Publishing Vision

Publishing for Higher Education has become increasingly digital over recent years, with the Covid-19 Pandemic accelerating this transition. This discussion will explore the various trends in publishing across genres, markets and customer type - from the government to institution to library to end-user. Speakers will cover the Asian and ANZ markets.

Asia has been an important growth engine for many publishers. Some of us, of course, it's our home market. But, it's been a growth engine for the last couple of decades. It's about 20% of global revenues, in our higher education sector, but growing twice as fast as any other region. That's been the story, pretty much to the 2000s.

The manner of digital adoption is very much a question mark, and very much up for play, especially as the mix of long–term and short-term trends plays out; we see which short term trends are really long ones. First up among our panellists is Alice Duijser. Managing Director international for Vital Source. Before joining Vital Source in early 2019, she was the Global Marketing Director of Taylor and Francis. She also spent 14 years at McGraw Hill Higher Education, where she was Divisional Director for the higher education business. Alice is extremely well placed to give her view of the shift to digital and the way it is playing out.

Joe Lam adds a huge volume of experience to the debate. Joe joined Pearson in September 2014. He is the Managing Director of Pearson Greater China and South Asia. He started in medicine: a surgeon, with the NHS Milton Keynes Hospital in the UK. He joined the Lancet, as a Scientific Consultant and in 2008, became Managing Director of Elsevier, Southeast Asia. After that, he moved into healthcare investment, as General Manager of Med Time, before joining Pearson.

Barry Clarke and Tao Seong bring the voice of Taylor Frances to the table, as leading publishers in education, this podcast is an opportunity to tap into that knowledge base.

Barry Clark moved to Singapore in 1991, where he worked for World Scientific and then APA Publications, before being asked to run a book distribution business called Gower Asia Pacific. Since 1998, he has guided the growth of Taylor and Francis in the region, as Managing Director of the Asia Pacific HQ, running offices in Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Lim Tao Seong, from Taylor and Francis, is the Higher Education Sales Manager for Asia Pacific, at Taylor and Francis. He has been there for the last seven years. He has 30 plus years of sales, marketing and management experience in the publishing, and book industry, and has previously been with Elsevier, BookWise Asia, and McGraw Hill education.

Taylor and Francis publish around 7,000 new books a year and up to 10% get used in coursework in various ways. Over 140,000 titles in their backlist, publishing journals too, over 2,700. Many of those with societies, and they are the leading publisher in the social sciences and the humanities, in particular. For major imprints are Routledge, the Social Sciences and Humanities, CRC Press for sciences, and Medicine, and Engineering, and Mathematics. They also have Dove Press, an Open Access Medical Publisher, and recently acquired F1000, providing open research publishing platforms to the global community

Alice Duijser (Vitalsource, UK)
Cath Godfrey (Australia)
Barry Clarke (Taylor & Francis, Singapore)
Lim Tao Siong (Taylor & Francis, Singapore)
Joe Lam (Pearson, Hong Kong SAR)
Peter Schoppert (NUS Press) MODERATOR

Manos Kapterian discusses the supply chain optimisation of Pearson International and sustainability, as well as how the circular economy has been a driving factor for their organisation. Manos describes how Pearson have focussed on process, technology, innovation and new ways of working to create new go-to-market models. 

Today's session will be looking at how Pearson are optimizing their publishing supply chain. 

Manos Kapterian is Senior Vice President Operations at Pearson. During a career spanning nearly 20 years in the education sector, he has held a number of senior operational and commercial roles, including as Managing Director at Pearson Qualifications International. Prior to joining Pearson, Manos worked in human resource roles in the travel industry and the not for profit sectors, as well as in retail management. Manos holds an MBA, is a fellow at the CMI, and is an avid sports fan. He lives with his wife and son in London.

Like most teams, and most organizations, cost pressures placed, Pearson’s have had cost pressures, and they place some degree of challenge. So, trying to drive and unlock financial benefits, has always been important, but they have also had operational pressures, and through several cycles of improvement to try and create more efficient and more effective ways of working and interacting with their customers. Manos describes a few of the things that Pearson’s have done. Of course, increasingly recently, environmental pressures and innovation in a way that can have a far greener supply chain has become important. Sustainability and the drive toward a healthy economy has been a key factor and within an operations function, taking the leadership role in all these areas has been super important to Pearson’s.

“Over the years, as I've said, a lot of our focus has been on each of those kinds of areas individually, and also collectively in terms of improvements. We've tried to develop more sophisticated forecasting capabilities, which we've deployed globally. That has allowed us to optimize the manufacturing methods that we have. We've invested in creating improved workflows in our warehouses so that we can drive efficiency, and really thought about our freight routes. To be fair, we've seen a significant amount of benefit that we've been able to derive from all of those initiatives, but some of the historic challenges with the print to stock model has persisted. We continue to see excess stock. We continue to see wastage. Our obsolescence is always higher than we'd like it to be. We have returns and those sorts of issues. I guess that's very similar with all of our competitors, so to try and mitigate that, we look to create some on-demand capabilities. We've been working with a range of printers to try and do that.

However, trying to manage a process, a complex process of moving files, securing them, maintaining them up to date, distributing them, that's been really complex and costly. Concurrently with that, digital print costs over the past years have traditionally been higher than lithographic printing. The quality has always, has actually never been quite as good, at least not in the eyes of our editorial team. Although both of those things have changed significantly in the last few years.

These were problems that we needed to try and solve because they persisted in our supply chain. Just over three years ago, we entered into an early discussion, and then into a partnership, with HP, in one of our key print partners in the UK, Ashford, where we developed an end-to-end solution. That solution brought together the set of existing capabilities that we had in digital printing, in on-demand, and integrated it to our older management processes, and finally connected them to the last mile” Manos Kapterian (Senior Vice President of International Operations at Pearson)

The Future of Publishing Super Powers, featuring China, Mexico, and South Africa. All 3 publishing economies have stories to tell about their markets and aspirations, revealing points of strengths and weakness that we may not have seen otherwise, without the pressure of the pandemic.

In this podcast, we are not talking about the pandemic per se, but we are going to be touching on things that it brings to light, things that it helps us understand about the world we're in right now and about where publishing may be able to take advantage of things opening up to us as we go.

We're going to ask each of our speakers to give us a short presentation about his or her market so that we get a sense for where things stand, what things look like, how things are going. We then come together for some discussion and to explore the points raised.

We start with Roberto Banchik, who is director-general at Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Mexico and gives us a detailed review of the Mexican publishing market.

“So first thing to say is that the Mexican book market is a big market in terms of production, more than 300 million units. Books are produced almost every year, this has been very stable over the years. At least before 2020, this was the case. Most of this is production done by the government. This is a particularity of the Mexican book market. 

The government has a huge participation within it, 50% of all books produced are produced by the state, or are produced by private publishers for the government. And that's almost 30% of all books produced.” Roberto Banchik Director General at Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Mexico.

Li Pengyi, the Publishers Association of China, familiar to many of us in the international industry for the work he does, particularly with the IPA and other organizations, speaks about the publishing universe in China.

Li explains that China is a big publishing power based on market size. Our country highly regards the development of both education and culture. Together with the rapid growth of our GDP and a strong demand, people in China have more books to read and more opportunities to get better

“Along with the development of a new technology, China's publishing industry is becoming more diversified. Digital publishing is one of the most distinguished segments. In the year 2018, the gross revenue of China's digital publishing industry, including E-books, online education, games, et cetera was 120 billion US dollars, an increase of 18% over the previous year. Being another significant part of the digital publishing, the online literature is also growing rapidly.” Li Pengyi The Publishers Association of China.

Thabiso Mahlape, the founder of BlackBird Books in South Africa discusses the publishing industry in South Africa. She talks about how racially charged everything still is in South Africa and the socioeconomic inheritance of apartheid still plays a very big role in terms of how publishing looks and what publishing is. South Africa doesn’t have a lot of E-retailers, even for physical books. So, the bookselling still is very physical creating a digital divide, the use of credit cards is limited to a minority so, Thabiso explains that even if there was the opportunity to purchase online, the means of payment would not be available to the majority.

“Traditionally, we have approached publishing as a highbrow, elite environment and we're leaving everyone out in the cold. And if I think back, myself, of how I became a reader and how I was reading Mills & Boon and how I practically read every Danielle Steel, which I can't stand now. And the thing is we have to allow everyone their Mills & Boon.” Thabiso Mahlape, Founder of BlackBird Book.

This is the second part in the HP Publishing series looking at Publishing Super Powers, exploring and discussing a wide range of trends and dynamics that are driving changes and transformations within the industry.  

Porter Anderson, joining us for the second time in the series, is our Moderator for this second part of our Publishing Super Powers podcast. Formerly with CNN. CNN.com and CNN International, as well as the Village Voice, The Dallas Times Herald, The Bookseller, and other news media outlets. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, founded and operated by the Frankfurt Book Fair in New York. Porter asks each of our guests to give us their point of view on where the markets they're in stand at this point, what challenges they are facing and where the successes are. 

We have with us Laura Prinsloo from Jakarta. We have Karine Pansa from Brazil, and we have Ananth Padmanabhan from India 

“Gramedia bookstore, the biggest bookstore chain in Indonesia have reported this drop of sales, net sales, from 2019 to 2020. When we started the lockdown in March that's when we see a huge decrease in net sales. And then it sort of picked up again the moment the government already a bit relaxed with the lockdown and bookstores were operating again. In terms of new titles, yes, I think everyone is experiencing less productivity. Everyone is postponing to launch new titles. Working from home is also quite challenging considering that not everyone have the same facility at home, good internet connection, good... Or a working office or things like that. Or they get preoccupied with the domestic requirements when they're at home. So, new titles, yup, it's dropped if we compare it to 2019 by about 50%.” Laura Prinsloo

Karine Pansa has just become the Vice President of the International Publishers Association and shares her experience on the Brazilian book market.

“I think that our biggest challenge during this period was our... As you may understand we have a big country and it was distribution. So many publishers, they had to adapt to a new distributing reality in a very short period of time otherwise they would stay without any income and without any sales. Our market was not adapted to such a dramatic change on this distributing model as you might expect. So, we have reached I think in a short period results that should have been taken like five years or more. Not only distribution but also in education models and indication like Zoom and Google Meet and other platforms. So we have developed a lot during this short period. But just as Mexico, we have a really difficult time on doing that. So these are our biggest struggles at the moment.” Karine Pansa

Ananth Padmanabhan, from New Delhi, speaks to us about the Indian market.

“So Indian book market is a seven billion dollar industry that includes both consumer publishing and education. Why education is more than 95% of the market we have over 250 million kids in schools. And if I add everybody else who is going through some form of education, that's 400 million people going through some form of formal education and need a textbook. 

The government when we went into the first lockdown declared books as nonessentials. That meant that not only did bookstores shut you couldn't even order anything online to be delivered home and there was a list of essentials that people could buy. Books are nonessential and it's literally like a lot of us have said. It made you sit back and think about everything you've taken for granted. The way we published, the supply chain, the fact that so many dozen books went into a distributor and then into a bookshop and then people went to markets to buy them. A lot had to change overnight and dramatically.“ Ananth Padmanabhan

The second podcast of the series discusses how the impact of Covid-19 has changed both how publishers print now and in the future? How are production needs changing for publishers? 

Our moderator is Mr Simon Crump. Simon is a publishing professional who has been in the business for 25 years. He has worked for a number of major publishing houses in academic publishing, amongst them, Cambridge University Press and Elsevier. He started at the Institute Of Materials in London, where he learned the end to end production process from manuscript to bound book. Since then, as his career has progressed, he has moved towards the manufacturing process; there's nothing Simon loves more than a beautifully printed and bound book.

This discussion focusses on how the publishing industry has adapted and changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a world that was already facing continuous technological changes and environmental challenges, this podcast discussion covers the topic from both a print and production perspective.

Joining Simon in this discussion are Cathy Felgar. Jude Gates, Gareth Jarrett and Barbara Scheuer-Arit. Cathy Felgar is Publishing Operations Director at Princeton University Press, where she leads the editorial manufacturing and digital production teams. Current initiatives include the life cycle of the book, new options to global prints and distribution, DEI at PUP and within publishing and the best practices in new titles metadata release.

Jude Gates has been working in publishing production for over 20 years, in legal and trade publishing. She is Production Director and Director of Faber Factory at Faber and Faber. She manages these teams that work on all print and digital products to support the independent publishing sector in the UK, through ebook distribution and conversion and print services. 

Gareth Jarrett has spent 26 years in publishing, starting his career in trade publishing with the Penguin Group and more recently working in academic publishing with Taylor and Francis, where he is now Director of Book Publishing Services. Whilst at T&F, he oversaw the expansion of the printing on-demand program that now has over 200,000 ISBNs available in POD in up to five markets, which alongside conventional stock, aims to maximize availability of T&S large stable of titles across the globe without flooding the planet with an excess of books.

And finally, Barbara Scheuer-Arlt, Vice President Production at Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, Germany. Barbara has been in publishing for 25 years; the last five years with Penguin. She is also responsible for environmental issues on behalf of the Penguin Group, including an international role at Pearson's.

Barbara Scheuer-Arlt (Penguin Random House, Germany)
Cathy Felgar (Princeton University Press, USA)
Dave Barrett (Taylor & Francis, UK)
Jude Gates (Faber and Faber, UK)
Simon Crump (Publishing Consultant) MODERATOR

The third episode discusses how readers may use STM Content in the future. Our global experts discuss and share their thoughts in a panel debate. 

This podcast has a stellar panel for you, with representatives from all four powerhouses in publishing: Springer Nature, Wiley, Elsevier and SAGE. We have Niels Peter Thomas from Springer Nature, Young Wu from Wiley, Dante Cid from Elsevier and Vivek Mehra from SAGE. We start the discussion with Neils Peter Thomas, who is the Managing Director, responsible for Springer Nature's book portfolio which amounts to an impressive 300,000 academic books. Springer Nature add 13,000 titles every year; Nelis is also responsible for overseeing 600 editorial colleagues worldwide. He also runs the Springer Campus GmbH, which focusses on e-learning and distance learning programs. His is clearly a diverse role. Nelis has been with Springer since 2005, worked in Heidelberg, Wiesbaden, and also in Beijing and has a PhD in Economics.

“Everything is in flux, the way we create content has very much changed in the last one or two years. We published the first book last year that did not have any author. At least not a human author, because it was written entirely by machine intelligence and an AI algorithm and was creating a proper and meaningful scientific book on the chemistry in this particular situation.

Book production is a big topic that is constantly changing. In general, we have a shrinking print market, so we print less, which also triggers the way and how we wanted to print. Print on demand is becoming an essential part of publishing and this podcast dives deep into the pages of the future.“ Niels Peter Thomas.

Young Wu, is the Editorial Director of Wiley in China, responsible for setting up all the content acquisition across the vast country, Young has been working in academic publishing for nearly 10 years; he held a variety of positions across STMJ departments, also spending time abroad researching a borders program in Sierra Leone, amongst other African nations, to support their medical journals.

Young makes the point that there is a huge appetite for content in the Chinese language; especially the need for research content. Many of the needs are really coming from specific ‘life–related’ areas such as health and science.

Dante Cid is now Vice President for Academic Relations for the whole of Latin America. He holds a master's in science for all AI – a real visionary. Dante has been Regional Director in Latin America and he also sits on many different boards – amongst them, as Vice-President for the Brazilian Publishers Association.

Dante speaks about Latin America and the trend of people migrating their reading habits from papers to pre-print, and then to general media, press releases, which is not really under the peer-review process, which is HP’s main pillar for the STM publication. His role is to ensure that all the material out there has at best a serious peer review process, which is the biggest value add by STM publishers in the industry.

Vivek Mehra who was CEO and MD or Sage publications holds an MBA from Columbia University. 

“We don't have to have massive print runs up front, and we can just wait for the orders to come in. The thing that confuses people is they think that print on demand versus stock in house, there is a difference in timing. Whereas actually today, thanks to technology there isn't one. The end customer would not know if it's printed on demand or it was lying in the warehouse and somebody shipped it. So I think that's where the answer lies what goes into a print first and what goes into digital first. I think nobody, no book can be without a digital strategy.” Vivek Mehra.

The fourth episode in the Publishing Vision webinar series discusses Educational Tech and its impacts on the educational publishing industry.

José Borghino is our moderator for this podcast. He is the Secretary-General of the International Publishers Association of Geneva, which he joined in 2013 as Policy Director and became the Secretary-General in 2015. Before joining the IPA, José was Manager of Industry Representation at the Australian Publishers Association. We have a great lineup of speakers in this podcast, each sharing a world of knowledge and experience in the Ed Tech universe of publishing. Each will speak briefly about the situation in their market regarding Ed Tech and the impact on education publishing. The scene is set by talking briefly about the IPA's Educational Publishing Forum, or EPF. This group is a committee of the IPA and has existed for about 12 years. It comprises K-12 educational publishers from 60 countries around the world. It has identified three key principles for educational publishing. Firstly, choice. Educational publishers are constantly innovating to create high-quality resources that teachers can use in their classrooms. Every classroom is different and every teacher should have a choice about the resources they want to use in those classrooms. The second principle is local solutions. Education everywhere in the world is local, local, local. In each country or region, it is determined by the local language culture and curriculum. And the third key principle is collaboration. The best educational outcomes are a product of intense collaboration between publishers, teachers, researchers and governments.

The first speaker is Kiarie Kamau. He is the Managing Director and CEO of the East African Educational Publishers - a leading publishing house in the East and Central Africa. Kiarie is also a council member of the Kenyan Publishers Association, a member of the Council of Management of the UK-based African Books Collective and a member of the International Publishers Association Copyright Policy Working Group. Our second speaker is Erin Kinard, who is Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for Core Solutions at Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt. Erin is responsible for the overall success and profitability of the English language arts, social studies, maths, science and world languages core product lines. Erin and her team of product managers develop HMH's product line vision, strategy, and roadmaps. Following on from Kairie Erin, we have Fei Chen Lee who will share her wisdom and experience. She is currently the Senior Advisor to Times Publishing Group in Singapore. She was Head of Publishing at Marshall Cavendish Publishing Group from 2008 to 2019 and was responsible for formulating and implementing strategies to grow the group's publishing operations worldwide. Fei Chen has worked in publishing businesses in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand. She was instrumental in setting up Times Publishing Group's electronic publishing business and prior to that, she worked at the Ministry of Education in Singapore and also as a lecturer in Hong Kong.

It is also worth noting that Fei Chen has written an illuminating chapter entitled What is Education for in the 21st Century?, which is contained in one of the IPA's recently released state-of-publishing reports, available on the IPA website at www.internationalpublishers.org

The final speaker on our podcast is Caroline Wright, who is Director General at the British Educational Suppliers Association, or BESA, the UK's trade body for educational suppliers and publishers. Caroline is Vice-Chair of the Department of Education's Ed Tech Leadership Group, a member of the Department for International Trades Education Advisory Group, and she received the Education Investors Outstanding Contribution of the Year Award in 2017. 

HP has brought together the industry’s most informed voices to look at what the future holds. The discussion explores the positive changes and developments that can drive the publishing industry in the 21st century. This opportunity allows us to gain fabulous knowledge sharing with a great panel looking at the insights into the publishing marketing. In particular, what is happening to our industry, our joint industry and the impact of the COVID pandemic. 

Leading the conversation is Marco Eikelenboom. Marco has been Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Graphic Papers at Sappi Europe since 2008. His professional career started in 1992 with KNP Fine Paper in the Netherlands. Then, after several commercial positions in Maastricht and Paris, he was appointed Manager of Corporate Planning, when KNP Leykam was acquired by Sappi in 1997.

Following this corporate strategy position, Marco took on the role of Managing Director of Sappi Benelux and left in 2002, to move to Sappi's Head Office in Johannesburg to become Marketing Director. Marco came back to Brussels as Director of Marketing Sales in 2005, and after the acquisition and integration of M Rio Graphics, he assumed the Global Marketing and Sales, responsible for the graphics business of Sappi Europe. 

Supporting Marco in our podcast is Bastian Scevonka, who has been with the Bertelsmann Corporation since 2009 with a team-based all over Europe, taking care of all international sales activities for the German-based factories of the Bertelsmann Printing Group. They serve a wide field of printed goods, such as catalogues, flyers, magazines, as well as books, and mailings.

In particular, in the book market, they serve the domestic market in Germany, as well as international publishers based in Europe, including the U.K, and further field in the U.S. 

Our second expert in this podcast is Emmanuel Bandeggi. He is a Sales and Marketing Director at Rotolito, which is a family-owned company based in Italy, with nine production plants, which are mainly based in the Milan area. Rotolito is a printing company that has always specialized in book printing, with a special focus on the educational, and illustrative books.

Alderano Fileni joins the conversation from a South American perspective. Alderano has worked for Grupo Print Laser for more than 20 years. Today he is the COO and also a Board Member of the Group. He shares the challenges that the pandemic has brought to that part of the world, but also discusses the positive gains in a post-pandemic bounce back, specifically in the book business.

This open and passionate discussion gives us great insight into the global state of publishing. From the outside, people would probably think that the future looks less bright than that which is painted in this podcast. The determination and resilience the panellist have demonstrated during COVID makes any future challenges less of a worry and gives us confidence that our industry is now better equipped to overcome them.

Emanuele Bandecchi (Rotolito, Italy)
Bastian Czerwonka (MohnMedia, Germany)
Alderano Fileni (Grupo Print Laser, Brazil)
Marco Eikelenboom (SAPPI) MODERATOR

Four expert panellists share their experiences over the last extraordinary year and debate what the future of export might hold - and the role that print can play in ensuring a sustainable agenda. 

This podcast looks at some of the global trends and issues affecting export. Our moderator is Ed Nawotka, who is the Book Seller & International Editor of Publishers Weekly and US Coordinator of Publishers Weekly Espanol, which launched this August.

Ed was the Editor of Publishing Perspectives, which he also founded. Some of his recent work covered the future of publishing and the role of China in US publishing for the Los Angeles Times and the role of Literature in US Diplomatic Relations for the Houston Chronicle, along with Serving Faculty Member of the Yale Publishing Course at the Yale University School of Management. He has lectured at many publishing events from Sao Paulo to Sharjah, to Seoul and many places in between.

Between the five contributors of this podcast, there are more than 115 years of collective experience. So hopefully they will help listeners unravel the biggest challenges facing the export market today.

Joining Ed is Rob Thompson. Rob is currently the International Sales Director for Collins Learning, which is the education and reference division of HarperCollins, based in London. He has been in publishing and bookselling for 25 years and in that time Rob has been a bookseller first and then a publisher across many publishing houses but always in export. His background is export and educational export in particular, with a long history of travelling around the world, visiting schools.

We are also delighted to have Devin Luna contributing to this podcast. Currently, Vice President International Sales and Marketing at Macmillan Trade Publishers. She is in her 20th year in publishing and most of that time has been spent in international markets. She started with working with our HP UK colleagues in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and has since expanded her role and joined McMillan in 2014. 

In addition to the line-up today, we have Denise Bauer. Her title function is Head of Hachette Art and National which is the subsidiary of the Hachette Publishing Group designed for export sales throughout the world. Her background is mainly in press print before joining book prints in magazine publishing and newspapers publishing, before switching six years ago to expo books.

Finally, we have Joaquin who joins from Group of Planeta in Barcelona in Spain. Joaquin has been with the Group since 1994, in charge of all operations between Spain and Latin America. Planeta has more than eight subsidiaries in Latin America – and all the operations and exports between Spain and Latin America. Since 2000, Joaquin has been in the Book's Division, working for different imprints, mainly non-fiction imprints, in the Spanish market. He then became the CEO of the Book Club in Spain - a joint venture with Bertelsmann in Spain, for four years. Joaquin is now the CEO of the non-fiction imprints in the Planeta Group.
 
Jesus Badenes (Grupo Planeta, Spain)
Denis Berriat (Hachette Livre International, France)
Devin Luna (Pan Macmillan USA)
Rob Thompson (Collins Learning UK)
Ed Nawotka (Publishers Weekly)  MODERATOR

Nathan Hull explores future business models, looking at audio podcasting, merge media, print on demand and the other various ways publishers can deliver their content. The discussion also covers the inevitable impact of sustainability and the way publishers are leading the way in environmentally sound practices, such as shorter print runs and alternative, lower impact solutions.         

In this podcast, we have an esteemed panel from various roles of the publishing and publishing-related worlds. 2020 results demonstrated the essential part that global publishing continues to play in our changing world. It displayed its agility to respond to real challenges we had never really come across before. But inevitably, there are questions around the future business models that are tackled in this session.

So, we're going to touch on audio, podcasting, merch media, print on demand and the various ways in which publishers’ content can be delivered. Additionally, we touch on concerns around environmental impact and the ways publishers are demonstrating leadership and managing their inventory with smaller print runs, niche print sectors and alternative ways of thinking. These are the driving factors for discussion.

We have Diego Echeverría. Hola Diego, from Mexico City. He is the founder and CEO of Ink-It, a 360-degree platform that offers publishing companies the distribution of their eBooks and audiobooks, eCommerce management and print on demand.

Ink-It supports publishers from around 12 Latin American countries. It is considered one of the top Apple preferred partner companies and it's the only one in the Spanish speaking world. He is also the youngest person to become a Board Member of the National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry, where he has been secretary for two periods. 

We are also joined by Valentina Kaledina in Moscow. She is Business Development Manager for CastBox, which is one of the top three podcast destinations. She started her career as a journalist, working for various outlets including AFP in Paris. She went on for another seven years as a Partner at a Consulting firm, Strikitsa, at their head office in London, covering various industries from technology, telecoms and media. Now she is at CastBox, where she is responsible for business development and podcaster relations, also heading up CastBox's growth into new markets.

Finally, Jesper, based in Copenhagen. Jesper is CEO of Chapter which is a new publisher-backed eBook and audiobook service in Denmark. Jesper has more than 25 years of experience within commercial leadership and he has always taken a consumer-centric approach to business development where he is constantly searching to develop differentiating products to match the consumers’ needs. 

Jesper Siber (Chapter, Denmark)
Diego Echeverria (Ink It!, Mexico)
Valentina Kaledina (CastBox)
Nathan Hull (Beat Technology) MODERATOR