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Cambridge University Press has seen its digital revenues rise 70% over the past year to account for around a quarter of total revenue, newly appointed chief executive Peter Phillips has said.
Phillips told The Bookseller that CUP’s digital revenues now stand at around 20%–25% of its total revenue. He said precise figures were hard to break out because many of CUP’s products, such as its ELT course Touchstone Blended Learning, blend print and digital.
“It’s a very significant shift, the fastest in the last year on the academic side but also in ELT and education,” Phillips said. “In universities in North America and western Europe, we are seeing marked shifts to wanting to have digital products, particularly in research-oriented publications.”
As well as its own platforms, Cambridge Journals Online and Cambridge Books Online, Kindle has become “an important and rapidly growing platform” for CUP according to Phillips.
But the rapid pace of transition meant the publishing house must adapt—hence the proposal to close its historic in-house printing facility in favour of a shift to a contract with locally-based MPG Books.
“No-one can predict with any certainty how fast the shift to digital will be, but we can be flexible in managing our costs. We don’t want money tied up in boxes that might be empty in a few years time,” said Phillips. “So we have outsourced our warehousing to DHL, managing it in Northamptonshire rather than in an expensive Cambridge location, and in the US we are outsourcing to Ingram to manage it out of Tennessee. The same trends are highly relevant to printing. Digital printing enables us to be efficient with smaller runs, to print much closer to our customers around the globe. We no longer think it will be in our best interests to run it ourselves.”
CUP has doubled in size over the past six years, with revenues for the year ending April 2011 up 11% year on year, to £237.3m. Phillips said the publisher aimed to continue to grow “significantly” across the globe; just 15% of the publisher’s sales are in the UK.
“The world economy is a fragile place so it’s hard to predict,” Phillips said, “but there is potential in the fast-growing markets in India, Latin America and China. We’re already established there but there is an awful lot further to go in investing and developing new products.”