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, […]
We’ll see how what I actually learn compares to what I expect to find out
Australia and New Zealand have always been the far outposts of the English-speaking territories for book publishers based in New York and London. But the logistics and economics of managing inventory are very difficult. These countries are across long seas from where US and UK publishers normally warehouse their books. Whatever copies are shipped to […]
The best ways to use Lightning are not widely employed yet 20 years in
The 20th anniversary of Lightning Source, the digital service provided by Ingram that supplies both printed-on-demand books and ebook file distribution services for publishers, was recently noted in a tribute piece in Publishers Weekly. The growth of the file repository at Lightning was reported to have reached 15 million titles. Those represent books that might […]