Publishing software
Publishing software is the collective term for industry software that is exclusively tailored to the business of publishers.
The publishing software, sometimes also written as publishing software, comprises customer relationship management , or CRM for short, and aspects of enterprise resource planning ( ERP , company resource planning ) in the areas of book production and sales, subscriber management and advertising Management for magazines, daily newspapers and their online presence. Because of this wide range of applications, publishing software is one of the most complex industry-specific software applications.
Editorial systems play an important special role: There are complex content-oriented systems for managing editorial material such as a content management system (CMS for short) as well as pure text information and image databases. Author management and fee accounting as well as license management are in turn mostly integrated into the more ERP -oriented publishing software.
To date (status: 2014) no provider is able to cover the entire spectrum of publishing software. Most software manufacturers concentrate on one aspect, such as ad management or subscriber support, or they dedicate themselves to a sector segment, for example exclusively to newspaper publishers, book production or editorial-related applications.
According to the differentiation according to rough market segments and adapted to different publishing activities, four main groups of publishing software can be distinguished:
- Software for the production and distribution of books
- Software for newspapers
- Software for magazines
- Editorial systems
each with corresponding varieties for online publications.
The control of material production processes (such as manufacturing and printing) is - as it usually does not take place in the publishing house itself (frequent exception: daily newspapers) - not counted as publishing software, nor is general software for creating and managing layouts, but systems for automatic pagination, for example of classified ads.