Technology
A technology-centric approach to mass customization
The technology vision of BiblioLabs is to allow institutions to collect and digitally capture any content in any location, and to be able to process that content efficiently, in a flexible manner that supports any output format (BiblioLabs is format agnostic), and allows partners to customize the final product to meet their needs. To achieve this vision, the Company developed a hardware/software architecture that combines decentralized media aggregation with a centralized end-to-end software system, Global Book Manager (GBM) to manage the creation, marketing, enrichment and distribution of content.
BiblioLabs Global Book Manager Application Suite
The Company’s Global Book Manager (GBM) application suite represents an end-to-end enterprise software system that is centralized inside a secure, scalable data center, where banks of computers can work on the content creation process 24 hours a day. The vision for GBM is simple: (a) Take any type of media in any digital format; (b) Create finished products in products in a variety of formats (print or electronic); (c) Allow the books to be customized and/or branded by retail partners; (d) Allow communities the ability to enrich the information about the media (descriptions, biographies, reviews); and (e) Make the final product available in as many distribution channels as possible.
The GBM application suite database and storage engines are based primarily on an open-source service oriented architecture. GBM was architected as a scalable (ability to dynamically add processing nodes in a decentralized manner), modular (add and reuse software objects to add new application functionality), and extensible. Leveraging the distributed processing paradigm to maximize application performance, the system was designed to be manageable from any system with an Internet connection and directly integrated with systems from BiblioLife content partners, outsource quality assurance vendors, strategic retail partners and print-on-demand fulfillment partners. Because the system is “live” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, BiblioLabs has built the GBM platform on a scalable, distributed and redundant hardware architecture to ensure system reliability and availability.
Perhaps the most technically challenging aspect of the GBM application suite was building the Core Processing Engine, a sophisticated application that automatically detects different source file attributes and applies appropriate processing parameters. For example, the application is able to automatically detect certain image types (graphics versus text) within the same source file and process accordingly. For example, while graphic image are automatically processed using tonal curves, gamma correction and descreening, text pages are automatically converted to bi-tonal (to ensure font sharpness) and a median filter is applied to ensure text enhancement. All pages are processed using certain common functions such as deskewing, dewarping, alignment and despeckling. The result is a massively distributed application that automatically creates extremely high quality output from digital images of varying attributes.
Similar to traditional enterprise applications such Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Interaction Management, the GBM software application was designed to address the end-to-end management of the creation, customization and distribution of printed media. The Company plans to build enhancements to GBM in areas such book customization (custom forewords, inscriptions, covers, advertising, etc.), on-line analytic tools for general reporting and decision support, as well as API (application programming interface) enhancements to better support strategic retail partners.
The GBM application and database architecture was built on the premise that it could blindly process or reject native digital media files, without prior knowledge of the size, file type or quality of the incoming content. Where a completely automated nirvana was not achievable, the application process provided an automated structure that significantly limited any minimal required human intervention (GBM QA Manager). The architecture dictated that all software components be self-contained re-usable objects, with each object running as a stand-alone application “service” that could be turned on or off on any given computer system (or even multiple application instances on the same system), thereby maintaining maximum throughput, efficiency and scalability.
The result of the GBM application development initiative has been a comprehensive application workflow that not only provides a complete end-to-end solution, but does so in a manner that allows for minimal file transfer between computers, with a database structure that verifies and validates each step in the process. The software architecture further eliminates the need to permanently store multiple versions of each book block, cover, web page thumbnail and corresponding ONIX meta data file, but rather generates and transmits these files only as needed, and only based upon those formats that a corresponding sales channel can accommodate.
EXAMPLE: BiblioLabs GBM Core Processing Engine - Before and After
