Easier E-Books with Inkling

No one would mistake a book publisher for a tech company, but they do have one thing in common: offshoring. Just as Apple and other major gadget makers rely on companies like Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group to assemble products, the big New York publishers send manuscripts overseas for production. “There are literally tens of thousands of people in India and the Philippines and other parts of the world doing layout and compositioning,” says entrepreneur Matt MacInnis.

MacInnis is the founder and chief executive officer of Inkling, a San Francisco startup that over the past two years has created about 120 multimedia-rich iPad versions of popular textbooks. While researching how the publishing world works, MacInnis, a former employee of Apple’s education division, says he was “flabbergasted” by the “intense inefficiency” of book production. To create a 4,000-page behemoth like Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, he says, publishers and so-called content supply-chain optimizers such as Innodata and Aptara ship bulky manuscripts back and forth across the world multiple times.