Download PDF
Cloudinary > Case Studies > Bloomsbury Turns a New Page, Publishing High-Res Digital Books with Cloudinary
Cloudinary Logo

Bloomsbury Turns a New Page, Publishing High-Res Digital Books with Cloudinary

Technology Category
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Functions
  • Product Research & Development
Use Cases
  • Digital Twin
  • Inventory Management
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • Data Science Services
The Challenge
Bloomsbury Publishing's Academic division embarked on an ambitious project to digitize encyclopedias, studies, and images from museum and private collections, as well as archive ancient manuscripts and very old printed books. The finished digital products would then be offered for sale to universities and other academic organizations, who would make the content available to all students and staff for research and educational purposes. The images of these books, manuscripts, and museum collections would be used as thumbnails for search results, merged into books view so users could digitally turn the pages, and zoom in and out. Also all products needed to be responsive, since visitors would access the content from both mobile devices and laptops. Another critical requirement was strong, yet flexible, security. Some images would be freely available to the public as part of its marketing efforts, while those that were part of published content — inside books, encyclopedias, and collections of museum objects — needed to be restricted so that only purchasers and authorized users could access the content.
About The Customer
Bloomsbury Publishing is a leading independent publishing house, established in 1986, with authors who have won the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker Prizes, and is the originating publisher and custodian of the Harry Potter series. Bloomsbury has offices in London, New York, New Delhi, Oxford and Sydney. Bloomsbury’s Academic division specializes in the humanities and social sciences, publishing more than 1,000 books and digital services each year.
The Solution
Bloomsbury discovered Cloudinary, which offered all the functionality it was seeking — from image manipulation and responsive delivery to security and a digital asset management (DAM) solution — in its cloud-based platform. Bloomsbury was able to deploy Cloudinary quickly and kick off its academic digitization work with a project that involved archiving rare manuscripts from a private collection. This project, as with others that followed, enabled Bloomsbury’s team to scan an image once, at 100 megapixels, so that this single high-res version could be stored, and then used in a variety of forms. Bloomsbury also uses Cloudinary’s DAM solution for storing and securing images, including an encyclopedia of architecture from the Royal Society of Architecture in the United Kingdom and traditional English monographs. Much of the digital content from Bloomsbury is peerreviewed and not available on Google or Wikipedia, or is composed of curated collections.
Operational Impact
  • Bloomsbury was able to deploy Cloudinary quickly and kick off its academic digitization work with a project that involved archiving rare manuscripts from a private collection.
  • The automation of image transformations, including format transcoding and quality compression, is particularly critical to the success of Bloomsbury’s digitization work.
  • Because it is cloud-based, the Cloudinary platform allows freelancers to leverage the XML publishing workflow when they’re doing subject indexing.
Quantitative Benefit
  • 50% reduction in publishing time
  • <1 second average load time for image-heavy pages
  • Up to 24 months of savings on digital transformation

Related Case Studies.

Contact us

Let's talk!

* Required
* Required
* Required
* Invalid email address
By submitting this form, you agree that IoT ONE may contact you with insights and marketing messaging.
No thanks, I don't want to receive any marketing emails from IoT ONE.
Submit

Thank you for your message!
We will contact you soon.