John Wiley & Sons

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Type	Public (NYSE: JWA, NYSE: JWB)
Founded	1807 in New York, New York
Headquarters	Hoboken, New Jersey
Key people	William J. Pesce; CEO
Industry	Publishing
Products	Publisher of print and electronic products
Revenue	$1.2 billion USD (▲ 18% FY 2006)
Employees	4900+
Website	www.wiley.com

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly fields. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in print and electronically, as well as online products and services, training materials, and educational materials for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students.^[1]

Contents 1 History 2 Governance and operations 3 Brands and partnerships 4 Publishing in the 21st century 4.1 Travel 4.2 Higher Education 4.3 Medicine 5 Acquisition of Blackwell Publishing 6 Corporate culture 7 Wiley bicentennial 8 Notable 9 Controversy 10 Bibliography 11 References 12 External links

[edit] History

Wiley was established in 1807 when Charles Wiley opened a print shop in Manhattan. Founded during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Wiley is one of the oldest independent publishing companies in the world.^[2] The company was the publisher of such 19th century American literary figures as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as of legal, religious, and other non-fiction titles. During the second industrial revolution, Wiley shifted its focus to scientific, technical, and engineering subject areas, abandoning its literary interests. The company acquired its present name in 1876, when John’s second son William H. Wiley joined his brother Charles in the business. Through the 20th century, the company expanded its publishing activities business, the sciences, and higher education. Since the establishment of the Nobel Prize in 1901, Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 350 Nobel Laureates, in every category in which the prize is awarded.^[3]

[edit] Governance and operations

While the company is led by an independent management team and Board of Directors, the involvement of the Wiley family is ongoing, with sixth-generation members (and siblings) Peter Booth Wiley as the non-executive Chairman of the Board; Bradford Wiley II as a Director and past Chairman of the Board; and Deborah Wiley as Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications. Seventh-generation member Jesse Wiley is an assistant editor in the company’s Professional/Trade business.

Wiley has been publicly owned since 1962, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 1995; its stock is traded under the symbols NYSE: JWA and NYSE: JWB. William J. Pesce is President and Chief Executive Officer, the company’s tenth leader since 1807.

Today, Wiley operates in the USA, Canada, the EU, Asia, and Australia, with about 5,000 employees worldwide. Since 2002, the company's world headquarters have been located in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, where it had previously been based. The company’s global operations are organized into three core businesses: Professional/Trade; Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (STMS), also known as Wiley-Blackwell; and Higher Education.

[edit] Brands and partnerships

Wiley’s Professional/Trade brands include For Dummies, Frommer’s, Webster's New World, CliffsNotes, Betty Crocker, Wrox Press, J.K. Lasser, Sybex, and Fisher Investments Press. In STMS, Wiley’s brands include Wiley InterScience and numerous journal brands. The WileyPLUS brand refers to an online higher education product.

Wiley has publishing alliances with partners including Microsoft, CFA Institute, the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the American Institute of Architects, the National Geographic Society. Wiley-Blackwell also publishes several hundred journals on behalf of professional and scholarly societies; it is the world’s largest publisher of this type.^[4]

[edit] Publishing in the 21st century

With the integration of digital technology and the traditional print medium, Wiley has stated that in the near future its customers will be able to search across all its content regardless of original medium and assemble a custom product in the format of choice.^[5] Web resources are also enabling new types of publisher-customer interactions within the company’s various businesses.

[edit] Travel

In the Frommer’s travel program, Wiley has extended its print-on-paper guidebook business with online "forums", "blogs", and "podcasts" to give travelers suggestions and help them plan their trips, audio walking tours to supplement their guidebooks, and online trip journals and photo albums to help them document their experiences.^[6]

[edit] Higher Education

Higher Education’s WileyPLUS is an online product that combines electronic versions of texts with media resources and tools for instructors and students. It is intended to provide a single source from which instructors can manage their courses, create presentations, and assign and grade homework and tests; students can receive hints and explanations as they work on homework, and link back to relevant sections of the text. A majority of students surveyed have indicated that WileyPLUS improves their understanding of the material.^[7]

[edit] Medicine

In January 2008, Wiley launched a new version of its evidence-based medicine (EBM) product, InfoPOEMs with InfoRetriever, under the name Essential Evidence Plus, providing primary-care clinicians with point-of-care access to the most extensive source of EBM information^[8] via their PDAs/handheld devices and desktop computers. Essential Evidence Plus includes the InfoPOEMs daily EBM content alerting service and two new content resources—EBM Guidelines, a collection of practice guidelines, evidence summaries, and images, and e-Essential Evidence, a reference for general practitioners, nurses, and physician assistants providing first-contact care.

[edit] Acquisition of Blackwell Publishing

Wiley’s scientific, technical, and medical business was significantly expanded by the acquisition of Blackwell Publishing in February 2007.^[9] The combined business, named Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (also known as Wiley-Blackwell), publishes, in print and online, 1,400 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and an extensive collection of books, major reference works, databases, and laboratory manuals in the life and physical sciences, medicine and allied health, engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences. Through a backfile initiative completed in 2007, 8.2 million pages of journal content have been made available online, a collection dating back to 1799. Wiley-Blackwell also publishes on behalf of about 700 professional and scholarly societies; among them are the American Cancer Society (ACS), for which it publishes Cancer, the flagship ACS journal; the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing; and the American Anthropological Association. Other major journals published include Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, HEPATOLOGY, and Liver Transplantation.^[10]

Launched commercially in 1999, Wiley InterScience provides online access to Wiley journals, major reference works, and books, including backfile content. Journals previously from Blackwell Publishing are available online from Blackwell Synergy; as of July 1, 2008, they will be integrated into Wiley InterScience. The company has announced that in January 2009 it will launch a new service with features and functionality that exceed those of Wiley InterScience and Blackwell Synergy.^[11] In December 2007, Wiley also began distributing its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service.

[edit] Corporate culture

The company has been recognized on several occasions for the quality of its corporate culture. In 2008, Wiley was named for the second consecutive year to Forbes Magazine's annual list of the "400 Best Big Companies in America". In 2007, Book Business magazine cited Wiley as "One of the 20 Best Book Publishing Companies to Work For". For two consecutive years, 2006 and 2005, Fortune magazine named Wiley one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For". Wiley Canada was named to Canadian Business magazine's 2006 list of "Best Workplaces in Canada", and Wiley Australia has received the Australian government's "Employer of Choice for Women" citation every year since its inception in 2001. In 2004, Wiley was named to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "Best Workplaces for Commuters" list. Working Mother magazine in 2003 listed Wiley as one of the "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers", and that same year, the company received the Enterprise Award from the New Jersey Business & Industry Association in recognition of its contribution to the state's economic growth. In 1998, Wiley was selected as one of the "most respected companies," with a "strong and well thought out strategy," by the Financial Times in a global survey of Chief Executive Officers.

[edit] Wiley bicentennial

As one of the world’s oldest independent publishing companies, Wiley marked its bicentennial in 2007 with a year-long celebration, hosting festivities that spanned four continents and ten countries and included such highlights as ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on May 1. In conjunction with the anniversary, the company published Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807-2007, depicting Wiley’s pivotal role in the evolution of publishing against a social, cultural, and economic backdrop. Wiley has also created an online community called Wiley Living History, offering excerpts from Knowledge for Generations and a forum for visitors and Wiley employees to post their comments and anecdotes.

[edit] Notable

On April 25, 2007, a representative from the Society of Chemical Industry, which publishes Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture,^[12][13], on Wiley InterScience, sent a “cease and desist” letter to blogger Shelley Batts that warned of consequences if she did not remove the image from an article in that journal that she posted without permission on her blog, but later apologized for the over-reaction, citing it as "a misunderstanding inadvertently caused by a junior member of staff".^[14]

[edit] Controversy

In 2005, Steve Jobs, co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from the Apple retail stores in response to their publishing an unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve Jobs.^[15][16]

[edit] Bibliography

• (1957) The First One Hundred and Fifty Years: A History of John Wiley and Sons Incorporated 1807–1957. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 
• Wright, Robert E.; Timothy C. Jacobson, George David Smith (2007). Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807–2007. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-75721-7. 

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Corporate website
• Detailed company history published as part of its bicentennial celebration
• Wiley InterScience - online journal and book content
• Frommer's website
• CliffNotes website
• For Dummies website
• J.K. Lasser website
• Fisher Investments Press website