BBO Book Batch One

Solutions for the creation of customised high value-added publishing products

The BBO (Book Batch One) project aims to develop innovative publishing products in terms of both material and content. The digital book, like the paper book, is getting ready to explore new horizons. Numerous current trends - from self-publishing to print on demand through to the digitisation of books - highlight the need for greater specialisation in publishing in terms of personalisation.

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The project

The project “BBO - Book Batch One. Solutions for the configuration and efficient production of customised, high value-added publishing products” aims to develop products and services that come under the umbrella of technology regarded as enabling and fundamental for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the “Intelligent Factory” application area.

It is a project co-funded by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund and the National Operational Programme on Enterprises and Competitiveness 2014-2020 supported by MIMIT - the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy.

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The batch one book

The consume-actor will play an active role in defining his or her own digital and physical publishing product. For example, let’s imagine a teacher interested in structuring a textbook that contains only the topics that they want to cover at school or university. The proposed customisation process will be both content-based and formal and use new technologies such as 3D printing.

The BBO application suite

This system aims to support the entire process of producing customised publications through an application suite with four interoperable software solutions in a web environment. These include a Personal Book Editor solution with sophisticated semantic and design features. The aim is to meet the needs of the current market, fulfilling the wishes of the individual.

A fourth-generation publishing system

In the 2000s, the advent and worldwide spread of digital technologies ushered in the fourth generation of our publishing system. The entire process of the production, distribution and consumption of books has been reorganised around new forms of media and messaging: writing, composition, publishing, distribution, promotion, purchase and consumption (reading). BBO closes the circle of a very long evolutionary process, accelerated by the digital technological revolution and the worldwide web, towards the development of products with more limited print runs and high value added per unit.

New market requirements

Several current trends are profoundly changing the market. These include the growing distinction between a small number of transnational publishing hubs on one hand and a multiplicity of small niche publishing houses on the other, the growth of the bookshop's promotional function to the detriment of its role in distribution, the crisis of the e-book, and the change in the way we use books whose collective function is now giving way to a need for personalisation (for example, self-publishing, social reading and fanwriting). We expect books to meet our needs and we therefore aspire to transform them, rather than reading them in order that they may transform us.

Application solutions

  1. Personal front-end book editor. Operating in a web environment, it will offer professional and non-professional users a simplified interface to search, select and assemble content components and to compose publications based on the rules and structural templates provided by the system.

  2. Semantic repository. The “reservoir” of content made available by publishers. It can be implemented with personal but also crowdsourced content, i.e. content derived from contributions by other users.

  3. Author system. Structured around intelligent recommendation solutions on a semantic and statistical basis, it interfaces with a social biasing module to inform users of compositional choices that have already met the approval of other users.

  4. Digital/physical template configurator. A web service interfaced with the author system that will allow content chosen for publication to be used in pre-defined templates. The finalisation of digital content exploits an implementation based on interface logic and navigation that is ideal for use on large, high-resolution screens or in also unconventional physical formats, e.g. built in the form of three-dimensional products that can be assembled with 3D printing systems.

Objectives

  1. Innovating production processes in book and magazine publishing with a view to customisation

  2. Designing, configuring and producing customised digital and physical publishing products for small/very small-scale production (batch one)

  3. Revisiting the logic of the scriptoria with modern technology

  4. Personalising content and offering formal customisation

Partners

The BBO project is developed in cooperation with:

M.E.T.A. Srl
F2 S.r.l.
University of Cagliari – Department of Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy

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