"You can't stop a tidal wave with a fork,"
says David Silverman, in the current lead article on Salon right now. And the publishing biz doesn't come out of it looking so nice...(Permalink)
(The article is adapted from his book TYPO which we're publishing next month...)
Our real problem came from our customers, the publishers. We offered to charge them as little as the Indian firms did, but most of them wouldn't even let us bid, preferring to squeeze as much profit as possible out of typesetting.In the '90s, publishers had merged and merged and then merged some more. What had been hundreds of educational publishers was now just a few. Harcourt bought Mosby, Saunders, Academic Press and the Psychological Corp. Then Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt. The three top companies represented about 80 percent of our business and the pressures on us to maintain those customers were terrible. If Reed said, "Put an employee on site in our office in Texas," we did it, even though it cost us $100,000 a year, which was just about all of our profits on that account. If we said no, we'd have no business at all. It would have been like saying no to Wal-Mart. And just as it is at Wal-Mart, the mantra of our newly merged customers was: "Lower your prices."