John Wiley & Sons

John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons
Status Active
Founded 1807, New York City
Founder Charles Wiley
Country of origin United States
Headquarters location Hoboken, New Jersey
Distribution Worldwide
Nonfiction topics Science, medicine, travel, business, higher education
Imprints Wiley-Blackwell, Wiley-Liss
Revenue US$1.2 billion (increase 18% FY 2006)
Official website www.wiley.com

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, (NYSEJWA) is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and 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

History

Wiley was established in 1807 when Charles Wiley opened a print shop in Manhattan. 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. Charles Wiley's son John took over the business when his father died in 1826. 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. [2]

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.

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 NYSEJWA and NYSEJWB. William J. Pesce is President and Chief Executive Officer, the company’s tenth leader since 1807.

The Wiley Building in Hoboken, New Jersey, located on the waterfront between River Street and Frank Sinatra Drive.

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.

Brands and partnerships

Wiley’s Professional/Trade brands include For Dummies, Frommer's, Webster's New World, Jossey-Bass, Pfeiffer, CliffsNotes, Betty Crocker, Wrox Press, J.K. Lasser, Sybex and Fisher Investments Press. The STMS business is also known as Wiley-Blackwell, formed following the acquisition of Blackwell Publishing in February 2007. Brands include The Cochrane Library and more than 1,400 journals. 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, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Wiley-Blackwell also publishes more than 1,400 journals on behalf of more than 700 professional and scholarly society partners including the New York Academy of Sciences, American Cancer Society, The Physiological Society, British Ecological Society, American Association of Anatomists, and The London School of Economics and Political Science, making it the world’s largest society publisher.[3]

Wiley has also partnered with five other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform.[4]

Current initiatives

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.

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]

Higher education

the sybex brand is used on technology textbooks

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]

"Wiley Custom Select" launched in February 2009 as a custom textbook system allowing instructors to combine content from different Wiley textbooks and lab manuals and add in their own material. The company plans to make content from its STMS and Professional/Trade businesses available to instructors through the system in the future.[8]

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[9] 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.

Architecture and design

In October 2008, Wiley launched a new online service providing CEU/PDH credits to architects and designers. The initial courses are adapted from Wiley books, extending their reach into the digital space. Wiley is an accredited AIA continuing education provider.

Acquisition of Blackwell Publishing

Wiley’s scientific, technical, and medical business was significantly expanded by the acquisition of Blackwell Publishing in February 2007.[10] 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, International Finance and Liver Transplantation.[11]

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 were available online from Blackwell Synergy until they were integrated into Wiley InterScience on June 30, 2008. The company has announced that it will launch a new service with features and functionality that exceed those of Wiley InterScience and Blackwell Synergy.[12] In December 2007, Wiley also began distributing its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service.

Wiley Online Library

Wiley Online Library is the subscription-based, multidisciplinary digital library of John Wiley & Sons that launched over the weekend of Saturday, August 7th, and Sunday, August 8th 2010, replacing Wiley InterScience. It is a collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science and the humanities for researchers, students, authors, Wiley society partners and library customers globally.

Wiley Online Library delivers integrated access to over 4 million articles from 1500 journals, 9000 books, and hundreds of reference works, laboratory protocols and databases from John Wiley & Sons and key imprints including Wiley-Blackwell, Wiley-VCH, and Jossey-Bass.

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. In August 2009, the company announced a proposed reduction of Wiley-Blackwell staff in content management operations in the U.K. and Australia by approximately 60, in conjunction with an increase of staff in Asia[13] In March 2010, it announced a similar reorganization of its Wiley-Blackwell central marketing operations that would affect approximately 40 employees. The company’s position was that the primary goal of this restructuring was to increase workflow efficiency and that there were no plans for further offshoring at present.

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.[14][15] Subsequently, Wiley did nonetheless become a provider of apps and eBooks for the Apple iPhone and iPad.

In its 2010 annual earnings report, Wiley said it had "closed a deal ... to make its titles available for the iPad," and was looking forward to improving its e-book sales (only $US7M, less than 2% of overall sales in fiscal 2010).[16]

References

  1. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2008). "About Wileuu". Press release. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-301454.html. Retrieved 2008-02-04. 
  2. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2008). "News". Press release. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-301452,newsId-2343.html. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
  3. Rittenhouse Book Distributors, Inc. (2008). "Rittenhouse Quarterly Report". Press release. http://rittenhousereport.com/FeaturedPubs.aspx. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
  4. "New Agreement Makes eTextbooks Available to Students". http://www.coursesmart.com/aboutus?aboutview=media#pressedmap. 
  5. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2006). "2006 Annual Report". Press release. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/annual_reports/ar_2006/time.html. Retrieved 2008-02-04. 
  6. Book Business (2008). "Web 2.0 for Dummies". Press release. http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/story/story.bsp?sid=91862&var=story&6314. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
  7. John Wiley & Sons (2008). "WileyPLUS". Press release. http://he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-101003.html. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
  8. Mark Logic (2009). "Wiley Custom Select". Press release. http://www.marklogic.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2009/announcing-wiley-custom-select-next-generation-custom-publishing-application-powered-by-mark-logic.html. Retrieved 2009-05-25. 
  9. John Wiley & Sons (2008). "News". Press release. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-301452,newsId-2331.html. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
  10. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (17 November 2006). "Wiley to Acquire Blackwell Publishing (Holdings) Ltd." (PDF). Press release. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/wiley.pdf. Retrieved 2007-06-07. 
  11. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2008). "Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (Wiley-Blackwell)". Press release. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-301704.html. Retrieved 18 July 2009. 
  12. MALMAD (2008). "Wiley-Blackwell". Press release. http://malmad.iucc.ac.il/multimedia/upl_doc/doc_310108_239285.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
  13. "Wiley plans redundancies in the UK and Australia". The Bookseller, 13 August 2009
  14. Hafner, Katie (April 30, 2005). "Steve Jobs's Review of His Biography: Ban It". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/30/technology/30apple.html. Retrieved 2006-10-16. 
  15. Orlowski, Andrew (27 April 2005). "Book giant feels wrath of Jobs". The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/27/apple_snubs_wiley/. Retrieved 18 July 2009. 
  16. Weinman, Sarah, "Education Publisher John Wiley & Sons Closes Fiscal Year on a Strong Note", DailyFinance/AOL, 6/17/10 4:00 PM. Retrieved 2010-09-03.

Bibliography

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