Commercial publishers were some of the earliest adopters of SGML and XML technology, and the use of markup technologies for production has become an established and accepted norm in many parts of the publishing industry.

The emergence of new XML-based languages and technologies, together with the overturning of some of the old verities about what SGML was 'for', has opened the possibility for publishers to capitalise on the XML expertise they have acquired, and expand its use beyond production departments to many other areas within a publishing business.

Drawn from real-world experience of the transitions currently taking place or planned within a number of major players within the international publishing industry, this presentation gives a high-level overview of the expanded role XML can play in the publishing process, and the benefits and problems that follow.

The presentation tracks the evolution of markup technologies in publishing from a position where deep semantic tagging was expected, to a more pragmatic business position in which semantically leaner content is produced, but with a compensating increase in the richness of metadata. The emergence of XML and the rise of XSLT and de facto 'off-the-shelf' DTD and Schema modules will be shown to have had some effect in homogenising publishers' content and driving down the cost of turning XML content into products.

Publishing companies have typically evolved into institutions in which 'production' is seen as a distinct and separable part of the business. Yet the wealth of XML data and knowledge now being accumulated in production departments has a wider application within publishing business - particularly to the core areas of sales and marketing.

Sales and marketing departments are now increasingly being required to use XML for a number of eCommerce activities. The eCommerce need not only be between a publisher and other organisations, however. Internal eCommerce between the business and production parts of a publishing enterprise can automate a number of data transfers which traditionally have been manual tasks.

Within manufacturing too, the arrival of JDF (Job Description Format) has created the potential to specify information that carries a print job from genesis through to completion. Again, there is the possibility for internal eCommerce within a publishing company to exploit and share this kind of data with other processes within publishing.

Ultimately, it is possible to describe a publishing business in which XML informs the processes from product inception through to manufacturing and beyond, and to show how XML data can flow between departments, systems and suppliers within publishing to bring business benefits from increased automation and interoperability.