Delegates from the Phoenix Publishing & Media Group at the opening session of an educational exchange program hosted by Pace University in New York City. Seated center: Patrick Henry. Seated second from right: Prof. Andrea Baron, Pace, program coordinator. Seated right: Prof. Xiao Chuan Lian, Pace, translator.
On May 29, the MS in Publishing Program at Pace University convened a three-week seminar on printing technology for 16 representatives of the Phoenix Publishing & Media Group (PPMG) of Nanjing, the largest business of its kind in China. Through June 15, at the program’s academic center in midtown Manhattan, the senior managers will attend a series of educational sessions led by U.S. print and publishing executives. They also will visit print production sites and other places of interest in the NY-NJ metro area.
The visit is being coordinated by Andrea Baron, an adjunct professor in the publishing program, who describes the purpose and the agenda here. Pace has been cooperating with PPMG since 2006 in a variety of educational initiatives, all of them aimed at fostering better cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese print and publishing sectors.
With invaluable help in translation from Professor Xiao Chuan Lian, a senior staff associate of the publishing program, I led the opening session with a report on the present state of the U.S. printing industry. We covered industry demographics, game-changing technological trends, and revenue opportunities for printers both inside and outside the press department.
The visitors are a formidable audience. They all hold high-level positions in production and publishing in various divisions of PPMG, a group that employs 12,000 people, owns more than 1,700 bookstores, and claims annual sales in excess of 12 billion RMB (about $1.9 billion). They were attentive, inquisitive, and particularly eager to learn about developments in digital print manufacturing.
A number of them had been to drupa where, it was clear, they’d been mightily impressed (if not also a little baffled) by the new line of nanographic printing presses from Landa Corp. Web-to-print was another high-priority topic, with a few of the visitors mentioning the tentative first steps they were taking toward e-commerce. Concern was expressed about the re-shoring of book production from China to digitally equipped plants in the U.S. Apparently, some volume loss of that kind is being experienced by PPMG.
By the end of the seminar, the visitors will have heard from representatives of Quad Graphics, Idealliance, Baker & Taylor, Hearst, Time Inc., Group FMG, Brown Printing, Red Tie Ltd., MediaNeutral LLC, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), Publishers Press, Toppan Printing, XMpie, HP, Fry Communications, SAPPI, Random House, Periodicals & Book Association of America (PBAA), and Brown Printing. The site visit itinerary includes Hearst, Time Inc., Book Expo America, SCI Strategic Content Imaging, and Bloomberg Financial.
