Johns Hopkins University Press

When Alison Mudditt took over as the new director of the University of California Press a little over three years ago, after spending nearly a quarter-century working in the scholarly publishing space for commercial houses like Blackwell and Taylor & Francis, to say she had her work cut out for her would be a tragic understatement

To Go Big for D2C marketing-to shoot the moon-really means to begin to recast a university press to be more like a professional society, where all the members and readers participate in research and teaching in the same intellectual space. Such a focus provides scale, which can be used for targeted marketing and new content development; it also could be leveraged into a conference business, which could be highly profitable. But a university press with $5 million in revenue and a list of 100 new titles each year, spread over 10 subjects

Changes in ownership in our community aren't that rare.   In fact the pace of mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs has occurred at a fairly regular pace. One company in our community has experienced five changes of ownership in the past 15 years, along with several other major mergers and acquisitions during the same time period. What is more unusual in our space is when a university, a library or non-profit spins off a for-profit company. There are many successful non-profit and university publishers and many of them also have successful digital publishing initiatives.

With the U.S. economy on shaky ground, book publishers, like so many others, are honing in on ways to cut costs while growing their businesses. This often means tapping the resources of thirdparty partners to manage the aspects of the publishing business that fall outside the publisher’s core competencies (creating and marketing great content)—things like physically managing inventory and fulfilling orders from retail partners and consumers. For fulfillment help, publishers may turn to their book printers, which often have warehousing and fulfillment operations to complement their manufacturing services, or to a third-party fulfillment specialist. Location, Location, Location Direct-mailers will tell you that minimizing mail

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP)—an organization of nonprofit publishers whose members strive to advance scholarship through their offerings—believes that the university press segment’s fundamental mission has not changed since America’s oldest university press, The Johns Hopkins University Press, was founded in 1878. However, the landscape in which its members operate has changed greatly, and the forecast calls for additional change in the future. As throughout the rest of the publishing industry, driving this change are advances in digital technologies. A varying segment According to Steve Maikowski, director of NYU Press, the university press world is divided into four major sales groups