Ware-Pak Inc.

With the U.S. economy on shaky ground, book publishers, like so many others, are honing in on ways to cut costs while growing their businesses. This often means tapping the resources of thirdparty partners to manage the aspects of the publishing business that fall outside the publisher’s core competencies (creating and marketing great content)—things like physically managing inventory and fulfilling orders from retail partners and consumers. For fulfillment help, publishers may turn to their book printers, which often have warehousing and fulfillment operations to complement their manufacturing services, or to a third-party fulfillment specialist. Location, Location, Location Direct-mailers will tell you that minimizing mail

If distribution means getting books into the hands of sellers, circulators or readers, then a true profile of the distribution business would cast a wide net, beginning at the binding line and continuing through to the ‘long tail’ of online portals, used bookstores and curbside pushcarts. However, if distribution, from the publisher’s view, means getting books to generate sales revenue, we can overlook all of the aftermarket, recirculation and reselling channels and focus solely on reaching stores, libraries, online and catalog warehouses and—increasingly, thanks to the Internet—direct marketing from the publisher to the consumer. In the article “Deconstructing Distribution,” in Book Business’

A year ago, Ideals Publications (www.IdealsPublications.com)—a Nashville, Tenn.-based division of Guideposts that publishes 100+ titles annually for children and adults—was operating, as many publishers do, under a paper-based inventory management and distribution system that involved order-faxing and a returns-handling system that could sometimes take weeks. Last July, however, Ideals began working with a new distribution company that had a new warehouse management system in place, called IRMS, to automate inventory management and returns processing. Today, Ideals’ order- and returns-management process is paperless, and its inventory levels are more accurate and visible to them in real-time. Returns are in the door and back in active