Investor interest in publishers is rising because publishers have a commodity that many businesses covet. “They have the content. They have the storytellers,” Robin Warner told Frankfurt Book Fair.
Producing podcasts has never have been more lucrative. For top-shelf creators, producers, distributors and platforms, podcasting may be an end in itself – or it can serve as a bridge to film, television, and publishing.
55 publishing groups with combined reported revenue for 2020 of nearly $68 billion are included in this year’s ranking. Total 2020 revenue is down about 6% from 2019, though a significant portion of that decline is owing to currency fluctuations.
“You’re not only a book buyer, consumer, reader, or a consumer of other media. What we saw in our data was that those that were avid in books were avid across other media,” says Dr. Rachel Noorda,
“The alleged conspiracy—in which the five largest American trade publishers are alleged to have banded together to give Amazon monopoly pricing power over e-books—fundamentally makes no sense.”
Over the past two decades, technology has transformed rights management from back-office clerical function to strategic opportunity across many sectors of publishing.
After 20 years, Publishers Weekly writers and editors are recalling 9/11. “The PW staff did a remarkable job capturing early reactions to the historic event,” says editorial director Jim Milliot.
While the music industry experienced financial carnage in the first decade of digital disruption, streaming has restored the business to growth by playing your favorite song.
In June, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office announced it will look at changes to the exhaustion of intellectual property rights. Essentially, exhaustion of IP rights is a limit on the control that copyright holders and others have over physical distribution of their works, such as books, in markets around the world.
Darrell Gunter has helped bring to market digital-driven initiatives such as Factiva, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and others. The technology next-in-line to transform publishing, says the industry veteran, will be blockchain.
