Why does producing a book in 2025 still feel so outdated?
Despite having witnessed ground-breaking advances in technology in the past decade, many publishing houses are still trapped in legacy workflows that bleed time, money, and trust. The process of creating ebooks, in particular, is a glaring example. It is often outsourced, siloed from the main editorial pipeline, and riddled with inconsistencies thanks to incorporation of often unnecessary manual work.
For an industry under pressure to deliver faster and more affordably due to a spike in content creation volume over the years, this is no longer the go-to method for many of the newer, more modern content creators to get their thoughts out.
This blog makes the case that it is time for a smarter, more integrated publishing workflow — one that reduces risk, cuts costs while improving efficiency, and definitely one that does not leave out the “smaller” yet extremely talented writers and designers from expressing their creativity.
Let us now dive into the top issues of the current publishing workflow.
Let’s start with the obvious: cost.
Ebook production is frequently outsourced. On one end, you have low-cost conversion warehouses that churn out files with questionable quality. On the other, you pay a premium for freelancers or boutique services to do the same job, often without long-term accountability.
Now ask yourself: What happens if that third-party disappears mid-project? Or worse, what if sensitive manuscripts are leaked? Legal exposure is a real risk in an outsourced workflow — yet many publishers still accept it as part of doing business. Ironically, publishing workflows are supposed to uphold the legality of content publishing.
Compare that to an in-house process. While it may seem expensive to build and maintain, the cost is easier to control and the results are easier to trust. When you own your workflow, you end up reducing not only your financial overhead but also your operational vulnerability.
Ebook production often branches off from print workflows too early — sometimes before the final manuscript is even finalized. This is because ebook production is frequently outsourced, and the third-party timeline does not always align with the publisher’s internal schedule. The result? Ebooks built on unfinished versions of the manuscript, leading to inconsistencies, rework, and unnecessary delays.
Even worse, ebooks — especially those designed with rich accessibility — are still often built manually. Every tag, every metadata entry, every navigation point is hand-crafted. This is the opposite of scalable, further aggravating the ever growing backlog of ebooks in line to be published.
Again, it is time-consuming, error-prone, and reliant on highly specialized knowledge.
Single-source publishing is the buzzword here, but the concept is powerful: one clean, structured source that feeds all output formats — print, ebook, web, and beyond. That’s how you collapse timelines and free your team from redundant tasks.
Let’s take EPUB 3.3 publishing as an example where the lack of trust is rather stark. Note that it is not just a format — it is a web of interconnected standards: XHTML, CSS, Dublin Core metadata, WCAG accessibility guidelines, and more. Each component introduces an additional point of failure.
Most publishers do not trust the output of outsourced workflows, and sometimes rightly so. They then spend even more time and money validating the results. But are their tools up to date? Are their testers certified? What happens when inconsistencies arise between different test environments?
In other words, if we do not trust the workflow — and we don’t trust the testers checking that workflow — what exactly are we trusting? This fragility underscores just how outdated and brittle current systems are.
And in 2025, where trust in the supply chain is critical across industries, shouldn’t publishing hold itself to the same standard?
This is not a pitch. This is a call to rethink.
There are several tools out there that already address these issues head-on — tools that support modern publishing requirements from the ground up: structured content, automated styling, semantic tagging, embedded accessibility, metadata enrichment, version control.
However, there is only one tool certified for building accessible ebooks.
Bookalope is the name of this very tool, the first tool to ever be approved by Benetech as a publishing tool. While we will not delve into the specifics, it is worth noting that nearly every major publishing buzzword — born accessible, linear or single-source workflows, digital-first publishing, or XML and metadata workflows — is actually taken care of by Bookalope. And it works.
The benefits of Bookalope’s certification as a publishing tool are obvious. One, the certification guarantees the quality and standards compliance of the final product; and two, with that guarantee Bookalope assumes responsibility for the book production process.
And thereby the certification establishes trust in the tool.
The caveat? You would need to unlearn some old habits, as difficult as it may be. The payoff is a streamlined, trustworthy, in-house workflow that scales without compromising quality, without burdening the user with technical details and standards.
I myself have used a few of those tools firsthand as an independent writer.
For the Easing Awake series and multiple titles for Bar Nothing Books, we adopted a workflow powered by Bookalope. The result? Ebooks and print-ready files generated from a single, clean source — accessible, styled, and standards-compliant in every way. What once took weeks of manual work and quality checks became just a matter of hours.
All this thanks to QA guaranteed by the tool itself, and that guarantee stems from its certification status by Benetech.
This was not just faster. It was better. No errors, no dependency on external vendors, and absolute control over the final product paired with responsive collaboration with the Bookalope staff.
Good tools which tackle current problems with publishing do exist. The need is obvious, and that legal pressure, especially that to ensure books are accessible to all audiences, is increasing (for instance the EAA 2025). So what exactly is stopping us?
Part of it is inertia. Publishing is, by nature, risk-averse. New workflows require not just new tools, but new thinking. It's easier to stick with what’s familiar — even if it’s broken, arduous, and costly.
Organizations like BISG have documented these challenges for years. Not only that, they have established a workflow committee which aims to improve efficiency of current publishing approaches. And yet, change is slow. Not because we lack solutions, but because we lack the will, or better yet, cooperation between organizations to implement them.
Publishing is not exempt from digital disruption.
The inefficiencies baked into current workflows are not just technical issues — they are strategic vulnerabilities and act as a huge deterrent to writers’ trust in the current publishing system, making them “elope” to other content creation platforms which offer much lesser resistance.
If you are in a leadership role, or any sort of role which puts you in a position to create meaningful change, ask yourself: Is your current publishing workflow a competitive advantage, or a liability?
Would you want to see only potentially monotonous, published content from the same “established” writers, or would you rather let the whole world witness a plethora of exciting, published content originating from writers of a more diverse background.
Modern tools like Bookalope are already showing us a proven better way. What is missing is not the technology — it is the decision to become more agile and receptive toward constructive feedback, leading to meaningful, rapid change for the better.
It is time to take back control. Rethink the process. Rebuild trust. And finally, bring a modern and AI-powered book production workflow to the table — something both readers and publishers of the 21st century deserve.