June 2006 Issue

 

¿Cómo Se Dice ‘Opportunity’?

Nine hundred billion dollars. That’s the estimated buying power expected of the Latino market within the next five years. Today its buying power is $500 billion here in the United States, and it is considered the 12th largest economy in the world. Information like this can be found on www.SpanishBookMarket.com—a Web site built and maintained by Mark Wesley of Rosa + Wesley, a development firm specializing in graphic design, book production and Spanish translation located in Wheaton, Ill. For those in any business, such numbers are enough to make one’s head spin. Yet some in book publishing are just now waking to this


… Likes Long Walks and Curling Up With a Good Cell Phone

It’s a metamorphosis of the media. Book publishers with ad-supported content models traditionally donned by magazine publishers. Magazine publishers broadcasting live event coverage on their Web sites, and traditional broadcast news media directing consumers to their Web sites for supplemental content. The newest development on this front opens up a whole new can of worms. Amazon.com has crossed over into traditional media territory with its first online, video entertainment talk show. And I realized that not only is the media blurring into one behemoth information-blob, but the boundaries that separate the media from the rest of the world are even beginning to disappear. Amazon.com


Big News on the “Green” Front

Environmental advocacy groups were likely breaking out the champagne as Random House Inc. (www.RandomHouse.com)—the world’s largest English-language trade book publisher and the U.S. division of Random House, the largest trade book publisher in the world—­announced its plans for a tenfold increase in its use of recycled paper. The company says that within four years a minimum of 30 percent of the uncoated paper it uses to print the majority of its U.S. titles will be derived from recycled fibers (as opposed to its current 3 percent). The announcement marks the most substantial environmental initiative in the company’s history, and considering the fact that


Creating Online Products with Bottom-Line Impact

For Roger Hall, determining how to extend a successful print publishing business online is no academic exercise. Hall, the senior vice president of scholarly book and journal publisher Haworth Press, has overseen the expansion of the company’s operations from a handful of publications to more than 100 books and 226 quarterly journals. Hall says Haworth succeeds because the company identifies social, behavioral and library science niches, among others, and uses a flexible printing strategy to extract the maximum return from small print runs. “You don’t need to have 20,000 subscribers to a journal to make a profitable business,” Hall says. “Four hundred to 600


Digital Full Color Opens New Book Markets

While digital toner and inkjet based color has been available for years, Lightning Source’s announcement at Book Expo America of its four-color one-off production line exponentially expands the base for untapped publishing business opportunities for mid-range, independent and high-end publishers. It also shines the light on the transformation of manufacturing business models in the past 10 years, providing a price-list-based, sophisticated manufacturing service that simplifies the supply chain process without sacrificing quality controls. Buying color in Asia or Europe in sufficient quantities to bring the unit cost down and allowing for the weeks of turnaround time need no longer be a barrier to the


E-commerce-Solution Shopping Made Easy

Last year, retail e-commerce totaled $88 billion, or 2.4 percent of total U.S. retail sales, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. In the first quarter of this year, U.S. retail e-sales hit $25 billion—2.7 percent of total retail sales for the quarter ($906 billion). And based on the average annual growth rate (in the mid 20-percent range) of the last few years, 2006’s year-end e-commerce totals are likely to top $110 billion. Book publishers in almost every market have launched e-commerce sites to tap the growing potential in e-sales. Major publishers such as Scholastic (ShopScholastic.com), Random House (RandomHouse.com), McGraw-Hill (Books.McGraw-Hill.com), Penguin Group


Grandma Knows Best

Grandma Janet Mary Sinke has some story to tell. A grandmother of eight (with a ninth on the way) who is battling Parkinson’s Disease—a neurological condition affecting the motor system—she started her own independent publishing company, My Grandma and Me Publishers, in 2003. Despite having no publishing experience to draw upon, Sinke’s books have been recognized for their innovative marketing efforts. Two of her recent works—“Grandma’s Treasure Chest” and “Grandpa’s Fishin’ Friend”—were finalists for the PMA’s (The Independent Book Publishers Association) 2006 Ben Franklin Award for children’s picture book, with the latter title taking home the honor. In addition, she has sold more than


Looking for Environmentally Friendly Paper? Here Are Some of Your Options

If you haven’t reviewed your options in environmentally friendly paper in a while, it might be time to do so. There are currently more than 50 papers on the market made from recycled paper, 20 of which contain 100-percent recycled content. Others contain anywhere from 10-percent to 90-percent recycled content and brightness levels up to 97. Many are also produced using more environmentally friendly bleaching processes, such as processed-chlorine free or elemental-chlorine free processes (see box below). Supply seems to be keeping pace with demand, and as more publishers are committing to improving their environmental footprints, including giant Random House (see story on page


Morton’s Writes the Book on Steak

When Klaus Fritsch moved to the United States in 1967 and then teamed with Arnie Morton to co-found Morton’s, The Steakhouse in 1978, the West German probably never envisioned penning a 240-page “bible” on steak. But almost 30 years after opening the first of what has become a chain of more than 70 restaurants worldwide, Fritsch has done just that. “Morton’s Steak Bible” is the first-ever publishing effort from the company that made its name in the kitchen—not the book store. Roger Drake, Morton’s vice president of communications and public relations, says finding the right publisher to get behind the book was the first


Pressing Matters Face the University Press Market

The university press has always been about more than just turning a profit. There’s the contribution of enabling scholars to write about unusual subjects, professors expanding on their classroom teachings and the overall extension of the university’s mission. Still, in a time when college budgets are dealing with further cutbacks and digital publishing is becoming more of a factor, university presses have never felt more pressure to produce economically, as well as educationally. “We’ve always relied on the credibility of what we publish to keep us afloat, but we need to expand our market to the mainstream,” says Ivar Nelson, director of the Eastern


Tools for Easy Content Management and Repurposing

Content is still king in book publishing. The challenge to publishers today is to move, manage, exchange and manipulate that content in the most efficient and profitable ways. In the age of new media, publishers must be able to accept content from external sources, traffic it through all the pre-publishing phases and then be agile in the way they output it, so that it’s cost-effective but also meaningful to readers. As with any new technology, publishers should evaluate software solutions with these basic considerations in mind: Functionality: What solutions out there have the types of capabilities your company needs? Once the field has


Top 30 Book Manufacturers

For the second consecutive year, Visant Corp. nailed down the top spot in Book Business’ Top 30 Book Manufacturers List (p. 41)—ranked by 2005 book manufacturing revenue—in what was certainly an up-and-down year for many book printers. The book manufacturing landscape continues to change, with paper prices on the rise while availability declines. Publishers are being more vigilant than ever in controlling their costs, while Asia’s impact on the market increases each year. In its annual look at the state of the industry, Book Business sought insights from executives at four of the companies on the list—four companies, it is worth noting, that posted