Business Management - Industry Trends

Slated to roll out next month, “Printers Row” will feature 24 pages of book reviews, author interviews and Chicago-focused literary news, along with a weekly bonus book of short fiction. The journal will be delivered with the Sunday paper and online beginning Feb. 26 to Tribune subscribers who pay an additional $99 per year. Subscriptions also will include access to member-only book events, such as the Tribune series of author conversations, and discussion groups.

Asking subscribers to pay $2 extra per week for a books section may seem like a gamble, but Kern said he is banking on pent-up demand among

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a “mini-report” on the adoption of tablets and eReaders that found the number of Americans owning tablets and eReaders nearly doubled over the holidays. The number of Americans owning a tablet computer rose to 19 percent from 10 percent, and the growth in eBook readers jumped an identical amount, to 19 percent from 10 percent.

Overall, the number of Americans owning either one of these devices jumped from 18 percent to 29 percent, meaning that nearly 1 in 3 Americans now owns a device.

“These findings are striking because they come after a

David Carey is the eternal optimist. The president of Hearst Magazines has his fingers on the pulse of the magazine industry. His prescription for an industry’s cure was outlined in his New Year’s letter to Hearst employees in which he stressed the need and importance of both the ink on paper and the pixels on the screen new magazine media business model.

I had the opportunity to visit with Mr. Carey last week. David was generous enough to share with me on tape some of his ideas and practices regarding the magazine industry now and in the future...

Apple’s one-hour event Thursday seemed fairly simple. But the ramifications of what Apple announced may go a lot further than simply changing the way we educate children. One of the biggest misconceptions I run into is the assumption that developing iOS apps is easy. It’s not.

Roman Hohol says tablets and other digital devices will depress the demand for printed media even faster than most forecasts predict. But the director-marketing practice for Forest Industry Consulting also sees signs that the tablet revolution will benefit many publishers.

Of the 5,000 magazine and newspaper iPad apps we’ve evaluated for McPheters & Co.’s iMonitor service since April 2010, far too many simply do not work well. In the summer of 2010, about 45 percent of the apps we evaluated revealed significant malfunctions. That proportion is falling, but not quickly enough: Our analysis shows that about a third of all apps we have evaluated still have at least one serious shortcoming.

According to InfoTrends, the global market for wide-format UV-curable inkjet printers and supplies is expected to grow from $1.42 billion in 2010 to $3.04 billion in 2015 for a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4 percent.

When Apple launched the tablet, single copies were the only way most magazines were available, and the consumer backlash was brutal. But now...single issues have turned out to be a good way of selling back copies of magazines, which has been cumbersome to do in print.

“The Serpent’s Shadow,” the final book in “The Kane Chronicles” series by best-selling author Rick Riordan, will be released on May 1, 2012, with a two-million-copy first printing. It will simultaneously release in hardcover and as an eBook from Disney Publishing’s Disney-Hyperion imprint.

With newsstand sales down almost across the board, the past few years have been, well, bumpy for the magazine industry. With the dawning of 2012, the print industry is pulling out all the stops to refresh, innovate and improve their product.