Oxford University Press creates new business plan for Indian market

With its presence in India spanning more than 100 years, Oxford University Press has embarked on a slew of new initiatives for the Indian audience like print on demand, a digital platform for writers and local publishing and adaptations of its global medicine programme.

According to Tim Barton, Managing Director of Global Academic Publishing at Oxford University Press, OUP is focusing on three aspects in India — investment, integration and autonomy.

It has initiated a new business plan called Global Academic India which is an organisational structure for OUP’s academic publishing in India.

“Global Academic India is a new initiative of projects to develop and grow quantity and quality and range of what we have been doing in academic publishing. This involves putting significant new investment in new areas like medicine and law.

It also involves looking into the idea of a native language publishing programme, investments in marketing and taking up a cross-functional group of marketing cells, editorial production demand, planning to boost academic marketing here,” Barton told PTI in an interview here.

“A lot of new money is going to this new structure and then we are thinking of integration. Indian academic publishing has done a good job operating quite independently; what we are trying to do now is to connect it much more strongly to rest of Oxford publishing,” he said.

OUP has also initiated a print on demand programme.

“This means we can print single copies of books. Previously if a scholar wrote a book and after say three years, the book went out of stock we would need a print run of a certain style and we have to justify for printing it back to stock. Now with print on demand, we are able to keep a book in print pretty much forever,” Barton said.

Another thing is OUP is doing is use of the digital publishing platform for Indian content.

COMMENT NOW