Shobunsha Publications, MAPPLE Publications
Magazine Editorial
Webpage Editorial
Image Processing
Shobunsha Publications, MAPPLE Publications
Shobunsha Publications (昭文社) and MAPPLE Publications are both group companies of Shobunsha Holdings. The most remarkable publications of Shobunsha and MAPPLE are map and guidebooks. Their practical publications helped not only Japanese but also the foreigners to get the useful information while travelling Japan. Besides, they are also publishing magazine and digitalizing their travelling/daily life information and uploading it on different websites and social media platforms.
Construct an Image Operation and Management System for Business Expansion
Centralized Management for travel guidebook photos: Streamlined the Editorial Process
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Convenient Data Copyrights Management
Guidebooks editing involves a huge amount of photos of tourist spots and facilities. Some of the photos will be shared by two guidebook brands "KOTRIP" and "MAPPLE", some will be only used by one brand. Shobunsha used to manage the copyright information of the images by ledger, but it was time-consuming to confirm whether the image can still be used or not. On CIERTO, images that exceed the expiration date will be marked as prohibit to use automatically. It reduced their checking time and ensure the data can be used safely.
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Enhancing the quality of magazine and webpage content
Editors have to select images from the vast archive of photos for production. The traditional way of image picking for Shobunsha was to read the magazine on the shelves, find a suitable picture, and search it on the file server again. But now, they can just directly search the suitable images on CIERTO, just inserting any relevant information like facility name, captions, tags, etc.. Sometimes they can also find some seldom used but perfect fit image, it also enhanced the quality of media contents and reduced waste of images.
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Efficient External Platforms Distribution
After the production, Shobunsha exports their media contents to social media and their own curation platform. In order to meet the image upload requirements for each pages, they are using the image conversion function on CIERTO to change the colour mode, resolution and the compression ratio of a picture. Moreover, the image data on CIERTO can be exported to external system through API without data download. The whole procedure of data distribution become much smoother.
Reason why we chose CIERTO ｜ Interview with the customers
CIERTO is a critical element for streamlining the production process and business growth.
Shobunsha Holdings publishes over thousands of guidebook and map including "KOTRIP" and "MAPPLE". And our business also including digitalizing map data and guidebook data, making contribution to the map creation and travel industries. It is critical to have a content management system that can help us to achieve the goal of secondary use of data correctly and accurately, and the monetization of the business. CIERTO is a platform that can do more than image data management. It helps us to control the copyright information, and also the captions of the data which can also be used when searching. Now we can ensure all the data stored on CIERTO can be used effectively, without the concern on misusing expired data. It enhanced the quality of our productions, and contributed to the business growth.
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Our Practical Books
MAPPLE Magazine Series
How we use CIERTO
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Flexible Search Function
Every year there will be new materials and images while magazine revision. At the same time, we reuse the past data frequently, and edit the image in the highest quality that can meet the requirements of the new magazine publishing. And we also publish articles via webpage everyday.
The search system of CIERTO is convenient. You can hit the result in many different ways, like inserting the characteristics of the image you needed. Since we are managing different magazine and webpage brands, the system is really helpful for us to handle with large number of data efficiently. I can't imagine what will happen if we were not using CIERTO. -
Convenient Copyright Management
We use different images of the tourist spots and the facilities on out guidebook. However, the copyright management of the materials can be complicated: some images have to get extra permission when it comes to web contents, some may need to resubmmit the application while reusing. Before implementing CIERTO, we used ledger to manage these information, and we have to recheck the permission information whenever there is new application. But now we can simply manage the copyright information on CIERTO collectively with the image, i.e. input the information as a metadata value of the image. thus, the editor can directly check the information on CIERTO, we can feel ease and just use the data meet the copyright requirements.
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Image Conversion: a key for production streamlining
User can convert file format or compress the file directly on CIERTO without using other software. Our editors are now just simply resizing all the images on CIERTO to reduce their workload. Moreover, the editors of Shobunsha curation webpage and social media accounts are also using the function to convert the high-resolution image for magazine, to digital platform-use format. We generate as many as 500 files in a month the the conversion function, which is a critical tool for our editorial teams.
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External Integration by API: bring us business growth
Our strength is having a tremendous amount of data, which can provide adequate information to public institutions, traffic agencies and commercial facilities. We created a website for our customer to search the data. In order to facilitate our customers to reach the data accurately, we use API to integrate the webpage with CIERTO. So they can directly access the data of tourist spots and facilities in Japan, with its basic information like image and address. Not only in publication, the flexible API integration of CIERTO also helps our digital business.
System We Provide
Digital Asset Management System