Opportunities in digital educational publishing have prompted WoodWing to a new focussed appointment.
Steve Schaffran, who was the company’s managing director for Latin America, becomes general manager education under the initiative.
He says the next five years will be a time of rapid change in educational technology: “Commitments in Brazil and South Korea to move all educational materials to delivery via electronic devices only are a wake-up call for education worldwide,” he says.
Schaffran is a former lecturer in economics at an Oxford college, and research engineer at the University of California.
He says the Brazilian announcement that textbooks will have to be presented in digital as well as print versions from 2015, and in digital-only formats from 2018, illustrates an accelerating global trend.
South Korea has committed to bringing all educational materials to delivery via electronic devices by 2015. In some more countries, including Thailand and Malaysia, as well as several states in the USA, the governments set similar targets for the digitisation of textbooks. In other countries, such as Germany, textbook publishers are also moving to offer digital editions.
Schaffran says WoodWing´s education initiative is all about meeting the specialised needs of education publishers during this transition, enabling them to implement a multi-channel publishing workflow to efficiently publish print and interactive digital content simultaneously, using a single system. The early publishers using this system have already experienced impressive savings in both time and money.