Chark Blog - Oxford university presses

Thursday, June 29, 2006

I was in Oxford yesterday at the Macmillan Education offices in the former car-building (and now new Mini building) area of Cowley. Driving back I thought I might indulge in one of my favourite pastimes - listening to international cricket on the radio (Test Match Special). Unfortunately the English team were so dreadful and unprofessional in being beaten for the fourth time in a row by Sri Lanka I couldn't bear to listen.

Instead I tried to calculate the size of the publishing industry in Oxfordshire (Oxford and its surrounding area). It is a really impressive bunch of companies. Big daddy in terms of employees, sales and profits is probably Oxford University Press itself. Reed Elsevier has two major units - Elsevier Science in Kidlington (which incorporates the famous and brillian Pergamon Press of Robert Maxwell fame) and Harcourt Education in Jordanhill (incorporating Heinemann Education, Ginn, Rigby etc). Blackwell Publishing is up the road from our offices and, not to be confused with its retailing cousins, is a hugely successful and profitable academic and scientific publisher. A little further South near Abingdon are the main offices of the academic divisions of Informa (Taylor & Francis, Routledge etc). Also in Abingdon we can find Hodder's distribution centre Bookpoint. And there are scores of smaller but no less significant specialist and general publishing firms scattered around the area.

I estimate total sales of publications emanating from these companies at well over €3 billion and profits close on €500m. I reckon this is more than the total profit emanating from London and maybe even New York. Explanations please.

6/29/2006 10:44:19 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Brain power concentrated in one area. Plus, once you get a company which is large and successful settled in one area, others of the same kind are drawn to the same place - e.g. Silicon Valley. Oxford has continued to draw publishers because of its proximity to London, good communications, plus good quality of life. It was also once true that housing was cheaper than London but that has pretty much gone - Oxford prices have been London prices for some years. It has all the advantages of London, but is still a better place to live - plus the colleges, schools, access to many authors.
If you really want to break the mould as a publisher you come to deepest rural Gloucestershire !
on another note, how is it that we could win the Ashes last year and this year be so shamefully bad ? Answers on a postcard.

SUSAN HILL

6/29/2006 4:23:12 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Very interesting numbers. I was wondering if you could make a rough estimate of how much of the revenues are emanating from secondary education and if you could give a ball-park figure for the margins in that sector? The reason I'm asking is that I'm wondering how much financial scope publishers and the industry have to support teachers, even if it is indirectly through innovation or more experimental attitude.

Germans are having a heated debate about the state of their education system (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,409876,00.html) and at an event last Tuesday the principal of a controversial school in Berlin (http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1950087,00.html) said that one problem with education at secondary schools is that the pupils have no respect for the teachers anymore (the teachers have no self-esteem he added) due to changes in the appreciation of the profession at the end of the 1960ies. I was wondering what the publishers contribution to the problem could be, especially when it comes to teachers self-esteem. Perhaps with support from the industry the acceptance of new teaching methods, techniques and innovations in the field by teachers could be heightened so they can keep up with their pupils more easily and may regain some respect. And the industry gains/keeps satisfied and motivated costumers

Please bear with my naive thoughts.

Gregor Reisch

6/30/2006 8:25:26 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Gosh, I really have no idea how publishers could help with German secondary teachers' self-esteem. I know that educational publishers worldwide try very hard to work closely with teachers. Typically educational publishing is less profitable than academic publishing and I estimate that of the €3 billion sales about €600 million would be to schools.

Richard Charkin

7/2/2006 1:58:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

It wasn't my intention to focus that much on the self-esteem issue. I was just trying to exemplify the problem with disregard for teachers as one factor in the restraint for innovation and technical improvements in classrooms. A more important factor in that respect is of course purchasing costs. That’s why I asked for a ball-park figure. To get an idea of the industry’s leeway, because I thought that if innovations (eg interactive whiteboards) are up and running to begin with and politicians/schools can see that the stuff is actually working and improving things that they might be more willing to find room for this in the budgets. Germany is always moving a little slower than other countries when it comes to reforms in the education system (which is probably getting worse with the latest reform of German federalism) and I was wondering if an innovative company like Macmillan couldn’t shake things up a little and while at it grab some share in the market.

Gregor Reisch

7/4/2006 9:52:15 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

We decided not to pursue the German schools market a couple of years ago. We are focussing much more on fast-growing emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, India and East Asia.

Richard Charkin

8/1/2006 9:19:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

In China there is a lot of copying and you can get cheap knockoffs of books. Is it like that in Latin America, Africa, India and East Asia? Do you have plans to counter that?

Duncan

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