Books
Jolly Roger
24.07.08 Tom Tivnan
"To be honest," Roger Horton says, "it used to irritate me greatly." The Taylor & Francis (T&F) chief executive is talking about how academic publishing is often ignored in the press in favour of the "sexier" trade side. It should be emphasised he said "used to". We are sitting in his Milton Park office, photos of his wife and two daughters gracing the walls, while a scarf and plaque from his beloved Reading FC lie on a table. He is smiling and seems calm, happy and relaxed.
"The reality is people will always be more interested in celebrity stuff than serious stuff, and that gets the headlines," he continues. "But the truth is that there is a lot more innovation and creativity going on in the academic markets than the trade markets."
He may have a point, particularly in the digital and online sphere. Indeed T&F, part of the global information giant Informa, is at the cutting edge of digital, outpacing even its academic competitors. In Informa's last full-year results to 31st December 2007, publishing revenue increased 26% on 2006, mostly thanks to increased digitisation and the "growing importance of this resilient revenue stream". T&F itself contributed about £250m of its parent company's £1.13bn turnover.
Horton says it "makes me chuckle" when he reads of a trade publisher being written about in glowing terms as it announces it is to release 2,000 e-books, when T&F have brought out 16,000 "almost under the parapet".
T&F's revenue breakdown is almost evenly split between its journals and books divisions. The bulk of the company's business, nearly 80%, is sold primarily through university libraries. "Of course our market absolutely demands digitalisation on the journals front," Horton says. "Therefore, on the book front we have to be more prepared to experiment and innovate."
Size helps, too. T&F is a global business, with more than 1,500 employees in the UK, US, India and the Far East. In the past 10 years, the company has bought up other academic presses such as Routledge, Haworth and Cavendish, giving it the size and scope to experiment digitally: "Some of the reasons we have been able to acquire smaller owner/proprietor businesses in the last few years is that the owners have said: 'We can't afford to play in that world anymore, and we want our books to go to a good home.' "
This year, Horton's acquisitions have been limited to single journals. He insists that the speculation of Informa being bought by private equity players has not affected the business—the edgy economic climate has been more of a factor: "There is not much happening in the marketplace. There is no denying the credit crunch, and there is a need to be careful."
From the time he was a teenager, Horton knew that he wanted to go into publishing. While he was working the pumps at a petrol station in Reading, Steve White, then business editor at McGraw-Hill, used to give him copies of The Bookseller so Horton could scan the jobs pages.
Horton eschewed university for a marketing assistant and part-time sales rep job for Van Nostrand, where he stayed for 10 years before moving to McGraw-Hill. Joining T&F in 1994, he became c.e.o. in 1998.
Apart from a sticky patch in 2004 when the move to the present HQ from London almost led to strike action from T&F staff, Horton says the past 10 years have been smooth. He credits his dedicated, long-serving senior team, which includes T&F m.d. Jeremy North and group sales director Christoph Chesher.
It has been an exciting time. "Journals publishing has probably changed more in the last 15 years than since T&F first started publishing them in 1798. It's obvious, but the internet has changed print. Publishers have moved from being suppliers of information where there has been a lack of it, to filters of quality in a world where there has been too much of it. What's the difference between junk mail and a letter that has been written to you? It's relevance. That's what publishers do: add relevance."
RSS
Subscriber Content