Everything started some 500 years ago with a certain Johannes Gutenberg and the world's first printed book the Bible. Today, book publishing is responsible for around $80 billion every year worldwide, a coy figure compared to $750 billion of the publishing industry as a whole.

Today's biggest global companies include Time Warner, Bertelsmann, Reader's Digest Association, Meredith, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, News Corporation (proprietor of The Sun, The Times, TV Guide and publisher HarperCollins), Wolters Kluwer, VNU and Pearson.

Much like in the music and film industries, most of the major players in the book publishing market are only small parts of huge media corporations. As for newspapers and magazines, the industry responsible for keeping everyone informed for so long now finds itself grappling to adapt to the digital age.

According to Ernst & Young, growth in the publishing industry during the next few years will be fostered by the internet and the scaling down of conglomerates.

Internet

The booming years of the internet hype cooled down and a number of publishers have reviewed their on-line businesses since then. But it seems that the world wide web is paying dividends to publishers: it is being increasingly used by established publishing companies offering added-value entertainment and information.

The world of professional information already shows a strong increase in the "just-in-time" delivery of "must-have" information over the internet in combination with new content and services.

Scaling down of conglomerates

In recent years, the aggressiveness of media groups brought about large media conglomerates. These conglomerates aimed to rapidly increase their revenues and profits through the multiple use of content by way of various distribution channels. In addition, they also aimed to tap into new revenue sources through media convergence and international brand building.

As the path of conglomeration slowed down due to technical and financial impairments, the business plans based on converging media and markets are being challenged and reviewed. The restructuring programmes initiated by prominent players highlight this new trend: core business is king. Small and medium-sized publishing companies will still succeed in specific publishing segments in the future.

Book publishing

The current state of the book publishing industry is unclear. Because consumer spending rather than advertising drives book-publishing revenues, the industry has not experienced similar challenges as other print media. Despite Harry Potter selling 8.3 million copies in 24 hours, US book publishers only sold 0.9% more books in 2007 than 2006.

Newspaper publishing

Despite the shilly-shallying of the last couple of years, a recent Audit Bureau of Circulation report noted that since 9/11, both The New York Post and The Daily News have experienced increased demand in circulation (respectively, they have sold 650,000 to 1 million papers daily). In Europe, The Sun continues to be a blockbuster with an average of 4 million copies sold per day.

Every aspect of the traditional model of running a newspaper - news-gathering, writing, editing, composition, advertising, print and delivery - is undergoing a remarkable change thanks to the convergent impact of technology and globalisation. Until early 1990s, leading newspapers invested mainly in the print medium. The dependence on print and sluggishness in adapting to the communication revolution took its toll on the newspaper publishing industry. At the same time new publishing opportunities have emerged in the digital media.

E-publishing

In the last decade, most of the major magazine and newspaper publishing companies have launched internet-based publications either as stand-alone entities or as extensions of their print publications. Magazine publishers are also using the internet to launch new publications in certain market niches where information is either scarce or non-existent. It is estimated that e-publishing represents $3 billion nowadays.

Various technologies make it possible for publishers to distribute their products electronically. As the name implies, print-on-demand technology allows publishers to produce bound copies of books on demand. With the contents of the book stored digitally, publishers are freed from the constraints of conventional production. The technical publishing segment is where the electronic distribution of books is becoming increasingly more popular.

Multilingual Publishing (The Hispanic Community in the US)

As the US Spanish-speaking market grows, and given its increased buying power, a noteworthy trend in publishing and distribution is the Spanish language book and newspaper markets. According to recent US Census Bureau projections, the Hispanic population will treble in the next fifty years. In addition, 15 % of the population (2.7 million people) in the New York State are Hispanic.

With the rapidly changing demographics of NYC and a great percentage (25 %) of the student population of Hispanic origin, this trend bodes well for those with the appropriate language skills.

Publishers Weekly reports that nearly 200 companies in the US and Puerto Rico publish books in Spanish. Collectively, they account for $38 million dollars in annual sales, approximately a 10% market share.

With further competition from Mexican publishers and e-commerce, US distributors of Spanish books have also entered the online market by creating their own websites. In response, large e-retailers have added Spanish titles to their sites as well.

The growth of Spanish-language newspapers in the US is especially notable in non-traditional markets. For the period between 1970 and 2000, the circulation numbers for mainstream newspapers decreased by 21 %. During this same period, The National Hispanic Media Directory reports an increase from 232 to 543 newspapers.

These publications also achieved remarkable circulation growth, increasing from 955,000 to 14.1 million and ad sales revenues jumping from $14 million to $533 million during the last 30 years. New York has several dailies in Spanish including "Hoy", "El Diario/La Prensa", and "Noticias del Mundo".