Baker & Taylor Inc.

In an effort to increase its international sales, Sourcebooks has signed agreements with four distribution partners. The independent publisher is one of four houses to sign on with Baker & Taylor’s new Global Publishers Services that provides publishers with international sales and marketing services. GPS will be representing Sourcebooks in all territories outside of North…

Baker & Taylor has announced the first four publishers to sign up with Global Publishers Services (GPS), a new business unit created in August that offers worldwide sales and marketing services to independent publishers. Beginning January 2, GPS will begin distributing titles from Sourcebooks, Glitterati Inc., Sellers Publishing, and Arcadia Publishing/The History Press. GPS offers…

ASHLAND, Ohio — April 20, 2016 — Bookmasters, one of the largest providers of integrated book publishing services, and Baker & Taylor, the premier worldwide distributor of books, digital content, and entertainment products, have entered into an international partnership with Printondemand-worldwide (PODW) to offer print on demand and distribution services to their publishers. Unveiled at…

WESTCHESTER, Ill. — April 18, 2016 — Follett Corporation today announced that it has acquired Baker & Taylor, LLC, the leading distributor of books, video and music products to public libraries and institutions, and a major wholesaler to retailers worldwide. With combined sales of $3.6 billion, the two businesses will offer librarians, patrons, educators and…

Academic publishing is a multi-million dollar business dominated by just a few major publishing houses. Many academics and open access advocates believe that's unfair-publishers simply take researchers' work and sell it back to them, they say. Stan Correy takes a look at the state of play.

In 2001, I did a story for RN's Background Briefing called Knowledge Indignation: Road Rage on the Information Superhighway.

That rage was aimed at companies in the STM industry-science, technology and medical publishing.  Leading the charge against these commercial publishers were scientists, doctors, university librarians and other researchers

Classroom materials will dramatically transition from paper to digital books in the next two years, educators predict, according to a survey from LightSail Education, a K-12 literacy platform that partners with Baker & Taylor. The January 28 report, polling  475 educators, predominantly school and district leaders, also revealed a strong preference for digital libraries over rental models.

Among those polled, 94 percent expect that ebooks will increase in their schools and districts, with 52 percent predicting that ebooks will surge

Digital library distributor Baker & Taylor has launched an app for iOS and Android that lets users read ebooks from libraries on their tablets and smartphones. The move is intended to give patrons of libraries that use Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 platform to supply ebooks more choice in how they read those ebooks. The app, axisReader, lets library users borrow and read ebooks from their local libraries.

It looks like all those avowed Kindle fanatics might be going through ink withdrawal -- or so says a new report funded by a few titans of old media. The report, published last week by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), found that fewer consumers are purchasing books exclusively in electronic formats, while the number of booklovers who have "no preference" for e-books over print books is increasing. The percentage of e-book consumers who purchased books "exclusively or mostly" in e-book formats has decreased from 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012.

E-book consumers are becoming more diverse in their format preferences, says the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)'s closely-watched Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading report. The third installment in Volume Three of this Bowker-powered study shows that the percentage of e-book consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase book content in e-book format has decreased from nearly 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012. Over the same period, the percentage of survey respondents who have no preference for either e-book or print formats, or who buy some genres in e-book format and others in print, rose from 25 percent to 34 percent. The study also tracks changes in device ownership, showing that Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has overtaken Apple's iPad among e-book consumers for the first time. Ownership of the Kindle Fire has grown from seven percent of respondents in December 2011 to 20 percent just six months later. Apple's iPad has remained static at 17 percent over the same time period.

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.