Warren Chiara

As professors begin creating their course plan for the year, often they’ll select a title that they once used during their days as an undergrad or graduate student, not realizing that the title has been pulled from the backlist of the publisher as ‘out of print.’ The advent of short-run digital technology has allowed publishers to offer books that are no longer in print in quantities anywhere from one to a few thousand. The technology in recent years also has opened up custom publishing divisions at major educational publishers. Pearson Education is one of several large educational book publishers to offer such a

“Consumer-Centric Publishing” was the theme for this year’s Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Publishing University, established to help member publishers deliver focused training from a Christian publishing perspective. ECPA chose this theme for the second annual event, held in Bloomingdale, Ill., outside of Chicago, to enhance the publishing professional’s understanding of their customers’ needs. ECPA divided the conference into six educational tracks—advanced management, editorial and content development, marketing and sales management, production and prepress management, information technologies and systems, and publishing 101. The conference featured four plenary sessions designed to help the nearly 400 attendees understand the Christian consumer, the markets in which they