By Fangning Lou
On 4th Dec 2019, the students from the 2019-2020 short term programme of BIGC went on a field trip. They were accompanied by Grace Wang, Frances Sessford and Elaine Watson from the University of Stirling. They all went to the largest city in Scotland, Glasgow, and visited the local book distributor BookSource and one of the oldest established printing companies Bell & Bain to experience the British publishing industry and learn about the distribution and printing process.
The visit to Glasgow started with book distributor BookSource. BookSource was founded in 1995 by Publishing Scotland (later renamed the Scottish Publishers Association). It is a book distributor serving 92 publishers. The warehouse has no more than 13 employees on duty, although there are 13,178 book catalogues and 3.44 million books in the company. The transportation and sales information of these books can be tracked through the information system of its official website.
For small and medium-sized publishers in the UK, book distributors are indispensable institutions. Distributors, institutions and personnel who specialise in the activities of transferring goods from producers to consumers, are completely independent merchants, between agents and retailers. Book distributors are the bridge that connects publishers with retailers and consumers, improving the efficiency of book distribution and reducing the labour and material cost of small and medium-sized publishers.
Founded in 1831, Bell & Bain is the oldest existing printing company in the UK. In this era of electronic reading Bell & Bain is also seeking innovations and changes, hoping to take a place in publishing industry with physical publications.
Specialising in printing and binding of academic journals in the field of business, education, finance, medicine, and science, Bell & Bain serves their customers including Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, etc. High-quality and low-volume printed matter is its key selling point. We visited its traditional printing and electronic printing factories successively, and observed the whole process from plate making, printing to binding.