Niko Pfund

In a time of significant flux in the industry, publishing executives are faced with more pressure than ever to examine their businesses and make decisions that will lead them to a profitable future. Book Business checked in with the leaders of publishing companies of various sizes and scopes—from Scholastic to Springer to Merriam-Webster to Triple Crown—to find out what their best business decisions of the year have been.

Perspectives on the shifting publishing marketplace, and threats and opportunities surfacing as a result, seem almost to have divided the industry. Some see print as holding fast as the primary bread-and-butter for publishers, with e-books and other digital products growing, but remaining as incremental revenue. Others see the current growth in e-book and new digital reading devices, and a younger generation of digital-bred readers pointing toward a future where "e" will be the primary revenue driver in most publishing businesses.

A friend of mine was diagnosed last year with a brain tumor. She underwent something like 30 days straight of chemo-
therapy. She was temporarily blind, obviously
 extremely sick and, one would think, terrified. But her outlook during the entire process was amazing. She was optimistic, celebrated each small hurdle and kept going, seemingly undaunted by the road ahead of her. She told me that when she was diagnosed with the tumor, she had read a number of books on Kabbalah, and apparently it gave her a new perspective with which to deal with the challenges she was facing.

One might think that all other problems fade into the background when there’s a recession, but for university presses, that’s certainly not true. Questions about changes in education funding and student habits rear up alongside concerns about preparing for the digital future; still, the country’s economic woes are plaguing university presses, and the stress is not likely to disappear anytime soon.