Covering the U.S. professional publishing market with full breakdowns by market segment and major media, this report is an essential tool for executives who need to understand the business strategies driving publishing revenues in the medical, legal, scientific/technical, and business markets.

This invaluable reports covers:

• books
• journals
• newsletters & looseleafs
• online services
• databases/directories

Learn which of these media are forecast to post the strongest growth over the next three years, and what's fueling that growth. Complete with profiles of the leading commercial, association, and university press publishers that detail key strategic and financial performance.

Additional Information

Methodology

Introduction

Simba Information has been tracking and reporting on the vibrant professional publishing and information market since 1994. The data included in this report is built on that foundation.

Deciding which subjects should be included in the legal, sci/tech, medical and business publishing markets is unquestionably subjective, but Simba has set the parameters for this report based upon in-depth interviews with top publishing executives throughout the professional publishing industry. It also has tapped into its own institutional knowledge, accumulated during more then ten years researching the market.

The following section describes what Simba has included and excluded in its professional publishing definitions because a clear understanding of what is being counted is essential to understanding the market size totals contained in this report.

Definition of the Professional Publishing Industry

Unless otherwise noted, the figures contained in this report are for English-language U.S.-based revenues only. The company profiles, however, contain global information. Simba has increased the amount of global information in this report based on customer demand and will continue to expand the scope of its research to include more international content.

It’s important to note that Simba has modified its definitions for the sci/tech and medical segments to more accurately reflect the respective markets. Pharmaceutical content revenue had been counted as sci/tech because of its parallels to chemistry, but has been shifted from sci/tech to medical publishing, resulting in higher medical revenues and lower sci/tech sales for all years tracked by Simba.

Legal Publishing

Legal publishing consists of printed and electronic content used by professionals in the legal market, including individual attorneys, law firms, law enforcement officials, courts, judges, legal assistants, paralegals, corporate counsel, intellectual property professionals, legal aids, law students and court reporters.

This market does not include products geared toward general consumers, such as Law for Dummies (John Wiley & Sons).

It does include any college textbooks used for instruction in accredited law schools.

Legal publishing includes professional-level print and electronic content covering: administrative law and regulatory practice, antitrust law, business law, criminal justice, dispute resolution, environmental law, family law, general practice, government and public sector law, health law, intellectual property law, labor and employment, law practice management, legal education and admissions to the Bar, litigation, contract law, public utility, communications and transportation law, property, probate and trust law, science and technology law, jury service and selection, and human resources law.

Legal products in this report include: upper-level textbooks used by students and attorneys, peer-reviewed journals, advanced-level professional magazines, professional databases and directories, and electronic services directed toward legal professionals.

Sci/Tech Publishing

Sci/tech publications cover both hard science and technology, including upper-level college texts, which have a crossover between the student and professional markets.

Sciences include: chemistry, physics, mathematics and biosciences.

Technology includes: upper-level professional computer titles and all fields of chemistry, physics, engineering and mathematics.

Sci/Tech products in this report include: textbooks that overlap between professional and graduate courses, professional-level monographs and reference works, peer-reviewed journals, advanced-level professional magazines, databases, and directories and electronic services directed at sci/tech professionals. Advanced-level computer science books used by MIS professionals and programmers also are included in this category.

Some “harder-edge” social sciences are also included, such as econometrics, financial and international economics and criminology.

Medical Publishing

Medical publications include professional-level medical content, along with those of other healthcare professionals, including clinical texts used in training and for professionals. This category includes: nurses, dentists, osteopaths, physical therapists, clinical psychologists and similar professions.

Medical publishing also includes all professional medical content, including information in adult primary care, allergy and immunology, cardiology, dentistry, diseases, internal medicine, neurology, nursing, orthopedics, pediatrics and veterinary sciences, to name a few. It also now includes pharmaceutical content in Simba’s definition of the market.

Allied health (physical therapy, optometry, radiography, occupational therapy, speech therapy, etc.) also is part of Simba’s definition of medical publishing.

Simba also counts clinical reference works and medical journal textbooks as part of the segment, along with journals carrying clinical and practice content directed at these markets, whether paid, advertising-supported, sponsored or a combination.

Electronic content directed primarily at a professional audience, such as online services, CD-ROMs, PDAs and other electronic content are included, along with working tools for the practice and administration of medicine (e.g. Ingenix coding directories or IHS Group HIPAA guides) is included.

Business Publishing

There is a greater overlap between the professional and consumer markets for business publishing than any other professional segment tracked by Simba.

Each publisher defines its business publishing products and services differently, making it more difficult to analyze the market. Some publishers classify tax and accounting within their legal publishing operations, while others make computer titles part of business rather than scientific/technical. Some include trade titles when reporting professional business publishing revenues.

For the purpose of this report, Simba classifies tax and accounting as the largest segment of the business publishing. Trade books such as The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke by Suze Orman (Penguin) and Trump: How to Get Rich by Donald Trump (Random House) are not included. General interest business magazines such as Forbes, Fortune and Business Week are also excluded. Additionally, real-time financial information services, such as Bloomberg, are not included in Simba’s definition.

Professional-level books, peer-reviewed journals, online services and graduate-level business textbooks are included in the definition.

Topics include: marketing and sales, business and management, leadership, accounting, finance, branding, hospitality, leisure and tourism, corporate research, investment banking, money and banking, professional-level investing, economics, international business, business references, innovation and entrepreneurship, organizational development, business communication and strategy.

Definitions By Media

Books

Scholarly books provide an outlet for the publication of work on topics that are critical to advancing knowledge but that may not necessarily have mass-market appeal.

Simba’s definition of professional books includes all professional-level print and electronic books (e-books). Print books include hard covers and soft covers/paperbacks. Graduate-level textbooks used to train current and future legal, scientific, medical and business professionals are also counted as books in this report.

Journals

Journals are usually the first place that scientific and scholarly research findings are reported to a global audience. Journal articles must first pass rigorous technical review, called peer review, before their findings are published. The peer review process ensures the quality and soundness of the research and has been subject to much controversy, especially as government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health argue that such research should be made available freely to the public, while commercial publishers contend that this peer-review process costs much time, energy, money and resources, and therefore should require a fee.

Simba’s definition of professional journals includes print and electronic periodicals and peer-reviewed journals that are published at least quarterly. By 2002, more than half of print journal subscriptions gave way to online platforms such as Wiley InterScience. Simba’s definition includes electronic access and site license subscriptions as part of journal revenues. It also counts revenues generated from the pay-per-view model, under which researchers can buy individual journal articles online, rather than full subscriptions.

Simba’s definition of journals for this report excludes controlled circulation business and industry news magazines such as EDN (RBI), and publications such as InformationWeek and eWeek.

Newsletters and Looseleafs

Unlike books, which are at best published annually, and journals, which are typically published monthly, newsletters and looseleafs can be produced on a weekly or biweekly basis and fortified with add-on content as necessary.

Newsletters are typically 6-10 pages in length and are available in both print and electronic formats. Print newsletters are typically printed on paper with 3-hole punches, so they can be easily stored and referred back to by subscribers.

Both newsletters and looseleafs can be launched quite easily and quickly in response to a trend. For example, Aspen Publishers (a Wolters Kluwer division) released Representing Corporate Officers and Directors in January 2005 to inform corporate lawyers about new laws and regulations.

Publishers produce far fewer loose leafs today than they did before the widespread adaptation of the Internet, because it can be easier to update information and post it on digital platforms. Still, looseleafs remain valuable to professional customers, particularly in the legal and business segment.

The key differentiator between a looseleaf and a newsletter is that looseleafs often deliver much more detailed information and are often updated on an unstructured manner (three or four times per year, compared to a monthly, bi-monthly or weekly newsletter).

Directories/Databases

Professional directories and databases provide customers with lists of critical data, such as updated company or industry contact information, statistics and product specifications. Medical coding directories and databases are counted in this category, along with collected data on manufacturing parts and specifications. Like most of the professional publishing market, print directories have given way to more online databases, and this trend has given publishers the ability to add new services and linking capabilities to previously static content.

The sector derives most of its revenue from subscription products and the continued release of new digital products designed to make it easier for professionals to find and analyze data.

Online Services/Abstracting & Indexing

For this report, online services include abstracting and indexing platforms that disseminate content from thousands of primary sources. Also known as secondary publishing services, the A&I market is quickly shifting to almost entirely electronic delivery. A dwindling portion of A&I revenues remain in print, CD-ROM or even microfiche.

Standalone Web sites, electronic databases and online marketplaces that are not based on books, journals or directories are also counted as online services. UpToDate and IHS Group’s TechSavvy.com are examples of online services in this report.

Other

This category includes meetings and hybrid media publications that are heavily used by pharmaceutical communications companies. For example, a video and pamphlet package promoting a new drug. Also includes a small fraction of microfilm, microfiche and CD-ROM content.

Eliminations

In order to accurately reflect market growth, Simba has added an “eliminations” line to remove publishing revenues from being counting twice. There are two reasons these eliminations are necessary:

1) Bundled print and electronic pricing of books and journals. The primary component is bundling of print and electronic journals. The need for elimination has grown considerably with the growth of bundled print and electronic journal customers.

2) Trade among A&I providers and between A&I providers and other content providers. There has been an increasing level of cooperation within the industry and A&I providers deliver content from thousands of outside publishers. For example, Simba estimates that A&I technology platform Ovid Technologies pays a 40% to 70% royalty fee to Thomson BIOSIS to use and sell its aggregated bioscience content. The “Eliminations” line ensures these revenues do not get counted twice.

Sources of Information

Primary Research

· Interviews with key executives culled from an internal database containing contact information of thousands of professional publishing and information companies and executives.

· Simba’s Professional Publishing Report, Electronic Information Report and Book Publishing Report newsletters. Simba maintains an archive of newsletter articles dating to 1979 and also has a large file of notes from interviews conducted with industry leaders.

· Databases from R.R. Bowker, Simba’s parent company, including: Books-In-Print, Global Books-In-Print and Ulrich’s Serials.

· Data from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), Book Industry Study Group and U.S. Department of Commerce.

Secondary Research

· Annual Reports/SEC filings

· Marketing materials

· Press releases

· Interviews with financial analysts

· Industry association surveys

· Interviews with agents, booksellers and libraries (U.S. and international)

· Industry conference proceedings and events

· Presentations made by publishers to investors

· Other government and company resources sourced throughout the report

Methodology For Projecting/Estimating Results

When reported information was not available, estimates were developed by Simba Information using the above sources. Simba also uses: historical trends, general guidance provided by executives (weak, flat, etc.), size of competitors, relative sizing based on customer observations, number of titles, library-spending studies and searches of online news databases.

All Simba estimates in this report are marked (E) for estimate.