist authors and institutions take advantage of new publishing opportunities.

For now, we are proud of the value we are adding to academic content and school textbooks. We are constantly working towards helping publishers move beyond paper and captivate their audience in dynamic ways. Readers and learners of today are shaping our industry and we are excited to be a part of this dialogue.

Initiatives like Kudos and Academic Book of the Future create a platform for us to engage with like-minded people and crowdsource ideas about the future of academic publishing. We hope to make the most of the Academic Book Week and continue to work closely with the industry to help bring better, more diverse and dynamic content to students, researches and libraries around the globe.

Zeba Talkhani is a Publishing graduate with experience in bookselling, literary festivals and digitising journals for academic and research databases. She currently works for Out of House Publishing where she oversees productions and editorial services for a list of academic titles. She blogs about books and publishing on Tumblr and tweets at @zebatalk.