The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of the premier events for the education and publishing industry and considered the world’s biggest organized book fair. Leading publishers and companies supporting publishers exhibit at the event with their offerings and there are sessions on topics related to publishing where experts share their views.
In the October 2023 edition of the Frankfurt Book Fair or FBF as it is popularly known, a key theme of discussion was generative AI and its impact on the publishing industry. The European Writers’ Council, the Federation of European Publishers and the European and International Booksellers Federation issued a joint statement that urged lawmakers to take strict action against AI companies using technology and training their models using pirated content. Firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have been under intense scrutiny and several legal suits have been filed to make a note of the fact that their AI models are being trained with archival content for which royalties are not being paid. Despite this those who attended the event would have observed how leading software and pre-press support firms were presenting their AI-powered solutions to improve the publishing experience.
At S4Carlisle, we are a trusted name in the world of publishing and pre-print support with a long legacy of excellence, prompt customer support, and affordable solutions. The last few years have seen the AI wave touch different aspects of publishing. As an innovative tech company, we adopt the latest trends, and upgrade our offerings accordingly to provide a better customer experience. We now offer NINJA and integrated suite of AI-powered solutions that aid publishers and eLearning solutions providers. This blog looks at how Generative AI or GenAI impacts educational publishing.
In an earlier blog, we looked specifically at five ways AI will impact book publishing, and touched upon the use of AI for detecting plagiarism and using it to run social media promotions, among other topics. This blog delves into the use of GenAI and its impact on educational publishing and touches upon some elements in detail.
Text-to-Data-Conversion and Vice-Versa
In educational publishing, one has several examples of the usage of unstructured data that needs to be properly structured, tagged, and represented as a chart or a table. AI now helps publishers structure data in the format that they want and forward it for printing. This is an interesting application that saves a lot of time and manual effort. The reverse also holds true wherein charts and tables are presented, and one needs to extract a quick text summary of the data that’s represented. Transforming text to numerical data or vectorization is also a subset of this function.
Text Generation
We have mentioned this in our earlier blog, the ability of AI to create text based on a given prompt is getting better with each passing day. The large language models or LLMs are being trained on varied datasets and evolving. Be it Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, Llama by Meta, or ChatGPT by OpenAI, the speed at which these LLMs are evolving makes one cautious.
We have already seen how wrappers built around these LLMs are being used by different companies to provide their own services. Ranging from customer support to coding to creating instructional questions, these LLMs are being deployed at an immense speed. The hunt for new content and the ability of LLMs to create or generate new content that is as human as possible will become an interesting differentiator as more products enter the market.
Academic writing / textbooks created using AI will become a major challenge for publishers to validate. New roles will come up or rather existing editors and QA teams will get the added responsibility of ensuring that the content is not AI-generated. This adds to the perplexity of publishers. It is again important to remember that any technology that we create is to aid us to do things better and faster. If it is going to complicate existing processes, it will not be easy for publishers. At this juncture, everyone wants to get on the AI bandwagon, but is there merit in it from all angles? This is a question that the publishers should ask themselves before signing up for an AI-based service. Using AI for plagiarism checks and hybrid editing but creating content using AI and publishing it as a book, passed off as written by a human is a strict no!
Interactive Books and Conversational Capabilities
The digital book or eBook revolution started well over a couple of decades ago. From ePubs and PDFs we have come a long way as we look at different eBook formats, compatible eReaders, and mobile devices supporting eBooks, and easy access to learning content. One of the areas where AI can play a significant role is in enhancing the quality of existing eBooks by making them more interactive. Mapping relevant videos to explain content given in the text, images that pop-up in a 3D rendition or model, suggesting related videos to explain a concept based on the user’s preferences, these are all activities that can be integrated within the eBook with the help of GenAI.
Image Processing and Videos
This is again a supplement to enhancing the eBooks and works as a solution to make printed books better. When working at scale and looking to get images and charts faster, AI serves as an ally to get things done faster. It will still need human intervention to check that the output is relevant, not plagiarized, and age appropriate.
Getting a Framework Ready
Now imagine if a readymade framework offers you most of the services or good-to-have features that are listed above? With NINJA we are attempting to solve the common problems that publishers face. From every aspect of pre-press, design, layout, editing, and much more we are here to help you make the whole process of publishing simpler, effective, efficient, and affordable.
Here’s a quick summary of how publishers can use NINJA to enhance their books:
Interactive Content Library: Transform the library experience into an interactive journey. NINJA allows you to interact with your content repository, asking questions, seeking explanations, and getting personalized and contextual responses.
Metadata Extraction: Enhances the discoverability of books. Our no code AI Ecosystem, NINJA, automatically extracts keywords, taxonomy, authors, titles, and genre in real time from multiple sources.
Summarization: Instantly generate abstractive summaries from chunked text. NINJA helps cleanse, enrich, and add contextual meaning to your content, delivering the right information at the right time for the right operation.
Adaptive Learning Experience: Personalized and engaged learning experiences. By analyzing user behavior and performance data, NINJA creates personalized learning experiences based on individual users' needs and preferences, resulting in more effective and engaging learning. This is suitable for publishers providing enhanced, interactive digital eBooks and for eLearning course providers.
As summarized above, NINJA offers several functionalities that make it easy for publishers to automate specific aspects of the publishing journey and bring their books to the market faster. Are you a publisher or eLearning vendor looking for a trusted AI-partner? Write to us at sales@s4carlisle.com to learn how NINJA can transform your business.
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