Revisiting: Why Publishers’ Brands Matter

Via Flickr user Dave Dugdale

Publishers’ brands are under attack from all sides. We hear, for example, about the “article economy” and the strongly held view that publishers add no value to the process of editorial development and the dissemination of materials. In the book world, the argument is that no one buys a book because of the name of a publisher; it’s the author’s name that counts. These arguments have implications. If publishers’ brands have little or no value, then publishers can be disintermediated. An author can deposit an article into an open access repository and then let Google do the marketing; a book author can work directly with Amazon and collect royalties of 70% on revenue, potentially dwarfing the income of the highly educated fools who write books for such firms as Random House or Springer. All this talk puts publishers into the humiliating position of having to jump up and down, shouting, “I matter! I matter!” There is so much glee on the part of those who believe that publishers and their brands do not matter that it almost seems uncompassionate to tell them that they are wrong.