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Parent company | Cambridge Information Group |
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Founded | 1868 |
Founder | Frederick Leypoldt Company named after Richard Rogers Bowker, who acquired Leypoldt's business in 1878. |
Headquarters location | Chatham, New Jersey |
Key people | Beat Barblan, General Manager [1] |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
R. R. Bowker LLC (trading as Bowker) is an American limited liability company domiciled under Delaware Limited Liability Company Law and based in Chatham, New Jersey. [2] Among other things, Bowker provides bibliographic information on published works to the book trade, including publishers, booksellers, libraries, and individuals; its roots in the industry trace back to 1868. Bowker is the exclusive U.S. agent for issuing International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). Bowker is the publisher of Books in Print and other compilations of information about books and periodical titles. It provides supply chain services and analytical tools to the book publishing industry. [3] Bowker is headquartered in Chatham, New Jersey, with additional operational offices in England and Australia. It is now owned by Cambridge Information Group. [4]
The company was founded in New York City by Frederick Leypoldt, a German immigrant who worked as a bookseller and recognized the need for good bibliographic information to make the book business more efficient. He established the monthly Literary Bulletin, his first periodical, in 1868. In 1870 Leypoldt issued the first edition of his Annual American Catalogue, the forerunner for Books in Print. In 1872 he published the first issue of Publishers Weekly , in 1873 the first Publishers' Uniform Trade-List Annual (later the Publishers Trade List Annual), and in 1876 the first issue of Library Journal . In 1878 Leypoldt's company was acquired by Richard Rogers Bowker. Leypoldt and Bowker also founded two influential standard book-industry references: Literary Marketplace and Ulrich's Periodicals Directory . [5]
In 1967, the Xerox Corporation acquired the R. R. Bowker company, and then, in 1985, sold it to Reed International (now RELX Group). That same year, in 1985, Publishers Weekly—after 113 years as a part of R. R. Bowker—was transferred to the Cahners Publishing Company. [6] In 1991, Reed's reference division moved to Chatham, New Jersey. [7] In 2001, Cambridge Information Group acquired Bowker. [8] After the sale, In 2007, Cambridge Information Group sold Literary Marketplace and other directories to Information Today Inc. [9] Cambridge Information Group merged Cambridge Scientific Abstracts with ProQuest Information and Learning to form ProQuest LLC, a privately held Delaware-domiciled limited liability company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. R. R. Bowker LLC was repositioned as an affiliate of ProQuest.[ clarification needed ] [10]
Bowker is the United States provider of International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs), a code for identifying commercial books devised by Gordon Foster in 1967. An ISBN is currently placed on a book to uniquely identify it. ISBNs are available one at a time and in blocks up to 100,000 for a set fee. [12] ISBNs may be purchased and maintained at Bowker's My Identifiers website. Many countries, including the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, to name a few, charge for ISBNs. Canada and Mexico provide ISBNs free of charge as their ISBN agencies are government funded. [13] [14] As of 2016 [update] , Bowker USA charges $125 for one ISBN [15] and offers substantial[ weasel words ] discounts on volume purchases.
ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene Power.
Publishers Weekly (PW) is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews.
Harcourt was an American publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. The company was last based in San Diego, California, with editorial/sales/marketing/rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida, and was known at different stages in its history as Harcourt Brace, & Co. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. From 1919 to 1982, it was based in New York City.
Ingram Content Group is an American service provider to the book publishing industry, based in La Vergne, Tennessee. It is a subsidiary of Ingram Industries.
Books+Publishing is a news outlet reporting on the Australian book industry. Published as a website with daily newsletters and a print magazine, the outlet produces industry news about publishing, bookselling, libraries, rights sales, literary awards and literary festivals, as well as author interviews and pre-publication reviews of Australian and New Zealand books.
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory is the standard library directory and database providing information about popular and academic magazines, scientific journals, newspapers and other serial publications.
Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood, is an educational and academic publisher which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Greenwood Press, Inc. and based in Westport, Connecticut, GPG publishes reference works under its Greenwood Press imprint, and scholarly, professional, and general interest books under its related imprint, Praeger Publishers. Also part of GPG is Libraries Unlimited, which publishes professional works for librarians and teachers.
Richard Rogers "R. R." Bowker was a journalist, editor of Publishers Weekly and Harper's Magazine, and founder of the R. R. Bowker Company.
Cengage Group is an American educational content, technology, and services company for higher education, K–12, professional, and library markets. It operates in more than 20 countries around the world.
Macmillan Inc. was an American book publishing company originally established as the American division of the British Macmillan Publishers. The two were later separated and acquired by other companies, with the remnants of the original American division of Macmillan present in McGraw-Hill Education's Macmillan/McGraw-Hill textbooks, Gale's Macmillan Reference USA division, and some trade imprints of Simon & Schuster that were transferred when both companies were owned by Paramount Communications.
Your Dream Home: How to Build It for Less Than $3,500 is a 1950 "do it yourself" book by American columnist and editor Hubbard Cobb. It was the biggest non-fiction seller of the year of its release, selling over a million copies. Specifically, the book featured instructions for building a Cape Cod style home, with eight floor plans included. The book is illustrated and covers all aspects of construction relevant to 1950, from financing the project and clearing the land to constructing built-in furniture for the finished product. It was the debut book for Cobb, who would go on to produce a number of others in the "do it yourself" genre.
AB Bookman's Weekly was a weekly trade publication begun in 1948 by Sol. M. Malkin as a publication of the R. R. Bowker Company, publisher of Books in Print and other book trade and library periodicals. In its glory days between the early 1950s and the early 1990s, AB was "the best marketplace for out-of-print books in North America." Nicholas Basbanes called it "the leading trade publication in the antiquarian world." In addition to publishing long lists of books wanted and for sale, it included trade news, reference lists, conference announcements, and various special features concerning the book trade, librarianship, and book collecting. The magazine was headquartered in Newark, New Jersey.
Frederick Leypoldt was a German-American bibliographer, the founder of Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Index Medicus and other publications.
Robert Freeman Asleson was an American publisher who was a major contributor to the publishing, library and information industries. He led a number of key information companies as they evolved from print, to microfilm, to mainframe, to CD-ROM and then eventually to web based databases. He also brought professional management to entrepreneurial library companies. Some of these organizations are now among the titans of the library industry.
Shelf Awareness is an American publishing company that produces two electronic publications/newsletters focused on bookselling, books and book reviews.
The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) was established in 1917, as an organization to promote the role of women in the community of the book. This organization includes twelve active chapters in the United States, network members outside regional chapters, and corporate sponsorships. WNBA is a broad-based, non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization offering three distinguished national awards and a longstanding history of literary activism.
As of 2018, five firms in France rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Éditions Lefebvre Sarrut, Groupe Albin Michel, Groupe Madrigall, Hachette Livre, and Martinière Groupe.
As of 2018, several firms in the United States rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Cengage Learning, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley.
Books in the United Kingdom have been studied from a variety of cultural, economic, political, and social angles since the formation of the Bibliographical Society in 1892 and since the History of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Books are understood as "written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers".
The selling of books dates back to ancient times. The founding of libraries in c.300 BC stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers. In Rome, toward the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library, and Roman booksellers carried on a flourishing trade.