In the last few years, as publishing has undergone rapid change, John Ingram has reconfigured Ingram's book businesses to turn the old warhorse that was Ingram into one of the most innovative companies in the industry, offering a range of services from print distribution and fulfillment to digital warehousing and print-on-demand. When speaking in public, John Ingram gives a speech he calls “Not My Father's Ingram,” which he describes as “rallying a call to the marketplace to look at the investments we've made and the new ways we can help, especially in digital.” His father, Bronson, got Ingram into books in the mid-'60s, setting a standard for what a book distributor could be. Now John is taking the company into the 21st century. He's a down-to-earth visionary whose main goal is “helping our customers sell more.”
Ingram is confident about his company, both because of its long history—founded in 1946—and because of his continuing commitment to diversification. He's got lots of irons in the fire, keeping the company stable and working with a wide array of customers. Beyond content distribution, one of Ingram's core assets is the Ingram Marine Group, which operates barges, shipping vessels and tugboats. Ingram says it “has done very well,” and it gives him the resources to make long-term investments in his book businesses.
Ingram's digital content arm is one such long-term venture—Ingram Digital was launched in 2006, and the company was added to the newly formed Ingram Content Group this year, putting all the company's book services under one umbrella. So far, Ingram Digital is not profitable, but John Ingram is confident it will be soon: “Our digital business is an investment today, which basically means it's losing money. But you've got one or two choices: you can build it yourself or, if you buy it when it's already successful, you'll pay 10 times as much. I feel we're making the right long-term investments, and as a well-capitalized private company, we're in a position to do that. It only took me seven years to get Lightning Source profitable. I know that this is the future, and I'm committed to making it work by providing services and creating value.”
Ingram's journey to the forefront of digital content took a few years. Like many others, he thought digital books were about to go big time “in 2001 or 2002, when Stephen King's Riding the Bullet came out,” he says. “At that moment it brought the thought that digital distribution was going to explode on the scene. I had to make a call to put a lot more money toward it.” While it took a few more years for digital books to really begin taking off, those initial investments laid the groundwork for Ingram Digital. “We kind of bumped along with digital until 2005 or so when it just seemed that it was starting to happen. 2005 was when it became clear that digital was coming back,” says Ingram.
In addition to Ingram's businesses focused on getting books and book content to consumers, he's also heavily invested in the potential of the education market, offering a set of programs to educational institutions. VitalSource, Ingram's educational content platform, has been going since the '90s, when it began as a way to create a digital curriculum for dental schools. Now, it's much more robust, serving content to all kinds of institutions. Ingram called digital education “a whole new avenue for our company and our world.”
As far as what the recent changes in the book business mean for publishers—Ingram's customers—John Ingram thinks they've got their hands full. “Publishers are really quite busy just managing the traditional business they've had,” he says, “and not too many of them have got a bunch of extra capital to come up with their own proprietary digital solutions. All of them need to be looking at digital as a threat and an opportunity. We live in a world that we call an either/and world, not either/or. Customers want physical goods in some circumstances, digital in others. It's a daunting task to figure out how to provide that, when your core business is trying to figure out how to shepherd the creation of content. Ingram is a more valuable resource to publishers today than at any time in our history.”
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