The Face of Textbook Publishing is Changing With XML, XQuery and Publishing Software

Instead of chunky thick textbooks with every topic under the sun to give to students, professors have gotten smarter about how they deliver information to their class. The long back breaking days of lugging around one’s textbooks on campus has changed. The internet, XML and now XQuery have changed how content is assigned.

XQuery makes it possible for anyone, not just professors looking to build their own text book to search huge content bases of information for the smallest piece of code to the largest digital file.

It is now possible now for any professor to piece together a custom text book, using the right resources like a large encyclopedia or publishing house for example. A professor who teaches a class on just the history of the Titanic can create a text that is full of interviews, photos, drawings and pages and pages of historical facts instead of demanding students spend $400 on a textbook based on American history, only to read 2 chapters that actually pertain to the Titanic.

Students and professors both love this new concept of custom education, and large publishing houses of large information enjoy the new profits that come with new advances in reuse and re purposed publishing.

It is also possible for organizations to perform an enterprise search and pull content from an entire content base within the organization and create an entire new text and redistribute it. Enterprises are finding that it is not necessary to recode a document that previously exists elsewhere in the system and needs only minor adjustments. With an XML platform, all previous content not already in XML can be automatically converted to XML and then queried using a highly powered enterprise search using XQuery. Professors can search a publishing company’s vast files that are converted in XML using XQuery.

Professors find satisfaction knowing the content is agreeable to their teaching. Often times professors feel that if they order a book for their students, it often times it is because it is the best of what is available and not necessarily perfect for the class. With the possibility for professors to use XQuery and enterprise search within a publishing house’s database of quality publications and not the "who knows if this is remotely accurate" of the World Wide Web, everyone wins.

About the author:Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about XQuery and publishing software , go to Mark Logic .