The Seventeenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

Outsourcing in publishing industry, started way back in the late eighties, and incidentally India happens to be the most preferred, as well as the major service provider for many top publishers across the globe starting from project management, typesetting to e-books. Now let us get into the inside details of outsourcing, which is widely classified into four segments, Top-end service providers with 1000 plus employees, having onshore offices around the world; mid-segment service providers with 100 plus employees; low-end service provider with less than 100 employees; freelancers. When a Publisher outsources a particular project for 5 USD to a top-end service provider, who sits with about 50 percent of non productive staff, tend to outsource the same to the mid-segment service providers for 2 USD, who in turn pass it down further to the low-end service providers for 1 USD, and they eventually end up using the freelancers for an even lesser price. Publishers generally benefit by outsourcing to the top-end segment. Moreover the publisher, actually ends up paying a premium cost to the top-end service provider, and mostly gets the delivery as expected; whereas, data security definitely takes a beating, as so many layers of outsourcing are involved in the process. In the long run, generally the growth of both, mid-segment and low-end segment service providers gets curbed by the top-end segment, as their growth instills fear of a potential competitor.