Business Management - Industry Trends

This year’s elections have generated more than $500 million of added revenue for printing businesses nationwide. A chunk of that money is helping a struggling Wisconsin print industry. Between things like tickets for presidential visits, mailers and voter information flyers, Tom Schorr of Wells Print and Digital Services in Madison says he’s been busy this year.

“For the full year of 2012, we have seen an increase of by say 160-170 percent for election-based printing,” he says.

Schorr said many of his employees have been working 10-15 hours of overtime for the past two months to meet deadlines.

Want a competitive advantage? As NFL teams are discovering, there’s an app for that. Across the league, teams are trading in their 500-page printed playbooks for iPads. In the last year alone, NFL teams using the iPad have quadrupled from three to 12, representing more than one-third of all teams.

Those using PlayerLync report that it has revolutionized the way they push out film and significantly altered the way they communicate.

In addition to saving printing costs, digital playbooks are increasing effective, real-time communication by allowing coaches and quarterbacks to add and share plays with the click of a button.

Like much of print, magazines are at the convoluted intersection of old and new consumption models and technologies. In many instances, a look at the print and Web versions of many mags reveals much the same content in each.

Instead of killing physical books, eBooks have actually encouraged a new level of fetishization of the printed page. Beautifully made editions that sit as objets d’art on the shelf or coffee table are becoming more prevalent. Publishers are investing in more luscious, expensive print editions.

Taschen makes stunning art books that are artworks in themselves, often costing hundreds of dollars. McSweeneys continues to experiment with formats and materials. The attributes that eBooks don’t do well or at all—heavy paper stocks, bookmark ribbons, book plates, artful typography, metallic foils, and stunning, colorful covers—are being implemented in a new flourishing of mass-produced

Last week was a painful one for book publishing. On Monday, D&M Publishers in Vancouver filed for bankruptcy protection, laying off staff and leaving authors uncertain about their future as the company attempts a reorganization. Most reports about the D&M situation mention a number of other Canadian publishers who are no more, thanks to bankruptcies or financial reorganizations.

One inaccurate report in The Globe & Mail newspaper even went so far to assert that this latest news confirms the failure of the independent Canadian publishing industry. That assertion was alarming for two reasons.

The first reason is that it’s not true.

Magazine publishers from a broad cross section of the industry spent two days presenting their best practices and innovative ideas for an era of transition during the third annual ACT III conference at the University of Mississippi. Like at the AMC in San Francisco last week, the underlying theme of the event was whether print media's best days are behind it. And if it is, the question was how long the decline will take, and how far down print will go.

And like at the AMC, there was no broad agreement...no one really knows what form the business will take

Textbook piracy is on the rise, spurred by the expense of course materials and the popularity of computer tablets and e-readers. Some in the publishing industry have likened the proliferation of book-sharing sites to the launch of Napster a decade ago. But learning from the missteps of the music industry, textbook publishers have been quick to embrace the new technology.

Until recently, the industry’s war on piracy has been focused on shutting down the numerous websites devoted to the illegal trading of textbooks. No one went after the users of BitTorrent file-sharing software…That changed last year, when John Wiley and Sons

Newsweek’s decision to stop publishing a print edition after 80 years and bet its life entirely on a digital future may be more a commentary on its own problems than a definitive statement on the health of the magazine industry. Magazine ad revenue in the U.S. is seen rising 2.6 percent this year to $18.3 billion, according to research firm eMarketer. That would be the third increase in three years, driven mainly by gains in digital ad sales, though print ads are expected to be flat.

Paid magazine subscriptions were up 1.1 percent in the first half of the year

Simon Dumenco (of AdAge) has a question: Would you rather own a magazine, or a digital startup? He notes that some magazines are making real money these days, including Marie Claire, even as most digital startups fail. Old Media isn’t sexy, he says, but “a lot of magazines continue to be not only damn good businesses, but are doing better than ever.”

I don’t know about the better-than-ever thing: I’d need to see some numbers before I was persuaded on that front. At any given point in time, statistically speaking, some small set of magazines is going to be having a

One of the first speakers of the day [at the American Magazine Conference]—Ben Horowitz, technology entrepreneur and co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—suggested that print will likely vanish completely as today’s younger consumers become the dominant generation. “Babies born now will never read anything in print,” he told the audience. “At the same time, people in their 40s and 50s will never stop reading print.”
   
Dr. Jeffery Cole, research professor and director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, presented a similar scenario—print, he predicts, will eventually go away.