Columbia University Press

Columbia University Press is pleased to announce the addition of two new distribution clients. Beginning January 1, 2013, Columbia University Press began to distribute frontlist and backlist titles from Transcript and, in a separate deal, Jagiellonian University Press.
 
Effective immediately, Columbia University Press will sell and market Transcript books in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.  Jagiellonian University Press books are available through Columbia University Press in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami once translated The Great Gatsby for Japanese readers. In Columbia University Press’ In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means anthology, you can read an essay he wrote about translating the book:

"When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye."

Indian service providers for typesetting, e-book, copy-editing and other production services are an established fact and part of virtually every major publisher's workflow.

To be sure, the business process outsourcing (BPO) of publishing services is a growth business, forecast to reach $1.2 billion in 2012 (according to a report by research and intelligence organization ValueNotes, "Offshoring in the Publishing Vertical: 2009"), including outsourcing for book, magazine and newspaper publishing—with 60 percent of these revenues being directed to Indian providers.

That said, it appears that we may be on the verge of a new addition to the existing Indian business model—an initiative that the Indian book manufacturing community has named Book City—Vision 2017.

If predictability is a qualification for success, I suggest to you that we are, as an industry, in for a bit of a roller coaster ride for the next several years.

The end of a calendar year is always an interesting time for the publishing industry and perhaps never more so than the close of 2010.

Managing inventory is as much an art as a science, and like any art, a number of tried-and-true techniques exist that publishers may want to consider.

Short-run digital printing is unquestionably a technology whose time has arrived. Its quality and capabilities are improving steadily, and inline/near-line binding solutions promise to make an already capable technology even more so. Many digital printers' equipment and skills have improved to where we have moved away from the Henry Ford Model A approach to substrates ("any paper you want as long as it is (50) uncoated offset") to manufacturing of case-bound, four-color textbooks printed on (60) gloss coated stock.

In previous columns, I've explored the strategic reasons to consider outsourcing distribution operations and the request for proposal (RFP) process for outsourced distribution partners. Now, let's assume that you have evaluated all the third-party proposals and selected the finalist among the various bids.

Effective cash management is critical to the health of any business, but the recession and associated credit crunch have made paying close attention to managing cash more important than ever.

The first step in the RFP process is to identify the companies you wish to consider as potential bidders for your distribution business. You have, essentially, two options: specialist firms that provide distribution services to book publishers, and book publishers who handle distribution for other publishers.