Ingram Content Group is a US-based service provider to the book publishing industry. The company was born in 2009, after the merger of Ingram Lightning Group with Ingram Digital Group. It has the largest active book inventory in the industry with access to 7.5 million titles and employs approximately 3,000 people worldwide. Ingram Content Group (hereafter referred to as «Ingram») is headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee, and is part of Ingram Industries together with Ingram Marine Group.
Ingram distributes to independent bookstores in the United States, prints on demand under the Lightning Source brand, and provides full-service distribution, including sales and marketing services through the Ingram Publisher Services division. It also provides digital content and distribution services through CoreSource, VitalSource, and MyiLibrary. It has been allowing US-based websites to sell books from the Ingram catalog since 2015 and has been distributing them in the UK since 2017.
What was the publishing process of the customer before contacting Pagination?
Ingram contacted Pagination to improve the process of creating the many catalogs they made. Designers, at that time, worked by hand with Adobe InDesign by copying and pasting all the information regarding their books: images, titles, authors, categories, etc., from an Excel sheet to the InDesign document. As they create dozens of catalogs a year: E-Supplement, Distribution Catalog, TBC Catalog (Tennessee Book Company), Print Supplement, IPS Gift Catalog, and a market analysis booklet, they needed an automatic solution that would allow them, in a few minutes, to have the documents ready for the market.
How did Pagination help Ingram?
Pagination began the collaboration by analyzing all types of documents created by Ingram. The documents were similar in terms of the information they contained but differed in page size and layout. Therefore Pagination had to automate several InDesign templates, one for each type. Technically, Pagination mapped some dynamic fields such as book title, cover image, author, synopsis, hardcover price, softcover price, size, the total number of pages, and the ISBN code (international barcode for books), and added some fields to the Ingram Excel file. The main field added is for choosing the product layout. In this way, Ingram can better choose how to lay out the books in their catalogs. Ingram also chooses the ordering of products. The result is semi-finished documents in an editable InDesign format. Once ready, Ingram downloads the files from Pagination and modifies them at will, adding the cover and other documents.
Worthy of mention is the Booklet, which is a market analysis document. To create it, Ingram provides us with several data files that Pagination automatically aggregates and transforms into tables, bar graphs, and word clouds. Each booklet deals with a particular theme and for that various data are collected and examined such as age, gender, level of education, geographical location, etc., and above all those who talk about it on the web and in other channels: youtube, social media, podcasts, media outlets, and so on.
Ingram is very happy with how we help them and has shown it both by continuing his collaboration with us and by increasing the number of automated projects almost every year!