Seminaries and religious organizations have long relied on print publishing to disseminate theological information and evoke discussion. Even with the radio, television and later the internet offering multiple means to reach out to audiences across the world, Christian publishing remained a crucial means of spreading the good word.
Now, with the world becoming increasingly digitized, faith-based publishers need to turn their attention to the best means to reach out to the widest audience. While going digital offers a myriad of benefits, it also comes with its own set of challenges.
Challenges faced by Christian Publishers
The interdisciplinary nature of religious studies has brought up the demand for collaboration, interactive content, tools for accommodating multiple books in different languages, and cost-effective publishing. However, all these challenges can be addressed with a powerful digital content creation and publishing platform
1. Cutting Costs
Print publishing is not just expensive for publishing houses but also their audience. On the other hand, digital publishing can bring down costs significantly for all stakeholders. By allowing publishers to create and regularly update eBooks, the cost of reprints and shipping are done away with completely. In addition, the publishers no longer require a huge in-house team to write, design and publish their titles.
A single platform with a robust content authoring tool gives them all the resources they need for cutting-edge publishing. There are thousands of in-built themes, templates, integrations and more, while the content can be easily branded to give the reader a complete brand experience of the publishing house. In addition, such platforms can help reduce the time to market by 40%. In the world of publishing, as in any other sector, time is money.
2. Overcoming Technical Hurdles
Christian readings often contain passages in ancient Greek, Hebrew and Coptic, which can’t always be supported on every device. This occurs due to some publishers lacking the budget and/or in-house expertise necessary to offer content compatible with multiple platforms and languages.
With a digital publishing platform that supports multiple devices and operating systems, while offering the ability to create multilingual content, publishers can deliver the well-rounded functionality that their users are looking for. Features such as easy search capabilities, interior links from tables of contents and notes, note-taking tools that integrate citations, bookmarking tools and more, the entire experience becomes satisfying.
3. Protecting Digital Rights
Publishers have long suffered the challenge of content piracy. eBook piracy costs publishers $315 million each year. With digital content, they fear that this challenge could be insurmountable, with users being able to copy or screen-grab their content.
However, with powerful digital rights management tools can prevent all such forms of digital piracy, protecting intellectual property efficiently. Powerful Digital Rights Management tools allow publishers to:
- Prevent users from screen grabbing, printing, or copying digital content.
- Ensure that access to content is available only for the subscribed period.
- Restrict the number of devices from which content can be accessed.
- Offer separate access codes for institutions and individual users to go along with eBooks.
A recent trend in this industry has been the growth of independent publishers. It is estimated that the number of self-published titles has grown by 156% over the past five years. This growth, in turn, has increased competition for readers’ time and money. However, when publishers use a digital publishing platform, they can easily create, modify, and update faith-based content without needing extensive resources.
4. Poorly Written, Edited, and Designed Books
Self-published books have always been criticized for poor writing, grammar, and spelling errors. While there are some authors who don’t take the time to have their books properly edited and designed, there are also publishing companies that, in their hurry to reach the market, might miss out on important user experience features. This creates a bad reputation that severely impacts the Christian publishing industry as well.
Once again, the right digital content creation, publishing and distribution platform can help overcome all these challenges. With carefully curated features to offer satisfying experiences to all users, publishers can offer the content at par with the latest standards of professional writing in religious studies.
If you too are facing similar challenges and need a robust digital publishing platform to ease Christian and other faith-based publishing, contact us today. MagicBox™ is an award-winning platform with over 5 million satisfied users and counting.
