Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Digital Book Manufacturing Helps Solve Costly Inventory Builds

With the advent of digital manufacturing facilities in the book and manual production industry, inventories can be managed.  No longer do publishers/authors need to warehouse large quantities of books with the hope that they will sell.  Every day that a book sits on a warehouse shelf, it is costing the current owner money, storage costs, and the cost on the money that you have paid for the manufacturing of this unsold unit.  When looking at manufacturing order quantities, look at how fast a title is going to be sold. Even if it were to sell over a specific time frame, such as a year, digital manufacturing is the most cost-effective way to manage your inventory costs.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Book Distribution Model Needs to Change for Both E-books and Physical Books

Taking a look at the book industry distribution model of the past and seeing how that model is evolving presents many options for change.  Traditionally in the book market, books were sold to distributors and the distributors sold them to book stores.  With the advent of the big-block book stores, some of those organizations went directly to the publishers to purchase books.  Then came the Internet, and a whole new selling model emerged.  Publishers in all cases were forced to give up large portions of the retail price to both distributors and book stores.  With the advent of the e-book, the possibility of this whole model could change.  Who does the marketing for a new book?  The publisher and the author do, not the distributor. Why shouldn’t the publisher just use a service to sell its downloaded books, and keep that “distribution” margin?  We see evidence of this new model in the airline industry, where airlines are now selling tickets directly off of their web sites along with other travel needs, cutting out the other “middleman” web sites.  We look forward to working through this whole book distribution model change.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Blogs for the Media Distribution Industry

As we begin 2011, we feel it is important to start this blog and show how our firm is adapting to meet the continued demands of our current and future customers.  The media distribution business is changing rapidly with the emergence of new technologies and their usage. Throughout this blog we will attempt to keep you informed of these changes, how they could or will affect you and your business, and how we can help you to use and implement them.  Some of these blogs will be very specific on a particular aspect of a subject.  Others will be more of a global view of things as we see them.   I hope to put some personal slant into the blog that reflects my years of experience in the print industry.  We welcome all inputs, suggestions, and other information that we can use.  We want to continue to be a leader in the media distribution industry, no matter what output format that media will take.  This is a very evolving industry, and we want to offer our customers solutions that best fit their unique needs.