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Can a book change a child’s life? The 145 winners of this year's Moonbeam Children's Book Awards think so, and the medal-winning books prove their authors’, illustrators’ and publishers’ dedication to inspiring young minds and imaginations.The 2012 Moonbeam Awards medalists represent a wide range of style and content, and the judges were affected by the many encouraging and sometimes challenging messages for children

With a battered economy dragging down just about every retail sector, a salient fact making headlines has been the ability of discounters to maintain sales growth—a sure sign that the “Wal-Mart Effect” has permeated every corner of the business world, and that raising prices is probably not the way to realize profits. This leaves cost-cutting, which, for obvious reasons, book publishers would like to pursue aggressively without sacrificing either product quality or valued employees. Here are some tips from a cross-section of the publishing world for reining in costs without sacrificing too much in the process.

The concept of offshoring—the practice of sourcing manufacturing or content management services overseas—is no stranger to the book publishing industry. Complex four-color work has long been sent to countries such as Italy and Japan, where the labor-intensive processes of producing art books (hand-stripping, contacting and working with film) were more cost-effective. Today, the same advances in technology that have had such a profound effect on publishing in general over the last 20 years—digital prepress work, real-time tracking of projects through the supply chain and instantaneous sending of digital files, among others—have opened the door to a true global sourcing revolution. “With Mac, Pagemaker,

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