Ingram Book Company's Lightning Print Inc. division is entering the e-book arena, PW has learned in an interview with Youngsuk (YS) Chi, chairman of LPI, and Ed Marino, LPI's newly named president and CEO. In the past month and a half, Ingram had made a string of announcements, including the naming of several new executives and the expansion to larger facilities in LaVergne, Tenn., sparking speculation about LPI's direction. The latest announcement named Phil Clark, the Danka official who developed LPI's print-on-demand system with Marino, as Lightning's chief technology officer, and Susan Peterson, formerly of Bantam Doubleday Dell, as v-p of publisher development.
"This expansion has been part of our plan for LPI all along," Chi noted. "We've been developing the business; we're adding another InfoPrint, which means we need more space and more personnel. Now the time is right for this next step."
"There are four components to electronic publishing," Marino stated, "storage, distribution, conversion and display. Publishers don't want to do all of these, retailers don't want to do all of them. Our new facility will allow us to provide publishers' services in these areas. We are building one archive, so we can distribute the titles in whatever format is requested: print-on-demand, Open e-Book or any other. "
"We're definitely not interested in retail, in selling directly to consumers," Chi declared. "Our advantage comes from our relationships with both publishers and retailers. We understand their businesses and want to provide these services for e-books. We are seeking new partnerships with publishers, to help build our archive of digitized titles." These partnerships will be Peterson's main responsibility.
The archive will work just like a physical warehouse, storing digitized versions of books and fulfilling orders from either publishers or retailers, most likely delivered via the Internet. LPI's archive currently includes about 7,500 titles, but Chi maintained that "it's not the number of titles in the archive that counts, but the velocity of those titles. We have titles that move now, and we'll be adding more."
"We're printing 70,000 books a month now," Marino added, "and we expect to be printing 100,000 a month by midyear." LPI will have printed more than 700,000 books by the end of this month.
