Industry veteran Ed Marino, who many of you may know from his time with Kodak and Presstek, has been the Chairman and CEO at codeMantra for about two years now. The company provides a services platform for content publishers. As of its newest release, codeMantra 4.0 offers content publishers of all types three areas of utility: collaboration, management and customer engagement. The company primarily services publishers in the scientific, technical and medical (STM) and educational publishing markets, but with this new release, its platform becomes more attractive to a broader range of publisher types.

For print service providers, codeMantra is an interesting platform. It provides composed content to book printers as authorized by publishers, but it also is a services platform that print service providers could leverage to add more functionality to their offering to small and mid-sized businesses.

Marino explained the services, saying, “One part of the platform manages the composition process with all of the collaborators, from authors to compositors. Another part manages the production and distribution of the content. Completed work is output in both print and digital formats, and is topically sent to printers (for printed books), online retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc., along with the specific metadata required by each; content is also retained in a repository or archive. Formats are compliant with all major retail sites around the globe. The third part has a direct-to-consumer aspect for uses like building an interactive community around an author or body of content.”

Marino describes a pre-K application being use by about 300 classrooms in Texas. “It wasn’t so much that parents were interested in the content their kids were using,” he says, “but they wanted to be able to engage with teachers. It’s set up like a social media platform where all stakeholders can interact with each other and with the content.”

codeMantra also does work with Cisco. Marino explains, “We produce all of Cisco’s technical training courses and format them for digital delivery.”

The codeMantra pricing is a per-asset annual charge, along with charges for set-up and services as required. With codeMantra 4.0, the offering becomes very interesting for any print service provider whose customer base includes communities who want to manage content and make it interactively available to members. This could be schools, associations, or special interest groups. Marino cites a Revolutionary War Reenactment group as an example of the latter.

Looking for ways to expand your offerings beyond ink and toner on paper? codeMantra may be just the ticket. Visit the company’s web site at www.codemantra.com, of your can contact Susan Peterson at the company ([email protected] or 908-239-5519).