There are, at this moment, still five US commercial book publishers of mega-size. Penguin Random House is the biggest; HarperCollins is 2nd; and Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster round out the Big Five. PRH is, approximately, as big as the other four combined (about $4 billion in sales) and HarperCollins is, approximately, as big […]
“The Family Business” is Ingram: the global infrastructure for the book industry
The global infrastructure for the book business that is not Amazon is owned and operated by the Ingram Content Group. In fact, a lot of the global infrastructure of the book business that is identified as Amazon is actually Ingram. And on top of that, there would probably have been no Amazon, certainly not the […]
Both the supply chain and book marketing are forever changed by Coronavirus
Just before the world changed, about five months ago on February 18th, we wrote in this space about two initiatives that made sense for all publishers to employ to raise revenues and profits. One was Ingram’s Guaranteed Availability Program (GAP), which connects their Lightning print-on-demand capability to their ability to ship within 24 hours, delivering […]
The supply chain for book publishing is being changed by Coronavirus too
One thing the pandemic has done is to make everybody more aware of “supply chains”: the path by which a thing gets made and delivered to its ultimate user. Many of us heard many times that a ventilator is constructed of 150 parts that come from all over the world, hinting at the massive logistical […]
2020: Zero year thoughts about the changes in book publishing
Years that end in zeroes summon a natural tendency to look backwards and forwards. So as we enter this century’s decade of The 20s, we’ll do just that. The ideas in this piece analyze what is mostly anecdata: “facts” that are real, that I’ve vetted with people who have lived through these times with me, […]