At a point when the words “fast-changing landscape” have become so universally true of publishing that one starts looking for alternative phrasings to avoid monotony, surprisingly little change appears between the Publishing Trends Distributor Survey 2011 and the results for this year. We list 25 total companies with no new additions this year: 12 publishers with a distribution arm and 13 distribution-only companies. Huge changes in digital certainly touch upon much that distributors do, and the major addition you’ll see to our chart this year is the question of whether a distributor offers digital services to those who are not also print customers. Overall, 15 of the 25 say they do, though the percentage of distribution-only companies offering digital-only is much higher than among the publisher-distributors, with 10 of the 13 distribution-onlys answering yes, while only 5 of the publishers offer this service.
The biggest news in terms of who’s distributing whom is certainly Disney/Hyperion’s move from HarperCollins to Hachette, though this won’t be taking place until April 2013.
Click on the image of the chart above for a full PDF version of the 2012 Distributor Profile chart.
