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 […]
A changing book business: it all seems to be flowing downhill to Amazon
Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was followed rapidly by other ebook systems — Kobo, Google, B&N’s Nook, and Apple’s iBook — and widely-available print-on-demand capabilities for printed books offered by Ingram (Lightning Print was already a decade old) and Amazon’s CreateSpace. Amazon had long exploited price as a weapon in the marketplace, discounting […]
Transformation of companies and the book industry itself are not just 21st century phenomena
Company transformation is a major theme at this year’s Digital Book World conference. By “transformation” we mean substantial changes in a company’s business model or core competencies or revenue streams. We found eight worthy companies to speak on this subject. Six of them — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Ingram, Quarto, Rodale, Sourcebooks, and Wiley — are […]
Some things that were true about publishing for decades aren’t true anymore
Back when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was active with significant publishers — the quarter century following World War II — he observed that very few books actually took in less cash than they required. That is not to say that publishers saw most books as “profitable”. Indeed, they didn’t. They placed an overhead charge of […]