Publishing award-winning books and transitioning to produce more e-books is the key to helping Vancouver’s D&M Publishers Inc. succeed in the rapidly evolving book publishing business.
The 51-year-old publishing house, which bills itself as the largest independent book publisher in Canada, is profitable, with about $10 million in revenue in 2010, up from $9 million in 2009, president Mark Scott told Business in Vancouver last week. (See “Novel challenges” – issue 1124; May 10-16.)
“I think we were shortlisted for every single major prize in Canada,” Scott said. “So, our success was due to good publishing. If we hadn’t been publishing well, it might have been a different story.”
D&M partnered with Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press to publish Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, which won the largest annual literary prize in the country, the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
While Scott is pleased with his company’s paper-based book sales, he is most excited about a separate venture that involves several D&M principals who aim to revolutionize book buying, much like iTunes revolutionized music sales and distribution.
Bookriff, which is set to launch in the fall, will have partnerships with a wide variety of publishers and a sophisticated website that customers will be able to use to search for books.
Those customers will then be able to buy specific chapters from various business books, for example. Their order could then be bound in a print-on-demand volume or be made downloadable to a book reader such as Amazon.com’s Kindle.
Glen Korstrom
Twitter: @GlenKorstrom