Issues in Publishing Industry
Let’s Check that!
The PAGE Network is an online content theme park platform based on NFTs. The PAGE platform has three main goals. The first is to solve the distribution of illegal copies of IP content with NFT technology. Secondly, it will enable the direct exchange of content between content producers, consumers, and investors. Finally, it aims to establish a decentralized platform through a reward ecosystem based on a transparent settlement system.
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After 2020, the number of Publishing has decreased significantly amid the pandemic, and after that, the number of Publishing has been similar for two years in a row, and in 2022, the number of issues increased by 5% in the same period of the previous year, indicating that it has entered a recovery trend. Let’s take a look at what has changed in the publishing industry in 2022.
Book production cost soaring
According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the average price of Southern Bleached Hardwood Kraft Pulp (SBHK), a raw material for paper, in June 2022 was $970 per ton, a 44% increase from January. Accordingly, domestic paper makers raised the price of printing paper twice in the first half of 2022 alone, and paper prices have already been raised in 2021.
In addition, the problem of delay in book logistics is serious. What I was able to receive on the same day of ordering is that recently it is difficult to receive the next day, and sometimes it takes a week. Even though paper cost, printing cost, and binding cost have all increased, it is difficult for publishers to reflect the increase in book prices. This is because the price resistance of book consumers cannot be ignored.
If book price hikes do not reflect the rise in production cost, books that reprint 300 to 500 copies will lose more the more they are published, increasing the likelihood that they will eventually go out of print. In addition to negatively impacting publication diversity, it can also reduce the overall vitality of the publishing industry.
Manpower shortage in printing and bookbinding
As more and more printing and bookbinding shops are closing due to a shortage of manpower, it is becoming difficult for publishers to publish books on time. The manpower shortage started to become noticeable in the second half of 2021, but it continues into the first half of 2022, showing no sign of improvement.
If the production schedule is delayed, it is difficult to redistribute books that have been temporarily sold out on time, and the inventory burden may increase by producing more copies in advance for fear that the production schedule will be delayed. .
The reasons for the manpower shortage are that many have changed jobs after the pandemic, such as delivery jobs, where they can receive relatively high wages, and there are virtually no cases of young people applying for printing and bookbinding due to the working environment or wage level. is understood as The crisis of book production infrastructure has been added to the ‘crisis of consumption’ where readers do not buy books.
Copyright Infringement
Publishers protested collectively when it was revealed that about 16,000 copyrights were used without permission when W, a publishing and logistics company, participated in the corpus project of the National Institute of the Korean Language.
Company W used as big data 600 million (622,717,166) words from 15,933 types of contents from Booktopia acquired in 2010 while participating in the corpus project of the National Institute of the Korean Language. The main content is that the contents of Booktopia were used without permission.
Company W is known to be in the process of making a copyright settlement with related companies, and the National Institute of the Korean Language also stopped the octopus service during the corpus business service, but there was a backlash from publishers whose copyright was infringed. The corpus project is a big data construction project to collect octopus data to build a corpus and use it as public data.
PAGE Network
IP infringement occurred in 2022 as well, and the backlash from the publishing industry emphasizes the importance of IP. Page Network can protect the IP of publications that can be produced as digital files by giving unique identification information through NFT in order to prevent IP infringement mentioned above. In addition, through a content theme park that can save physical costs through a variety of digital contents, problems in the publishing industry can be solved.
