Publishers and Outsourcing: Will Outsourcing Increase?

The publishing industry has changed dramatically over the past two years. The global economic slowdown hit industry revenues hard. Moreover, rapid technological advancements led publishers to a rude awakening - the business model they were operating by for decades isn’t working anymore. While publishers have made attempts to raise decreasing revenues, consumers as well as corporate clients have reduced spending. Rise in costs of print and production has led to a “two pronged” dilemma for publishers - increase revenues or decrease costs.

This report seeks to understand how publishers meet these challenges. The interest with which publishers are looking at the digital market has been established - the digital market addresses the ”two pronged” dilemma quite effectively. While opening up new channels to monetize content, it is significantly cheaper to distribute a unit of content. However, transitioning to ‘digital only’ form amounts to re-inventing the business model and brings in additional challenges (copyright protection, internet economics, etc).

Most publishers have joined the ebooks bandwagon - digitizing titles and packaging existing content for online consumption. But the there are a few questions that need to be addressed:

• Will the digital market alleviate revenue pressures sufficiently?
• Is the industry going to outsource more or less or stop altogether?
• Can some of the challenges be addressed by outsourcing?
• What is being outsourced?
• What are the cost savings that have been achieved?

Through a survey, we asked stakeholders from the publishing industry “What are the future plans for outsourcing?”

Research Methodology
We broke down the 237 responses as per segments to generate this report. We further cross tabbed the education segment responses on the following:

• Profile of the respondent
• Size of company and
• Geography

This break-down provided us with granularity on various aspects such as challenges faced, satisfaction levels, sourcing levels, cost savings, sourcing expectations, etc. This has helped us develop a comprehensive understanding of outsourcing sentiments within the segment.