Another exciting year for the publishing industry is in the books, so to speak. The eBook and digital publishing landscape changed drastically yet again. Seeing as though 2012 is just about over, we’ve gathered publishing experts to predict what extraordinary events are to come in book publishing in 2013.
While eBooks have been exploding in popularity in recent years, scholars, chefs and those who just love to tool around in the kitchen say it’s not time to stick a fork in the physical cookbook just yet. “I’m a pretty messy cook, so having your computer on the counter is a recipe for disaster,” said Ian Mosby, who is preparing to teach a University of Guelph course that encompasses the history of the cookbook.
“If I’m going to pay money to own something, I would rather have the physicality of the book. I’m more likely to read a physical cookbook
At a time when Wisconsin’s paper mills were already fighting off a digital death, China has become a sudden, potent adversary—a threat even greater than the rise of laptops and the iPad. Over the course of the last decade, China tripled its paper production and in 2009 overtook the United States as the world’s biggest papermaker. It can now match the annual output of Wisconsin, America’s top papermaking state, in the span of three weeks.
At RIT, I took the “Printing Industry Trends” course with Frank Romano. On the first day of class, Frank casually mentioned our main assignment was to create a book. “Print 2022: Printing Changed the World - Now the World Is Changing Printing” is that book.
The Orange Country Register in suburban Los Angeles is expanding its newsroom. Not only that—the owners are emphasizing print, not digital. In the past few weeks, longtime Register editor Ken Brusic has hired some two-dozen positions. “We haven't seen this kind of hiring since the early ’90s,” he says.
At the Register’s headquarters, it sounds like a different era. The Register’s presses whir nearly 24 hours a day. They’re printing more color, more pages.
Brusic doesn’t think people stopped subscribing to newspapers because they didn’t want to read them. He thinks it’s because publishers made too many cutbacks.
There are several ways of looking at the impact of electronic technologies on print, including: the relative impact on page volumes within a specific application, the impact of print loss within a specific application, and the loss of page volumes in total compared to other applications.
Now in its 29th year, the Printing Impressions 400 provides the industry’s most comprehensive ranking of the leading printing companies in the United States and Canada. The listings include company name and headquarters location; parent company, if applicable; current and previous year’s rankings; most recent and previous year’s fiscal sales; percentage change; primary specialties; principal officer(s); as well as number of employees, manufacturing plants and total press units.
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” author Jeff Kinney is a kid’s book star. And, in many ways, his success reflects the publishing industry’s shifting landscape. Twenty years ago, children’s book publishers sold mostly to librarians and teachers. A decade ago, though, state funding took a serious hit and publishers stepped up their marketing to kids and parents via bookstores, says Lin Oliver, executive director of the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators.
“Children’s publishing became more of a business with breakout hits,” Oliver says. Books with graphic elements...became especially popular. “They are not like book report books,” Oliver says.
When it comes to the magazine, Oprah Winfrey said her staff prepared her to expect a 25 percent decline in newsstand sales after the talk show ended. (It has been closer to 22 percent.) And while she acknowledged that she enjoys “holding the magazine in my hand,” she is pragmatic about print’s future and said she would stop publishing a print magazine if it were not profitable.
The median age for an O reader is 49, according to data tracked by GfK MRI. Ms. Winfrey said she would like to attract women “in their 30s or perhaps their 20s
There are some media channels, such as print, that seem so antiquated that marketers don’t think about how social media and technology can be influenced by the medium. Well, lets aim to make this a mindset of the past and start encouraging our coworkers, clients, leadership and partners to think “social,” even when producing print ads and printed collateral.
