11 Best Business Decisions of 2011

Niko Pfund

President
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press Inc. (OUP USA) is linked to Oxford University Press in Oxford, England (OUP UK), which is a department of Oxford University, and is the oldest and largest continuously operating university press in the world. The OUP group publishes more than 6,000 new titles a year and employs approximately 5,000 people across 50 countries.

"I'd say the two most important decisions we've made are: One, experimenting aggressively with e-books, [and] two, continuing to invest in our higher education (HE) and reference publishing.

E-books provide us with an excellent opportunity to gain a better understanding of the different price points for different kinds of nonfiction content. In so doing, we're confident we can reach more readers than ever before, a key consideration for a mission-based institution such as OUP.

As for our investment in HE, at a time when the cost of textbooks is much debated, we believe that the time is right for a strong higher-education publisher such as Oxford to provide affordably priced alternatives that rise to Oxford's quality standards while also being supported by all the ancillary materials that are increasingly key to pedagogy."

[For] reference, we aspire to be nothing less than a full-spectrum publisher to the academy, ranging from dictionaries to Oxford Handbooks and major reference works that set the standard in a given discipline. At a time when there is more high-quality reference content freely available than ever before, it has been incumbent on us to rethink what our constituents want from OUP as a reference publisher. Accordingly, we have reoriented our program to focus on scholarly services such as Oxford Bibliographies Online which draw on OUP's broad experience as a reference publisher to help scholars and students orient themselves in a world of seemingly infinite information."