Legal Research

Change and Book Publishing

By admin

Book Publishing: Changing, For the Better
by Kate Poole

“The Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell, Inc., released its report “A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing” on November 2. The report investigates the challenges of publishing from the perspective of publishers to depict the current and upcoming state of the industry. Sponsored by Aptara, Book Industry Study Group (BISG), HP, LibreDigital, MarkLogic, North Plains System Corporation, Océ North America and Really Strategies, the report has had over 1,700 downloads, just from Aptara’s website alone, in a week.”

The report investigates the fundamental shared processes that book pubishers use and how preapred they are for change and e-books, etc.

Some insights include:

“across all of the publishing segments … digital workflows are common, and the use of XML format for the production of workflow is pretty common”

“Just over half of publisher respondents are not yet using XML, but 35.4% of publishers said their companies are considering it.”

“Most publishers use XML to enhance flexibility in the re-use and repurposing of content.”

“Publishers, as often as not these days, actually deliver books to their printers in print-ready PDF, and that’s allowed them to also then turn to digital printers as opposed to off-set printers over the last 10 years or so.”

“Over 21% of respondents use digital printing to maintain backlist and out-of-print title availability.”

“20.6 % use [digital printing] because traditional offset printing requires too high a print run to be economical.”

The “study showed that in five years 26.4% of respondents expect 25-50% of gross revenues to come from ebook publishing.”

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on November 22, 2010 (boomark / email).