Wordium Publishing Services

  Readers across Asia-Pacific are mobile-first, and increasingly, they expect more from an eBook than a static page that happens to be digital. Interactive elements, embedded media, navigable references, fixed layouts that actually hold up across devices, these aren’t extras anymore. They’re what readers in the region have come to expect by default. For publishers based in Singapore, sitting at the center of a fast-growing regional market with English-language workflows and connections across APAC, this creates an opening, but also a production challenge most teams haven’t fully solved yet. Here’s where it gets complicated. EPUB3 supports interactivity, embedded video, audio, scripted content, fixed and reflowable layouts, but building these well requires a different skill set than traditional eBook conversion. A reflowable EPUB that handles a math-heavy STM title correctly is a different problem than a fixed-layout children’s book with interactive elements, which is again differ...

  Canadian academic publishers are under more pressure than usual right now. The ADA Title II deadline in April 2026 means accessibility can’t be an afterthought, production timelines keep tightening, and budgets aren’t growing to match. For publishers considering outsourcing book production for the first time, or rethinking an existing vendor relationship, here’s what actually separates a reliable partner from a risky one. Can they handle the full pipeline, not just one piece of it? Copyediting, typesetting, XML conversion, and accessibility output are usually treated as separate vendor relationships, which means every handoff between them is a place where something gets missed. The publishers with the smoothest production cycles work with a partner who runs all of it as one workflow, so accessibility metadata gets built alongside the XML, not bolted on six months later. This is exactly how we’ve structured our production process, because we’ve seen what happens when it isn’t. D...

  Most journal production workflows weren’t designed as one workflow. They were built piece by piece, a copyediting vendor here, a typesetting partner there, XML conversion handled separately, and accessibility bolted on at the end because a deadline made it urgent. For Netherlands-based STM and academic publishers , sitting at the center of Europe’s open access transition with Elsevier’s global headquarters in the country, that fragmented approach is becoming a liability rather than just an inefficiency. Here’s the problem with handling each stage separately: every handoff between vendors is a place where things get lost. A copyeditor flags a formatting issue that the typesetter doesn’t see. The XML conversion team tags content correctly, but nobody updates the accessibility metadata afterward. Each piece works, but the seams between them are where journals lose time, and where compliance gaps quietly form. We built our journal production process specifically to remove those seams...

  The European Accessibility Act is no longer a deadline on the horizon, it’s been in force since June 2025, and the EPUB files in your catalogue are either compliant or they’re a liability. For publishers based in the Netherlands, home to Elsevier’s global headquarters and a dense network of academic and STM publishers, this isn’t an abstract compliance exercise. It’s a backlist problem. Most publishers have years, sometimes decades, of EPUB titles that were never built with WCAG 2.1 AA in mind. Here’s what remediation actually involves, and where most projects get stuck. It’s not just alt text. The most common misconception we run into is that accessibility remediation means adding image descriptions and calling it done. Real EPUB3 remediation covers reading order, navigation landmarks, semantic structure, MathML for equations, and table markup, all of which require someone to actually understand the original content, not just run it through an automated checker. Metadata is h...

  Most conversations about AI in publishing start and end with content creation, drafting, summarizing, generating cover copy. It’s the most visible application, so it gets the most attention. But in our experience running production for STM and academic publishers , that’s not where AI has made the biggest difference. The real ROI shows up earlier in the pipeline, in the unglamorous QC stages that used to eat the most hours and catch the fewest errors. Preflight checks are a good example. Before a file moves into typesetting or conversion, someone needs to check it for structural issues, missing elements, inconsistent formatting, broken cross-references. Done manually, this is slow and inconsistent, the kind of task where reviewer fatigue genuinely affects quality. We’ve found AI-assisted preflight catches a meaningful share of these issues before a human ever opens the file, which means the human review that follows is faster and more focused. XML validation is similar. DTD va...

  For years, JATS XML was treated as a journals-only concern, something publishers handled to satisfy PubMed Central or Crossref, then moved on from. That thinking is now outdated, and it’s something we’ve watched shift firsthand across the projects we work on. Across STM, academic, and even reference publishing , the same structured XML originally built for journal articles is becoming the foundation for three things every publisher now cares about: content reuse, AI readiness, and searchability . Content reuse is the most immediate driver. A well-tagged JATS file isn’t locked into one output. The same structured content can generate a print PDF, an EPUB, an HTML version for a website, and a dataset for a learning platform, without re-keying or re-formatting each time. We’ve seen this play out with publishers managing multi-format portfolios (journals, books, course materials, reference works), where structure once, output everywhere went from a nice-to-have to the deciding fa...

Accessibility metadata in EPUB is structured information, embedded using schema.org vocabulary and reflected in ONIX product records, that describes how accessible a digital publication actually is, covering things like navigation, alternative text, and reading order. Most EPUB files that pass WCAG 2.1 AA conformance checks still fail accessibility audits because the metadata describing that conformance is missing, incomplete, or never makes it into the file’s package.opf or the retailer’s ONIX feed. Key Takeaways A file can be technically WCAG-conformant and still fail an accessibility audit if it lacks the schema.org accessibility metadat a that declares this conformance. ONIX accessibility metadata (codelists 195, 196, and 197) is what retailers, libraries, and aggregators use to surface accessible titles to readers who need them. ithout proper metadata, accessible EPUBs are effectively undiscoverable to users searching for accessible content, screen reader users, and procur...

  A JATS XML workflow converts journal manuscripts into Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) format the NLM/NISO standard used by PubMed Central, DOAJ, Crossref, and most major repositories. For open access (OA) publishers, a structured JATS workflow is what makes articles discoverable, indexable, and compliant with funder mandates like Plan S, all while reducing production turnaround time by 30–50% compared to manual tagging. Key Takeaways JATS XML is the de facto global standard for structuring journal article content for archiving, indexing, and distribution. Open access mandates (Plan S, Horizon Europe, NIH Public Access Policy) increasingly require XML-first or XML-parallel output, not just PDF. A well-built JATS workflow reduces time-to-publication, minimizes manual rework, and improves metadata accuracy for discovery platforms. Publishers across the EU including those based in the Netherlands, home to Elsevier’s global headquarters are under growing pressure to standardize XML ...