Celebrating 60th anniversary means a lot! It interprets the long vision of the founding leader and the contribution of the employees. The 6th June marks the celebration of the foundation day of PHI Learning. It comes to us as an opportunity to connect with each other and celebrate our proud history with all the stakeholders. It prepares us for the future years and energises us to start with a fresh momentum to keep going.
In this long journey we have celebrated all the milestones with full joy and, at the same time, observed keenly, the evolutionary phases of publishing. The people, the trends and practices, and the technology have changed a lot in these six decades. But one thing that has not changed is the integrity and the quality of our products and the teams, which make us proud and motivate us to continue serving the academic fraternity and the students.
With the evolution of technology, the book industry has changed enormously since its creation. In early days, publishing was indeed a herculean task which involved writing a manuscript on paper, collecting it personally or sending it over via postal services, typesetting and formatting it, processing it through editorial process, incorporating editorial corrections, sending proofs to the authors by post, incorporating the corrections suggested by the authors, and then final proofreading to prepare the CRC and processing it for printing. In press negatives were developed using a vertical camera and then these negatives were pasted on plates which were checked once again before loading that onto the printing machine. Though, overall, it was a long, time taking process yet it fascinated people. Publishing in those days involved more emotions and sentiments than what it is today!
Next came the era of computers and software when our industry transformed progressively and made a paradigm shift to a sort of digital world. The job became easier and faster. We started receiving soft files from the authors to convert them into printable formats using Ventura, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, and Latex and, for illustrations and drawings the software used were Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, or AutoCAD. Editing is done online. In short, the end-to-end process of writing and publishing became computerised.
The time came when the printer could directly produce negatives from PDF through image setter; the role of the vertical camera became obsolete. Next, with further advancement, the plates were developed directly from computers; the technique is called ‘computer to plate (CTP)’. Now, we have the technique to take ‘Digital prints’ which don’t even require a plate development. The typeset manuscript is directly printed from the computer and can be produced in the form of a book.
Advent of the digital age has not only changed the look of the industry but has created a paradigm shift of the business models. Most, if not all, work is produced on a computer. Now, the authors submit paperless work which is read on a computer screen and edited online before proceeding for its production work. Indeed computers make work easier by doing the difficult and time consuming tasks very fast. The point to be emphasised here is that publishing has come a long way from paper to paperless. Thanks to the digital world and new technologies!
The mid-20th century was the dawn of the Digital Age when the Internet was launched and today it is accessible for almost everyone. In 2007 we started publishing E-books (Adobe Digital Editions) for online reading. Having 5000+ titles and over 1200 authors, we had created e-books of all our titles itself and made Kindle editions available on Amazon soon after its launch in the same year. We showcased our publications on all e-commerce sites, say Amazon, Flipkart, GoogleBooks, Barnes and Noble, or you name any other online retailer or online giant; our books are omnipresent. On our website www.phindia.com , people can find details of all our publications and can even access books for preview and making buying decisions. Every necessary detail required by the readers for making a buying decision is available at one click!
Covid–19 pandemic has led to an inevitable surge in the use of digital. We all witnessed how the pandemic has sped up digital transformation and technologies by several years and has brought evident changes. How the people overnight switched to technology-driven tasks. Retail market has changed. Buyers’ patterns and trends are changed. Education platform has changed. However, we as a country are still to go a long way to be fully digitalised. Still whatever was achieved in those unique challenging times is really commendable and remarkable!
Readers are getting choosy day by day. They also go by pick-a-plan strategy and sometimes ask for the customized editions of our books. They pick and choose the chapters they wish to read and we, as a publisher, are ready to provide them with the customised contents to help them in teaching and learning keeping our mission alive ‘helping teachers to teach and students to learn’.
Visit us @ www.phindia.com to know more about our publications.
