Ingram Digital

“We are leading the pack by building a digital warehouse, which is the digital equivalent of our print warehouse,” commented Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, in the May issue of Book Business. This is the ultimate sign-off on the industry’s embrace of the future, and its take-back of content control from trailblazers such as Google, Amazon and Yahoo. For some years now, various technology vendors have enabled publishers to deliver electronically formatted versions of their titles for special purposes. These have included applications such as conversions to XML formats (e.g., Publishing Dimensions), proprietary e-book reader formats (Mobipocket), sight-impaired applications (National

Coutts Information Services—-a book-supply, collection-management and shelf-ready services provider-—has announced an agreement with Stanford University. The Stanford University Library has acquired collections of eBooks from Coutts, to be hosted on the MyiLibrary platform. MyiLibrary.com is an Ingram Digital Group company, a global provider of digital content accession, storage, management and delivery services to publishers and other content owners. The acquisitions include approximately 7,000 titles from Oxford University Press, 3,000 Cambridge University Press titles and more than 12,000 titles from Springer. “This groundbreaking arrangement will send a strong signal to the academic library community that eBooks have entered the mainstream of book acquisition

If distribution means getting books into the hands of sellers, circulators or readers, then a true profile of the distribution business would cast a wide net, beginning at the binding line and continuing through to the ‘long tail’ of online portals, used bookstores and curbside pushcarts. However, if distribution, from the publisher’s view, means getting books to generate sales revenue, we can overlook all of the aftermarket, recirculation and reselling channels and focus solely on reaching stores, libraries, online and catalog warehouses and—increasingly, thanks to the Internet—direct marketing from the publisher to the consumer. In the article “Deconstructing Distribution,” in Book Business’