Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807 - 2007 - Hardcover

Wright, Robert E.; Jacobson, Timothy C.; Smith, George David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471757217 ISBN 13: 9780471757214

Verlag: Wiley, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A lively history of one of America's oldest publishing houses, published in conjunction with Wiley's bicentennial

Founded in New York City when Thomas Jefferson was president, Wiley has been a significant player in the publishing industry for two centuries. Now, on the occasion of Wiley's bicentennial, a distinguished team of authors brings Wiley's rich history to life, showing how the company has reacted to trends within the publishing industry as well as to larger economic, social, and cultural forces. Knowledge for Generations sheds light on the long-term strengths and weaknesses of Wiley's business, illuminates the continuities and changes over time, and shows how family ownership has influenced the company's strategies, values, and corporate culture. Drawing on unrestricted access to company archives and interviews with key executives, the authors capture a story of sustained business success, intriguing personalities, and dramatic changes in the industry. Illustrated throughout with illuminating photographs and graphics, Knowledge for Generations is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of publishing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Robert E. Wright (Abington, PA) is a Clinical Associate Professor of Economics at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is the coauthor, with George David Smith, of Mutually Beneficial (0-8147-9397-5), among other books. Timothy C. Jacobson (Staunton, VA) is an author and editor who founded Chicago Times magazine.

Robert E. Wright, Clinical Associate Professor of Economics an der New York University (Stern School of Business), schrieb zahlreiche Bücher, darunter: Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), gemeinsam mit David Cowen; The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mutually Beneficial: The Guardian and Life Insurance in America (New York: New York University Press, 2004), gemeinsam mit George David Smith sowie The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Timothy C. Jacobson, Autor und Herausgeber, veröffentlichte unter anderem: Making Medical Doctors, A Historical Guide to the United State; From Practice to Profession: A History of the Financial Analysts Profession (AIMR, 1997) und Cotton's Renaissance: A Study in Market Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Er gründete das Magazin Chicago Times und gab Chicago History sowie die 51-bändige Reihe The States and the Nation heraus.

George David Smith, Clinical Professor of Economics and International Business an der Stern School of Business der NYU, verfasste unter anderem Anatomy of a Business Strategy, From Monopoly to Competition, The Transformation of Financial Capitalism (mit Richard Sylla) und New Financial Capitalists (mit George Baker).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Knowledge for Generations

Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807-2007By Robert E. Wright Timothy C. Jacobson George David Smith

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Robert E. Wright
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-471-75721-4

Chapter One

Change and Continuity

By American standards, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is a very old firm. No other American publishing company can match it in age. For two centuries it has produced books and, against long odds, it has remained an independent, family-controlled business. This Wiley publication, Knowledge for Generations, is written for the firm's bicentennial in 2007. It is the story of how Wiley has endured and prospered, and it suggests how its long history shines light on the path ahead.

Founder Charles Wiley, who opened a print shop in New York in 1807, would scarcely recognize either the book business or its environment today. New York at that time covered the southern tip of Manhattan Island, and Greenwich Village was just that, a village. Country estates and farmland spread off to the north. Today the only green places left in Manhattan are parks, and the city itself has covered Manhattan and expanded to Staten Island, the western end of Long Island, and a goodly chunk of land north of the Harlem River. Across the Hudson River to the west, the New Jersey shore-once dotted by small towns separated by forests and farms-is now an extension of the city, with high-rise apartment buildings, office towers, and the new world headquarters of John Wiley & Sons in Hoboken defining the skyline.

Publishing companies like Wiley have also grown apace from small shops run by a proprietor and a helper or two to complex multinational corporations. In the early years, Charles Wiley published a mixture of American originals, English reprints, and an occasional translation of a European title. Today, the largest publishers manage clusters of offices spread around the world-from New York to Tokyo, from London to Delhi, from Moscow to Beijing-recruiting authors on an equally international basis and delivering the results from one end of the earth to another.

Books themselves have changed physically as what was once a book's content has escaped from the confines of its covers into the digital world. At first glance, a recently published book and a well-preserved one from the early nineteenth century may seem alike. Both are printed on paper enclosed between two covers. They contain similar parts, too: a title page, a table of contents, some prefatory remarks, and a body of text. But while Charles and his helpers edited a hand-written manuscript, set it in type, printed each sheet on a hand-operated press, and then had the sheets cut, sewn, and bound between covers, books today are edited and designed online, sent to the printer via the World Wide Web, printed, and then assembled by machine.

Some say that the old artistic qualities have been lost, yet modern machines put out books of uniform quality for a fraction of the cost-and readers no longer have to cut pages-while acid-free paper has extended their usable shelf life. No one in Charles's day could begin to imagine the lush colors and elaborate illustrations that one finds in a modern text or coffee-table book. While books-and printed journals in Wiley's case-remain essential to almost every publisher's offering, Wiley describes itself as a company that "serves the needs of students, lifelong learners, professors, researchers, medical practitioners, professionals, and consumers for educational, professional, and personal development" by working with authors to create, market, sell, and distribute "must-have content and services in the global marketplace."

What used to appear between the covers of a book is now available in a dazzling variety of formats via tape, compact disk, the Internet, even MP3 and the iPod(r). Wiley has gone beyond the mere distribution of content to the creation of tools with which customers can search, shape, and use content in new ways. For example, a student using WileyPLUS, the company's online educational platform, can take tests based on a particular text, assess the outcome, and be referred to parts of the text for further study. And in its 200th year, Wiley introduced a new type of textbook: one where instructors can search Wiley's content to create a text designed for a specific course.

The way books are sold has also changed. In the nineteenth century, peddlers pushed titles door to door and field to field. Prepublication subscriptions were sought, and editors and reviewers, when not the authors themselves, were often paid for favorable notices. Today, formal distribution systems are precise, efficient, and highly specialized, with dedicated sales teams servicing everyone and everything from big franchise stores to online retail outlets to library consortia that license numerous journals and major reference works in a single transaction. Through a little work at a personal computer, a publisher can gather detailed information from Amazon and BookScan about how each title is doing in the marketplace. Although the occasional author may surreptitiously tout his own book in an anonymous online review, for the most part today's review system is honest and informative.

Publishing has its constants and traditions, too. Whatever the form of the final products, the publishing functions that lead to them-acquiring, editing, producing, marketing, and selling-have remained largely unchanged through the years. So has publishing's intermediary character remained constant-in between a business and a craft. Editors bring their individual creativity to their work in shaping and refining manuscripts. Designers, even with sophisticated computers, still must combine artfulness with practicality as they develop the right look for every title. And marketers apply both intelligence and intuition in their understanding of the marketplace. At the end of the day, commercial publishers must sell the fruits of their labor profitably in the marketplace or fail as businesses. They must also exercise respect for time-honored ways when dealing with the world of words and ideas, where authors, editors, and designers together create works of usefulness, insight, and sometimes even beauty. Behind locked glass doors along the softly lit corridor that leads to Wiley's executive offices in Hoboken, today's visitor can see masterpieces of the craft of bookmaking-the physical artifacts of a family's patrimony and a firm's history. That same visitor, from the comfort of home, can also go to the company's website for information about current titles and for samples of Wiley's technology offerings.

Publishing about important topics is intrinsically satisfying, even exciting. Ideas in print can and do change the world. Every now and then a book spawns profound social change or shifts the way we view the world: John Locke's Second Treatise [of Civil Government], Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, none of them published by Wiley. But Wiley has published a great many works that have been part of gentler evolutions as they serve the practical requirements of readers with a need to know. Dairy Engineering (1925), Poultry Breeding (1932), Sampling Inspection Tables (1944, 1945, 1959, 1970, 1998), Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940), or Simplified Drafting Practice (1953),...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471757217
• ISBN 13: 9780471757214
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 568
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland