OUP: new horizons The Bookseller
During a day spent researching academic publishing, I came across this article from last year about OUP's vision for the future. Nigel Portwood (a Cambridge University graduate, and the first non-Oxford graduate to head up the company in its 425 year history!) has a strong background of heading up and driving forwards big trade publishers in digital sales strategies in a global context. One of his key achievements at OUP has been to create the Global Academic Business, which combines many elements of the company. Portwood says:
“In some ways that change was evolutionary because we had been working towards closer links across those academic divisions. Yet nobody had taken the leap to say this is a global market, this is a market where formats no longer matter. The idea of books versus journals versus reference materials . . . that’s all gone now. I suppose that’s the biggest change that we made: acknowledging that the publishing has to be format independent, that we have to invest more in online and we have to think about moving resources across the business.”
He is optimistic about digital readers, and points to the rapid changes in the journals market to show why he holds these views:
“Users can now access more content more easily, for a lower price per article than they ever had before. They have the added functionality of cross-referencing and searchability that was never available. The industry has invested to enable this to happen; and the industry has grown as a result.”
The piece ends with Portwood's belief that now is the time for ambitious creative manoeuvring:
"Yet our industry has changed so much in the past five years—if you are not thinking ambitiously now, you’ll have a problem in a few years’ time.”
Looking at what announcements have already been made in the last few months, with both OUP and CUP announcing major digital publishing platforms with partnerships with other academic presses, Portwood's words are already looking prophetic.
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