The financial reports of the major publishers have been following a pattern for some years now. Sales are about flat but profits have been steadily rising. One explanation for that fact is that the management of the major houses have been diligent about adapting their businesses to the new marketplace configurations or, as the saying […]
After seeing Lightning Australia and a couple of publishers, and learning a few things
Ingram’s Lightning Print operation outside of Melbourne isn’t massive (at least not yet), but it sure has a lot of capabilities. It can deliver hardbacks as well as paperbacks, color as well as just black, and pretty much an infinite number of trim sizes. It’s built for true POD, meaning runs of one copy, but […]
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 […]
Imprint consolidation at big houses is a sign of changed times
I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So every book coming into the world today is competing against 16 million other books that you might buy. That […]