From mere typesetting, the Indian publishing BPO services industry is fast moving towards offering value-added services such as editorial work.

The digital explosion has opened up several offshoring options including end-to-end operations starting from typesetting to graphics to physical printing of the content in India.

“India, especially Chennai, is the hub of the publishing BPO industry. Overall revenue for 2008 stood at $660 million,” Sriram Subramanya, founder, managing director and chief executive officer of Integra Software Services, said.

“The industry is growing at 35 per cent in revenue year-on-year and the target is to reach $1.2 billion by 2012,” he said, and added that the publishing BPOs employ about 35,000 professionals and 20,000 more would be required in the next couple of years.

Value-added services are clearly the way forward, given the growth in the industry, said Kapil Viswanathan, co-CEO of PreMedia Global. Digital technologies available for both back-end work and printing have opened up avenues to offer end-to-end services.

Print-on-demand is fast catching up in India whereby printing is outsourced to India and the books are then delivered across the world. A few companies have started offering such end-to-end services and this could become a norm in three to five years, Subramanya said.

According to Vivek Shenoy, analyst-publishing, ValueNotes Outsourcing Practice, India leads as the favoured destination for publishing BPO services despite tough competition from countries including Philippines and China.

Content outsourcing is still the selling point and outsourcers are looking at actual cost savings of about 20 per cent, he said. “However, ValueNotes’ ongoing survey of global publishers has revealed that publishers are concerned about quality of work done in India because the industry is crowded by fly-by-night players,” Shenoy added.