The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books

by Keel Hunt, Tim O'Reilly (Foreword by)

Overview

The first book to tell the story of one of the world’s most influential media businesses, The Family Business draws on more than 70 interviews with company insiders as well as book-industry luminaries to present the Ingram story and how a little-known Nashville-based company grew to play a pivotal role in transforming book publishing around the world.

The history of the Ingram Content Group is one of the most important and remarkable business stories that almost no one knows. Launched as a favor to a family friend, it started as a local textbook distributor—one tiny division within a thriving corporation focused on oil, construction supplies, and shipping. It grew into the world’s largest book wholesaler, then into the most influential and innovative supplier of infrastructure and services to publishers around the world.

Over the past 50 years, from its headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, Ingram has played a pivotal role in modernizing the book business. Two members of the founding family have led the way: Bronson Ingram, a tough-minded industrialist who instinctively recognized a golden opportunity to apply modern efficiencies to antiquated logistical systems, and Bronson’s son John Ingram, an “intrapreneur” with a keen understanding of both the opportunities and the risks created by the new digital technologies. Led by these two brilliant managers, Ingram has used its unparalleled industry-wide connections to help transform book publishing from a tradition-bound business into a dynamic, global twenty-first century powerhouse.

Now, for the first time, The Family Business captures the whole story. In its pages, readers will learn about:

• The introduction of the Ingram microfiche reader in 1972 and how it catapulted book retailing into the electronic era
• Ingram’s network of coast-to-coast distribution centers turning U.S. book publishing into a truly national business for the first time
• Ingram using fast-growing video, software, magazine, and international wholesaling operations to create a phenomenal record of expansion, growing from a million-dollar company into a billion-dollar giant in just two decades
• Two of book publishing’s most powerful organizations—Ingram and Barnes & Noble—almost coming within a hair’s breadth of merging, and how the deal fell apart at the eleventh hour
• Ingram’s unparalleled ability to rapidly fulfill product orders empowering Amazon’s unique customer service model and enabling its explosive growth
• Lightning Source, a technological marvel spawned by Ingram, converting the “long tail” of niche books from a costly headache for publishers and retailers into a steady source of profitable sales
• Ingram’s transformation of the book supply chain enabling countless booksellers and publishers to survive and even thrive in the disruptive era of Covid-19

Today, with Ingram’s expanding portfolio of service and infrastructure businesses playing an ever-growing role in the world of publishing, the company stands ready to help lead the industry into an era of even more dramatic change.

The Family Business is the first book to recount the story of this strategic powerhouse that everyone in the publishing industry does business with, and that practically everyone admires—but that few people really understand. A must-read for people in the book business and the world of media, and anyone else who wants to understand how this vastly influential industry really works, this book fascinates with the story of the ways today’s electronic information technologies are transforming the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781513267210
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Keel Hunt is the author of two books on Tennessee political history and has been a columnist for the USA Today Tennessee network since 2013. In his early career, he was a journalist and Washington correspondent. He has been an adviser to the Ingram family and Ingram businesses since 1995 and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media in addition to being a businessman, speaker, writer, and trailblazer in the field of computers and technology. He has written and published technical books to inform business strategy with the evolving world today.

Read an Excerpt

In these earliest days of the Ingram Book Company, it was becoming clear that the intermediary function could be a daunting, complicated task. Connecting publishers and their products with retail booksellers and their customers required the rapid but careful management of a vast volume of data, requiring the development of new tools and procedures that did not as yet exist. Sorting this out led, in 1972, the launch of Ingram’s microfiche revolution. To understand its significance, you need to know a little about the cumbersome, inefficient book distribution system that existed when the fledgling Ingram Book Company was first securing its foothold in the publishing business.
At that time, thousands of bookstores mostly ordered their stock directly from publishers, of which there were literally hundreds, including dozens of big ones. Because most orders were small and the convention was that the bookstores paid “the freight” (that is, the shipping costs), publishers shipped most of the stock the cheapest way, which was the postal service’s fourth-class book rate. (This was a slow but very economical shipping method whose origins can be traced back to Benjamin Franklin and the other founders of our nation. Eager to make the postal service a tool for unifying, informing, and educating the far-flung population of the brand-new United States, they mandated that printed materials, including books, should be delivered at the lowest price possible. The arrangement persists today as the Media Mail service.)
Furthermore, the extremely decentralized and fragmented nature of the book market, with its hundreds of vendors and thousands of buyers, all operating independently, meant that each store had many small book orders to deal with all the time, with very uncertain delivery windows. And in those pre-computer days, just comparing deliveries to orders was daunting.
An efficient, unified system of nationwide book wholesalers could have simplified matters. But no such system existed in the early 1970s.

Table of Contents

Foreword Tim O'Reilly 7

Introduction 11

Part 1 The Beginning

1 The Family 17

2 The Favor 22

3 Stirrings of Growth 29

4 The First Big Breakthrough 39

Part 2 The Acceleration

5 A National Footprint 53

6 Harry Hoffman's Legacy 65

7 The Ingram Family's Impact 74

8 What Ships Like a Book? 82

9 An Industry Transformed 94

10 Consolidation and New Challenges 104

Photo Gallery 109

Part 3 The Disruption

11 The Rise of an Intrapreneur 127

12 Lightning in a Bottle 136

13 Digitization Rocks the Industry 146

14 The Marriage Not Meant to Be 162

Part 4 The Transformation

15 Finding New Ways to Grow 171

16 "Not My Father's Ingram" 182

17 Ingram and the World 194

18 The Family Business, Today and Tomorrow 202

Acknowledgments 207

Timeline of Ingram History 209

Key Data on Ingram Growth 213

List of Interviewees 215

Bibliography 217

Index 219

Photo Credits and Permissions 228

About the Author 229

Interviews

"We often take companies like Ingram for granted, they are a mostly invisible part of how the economy operates. Yet the role they play is crucial for entrepreneurs and large companies alike. Ingram turbocharged our entry into an existing distribution ecosystem. All of this makes me appreciate Ingram even more deeply. Ingram is a company that has always served its partners, growing as we grow and never at our expense. Reading this history I learned how Ingram's process of constant reinvention began long before the current era. This is a story rich in both inspiration and practical lessons for any business that intends to stick around for the long haul."

Editorial Reviews

03/29/2021

Hunt (Crossing the Aisle), an advisor to the Ingram family since 1995, gives an inside look at the Ingram Content Group, one of the publishing industry’s key players, in this comprehensive account. Making use of his access to family members and corporate archives, Hunt documents how, by the early 1960s, the Ingram family had built one of the country’s largest privately owned corporations. Bronson Ingram, the most “significant leader” of the family business in his generation, expanded the operation by acquiring the Tennessee School Book Depository in 1964, and in 1970 the Ingram Book Company was formed, becoming America’s leading national book wholesaler. Following Bronson’s death in 1995, his son John took over and helped steer the company through publisher consolidation, the growth of Amazon, and the explosion of e-book sales: by 2019, when the Ingram Content Group had revenue of about $1.8 billion, nearly 66% of its profits came from businesses formed since 1995. Though written to mark the 50th anniversary of Ingram Book Company’s formation, Hunt doesn’t shy away from discussing company missteps and controversies, such as the 1998 decision to sell the company to Barnes & Noble, which was called off after opposition by the publishing industry and government regulators. Anyone interested in learning about the modern history of book publishing would do well to check this out. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Keel Hunt's history of the Ingrams unwinds the past to reveal the family, friends, and business associates who, together, influenced and impacted the book industry (and the arts). It’s not just for locals, however, but for anyone interested in how dedication, risk-taking, and innovation can lead to major, long-term change and great success."
—Southern Bookseller Review

"Exceptionally well written, impressively comprehensive, meticulously researched, The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books is essential reading for authors, publishers, book publicists, book sellers, distributors and wholesalers, as well as anyone in the book business and the world of media—as well as the bibliophile and non-specialist general reader wanting to understand how this vastly influential publishing industry really works, as well as the ways in which today's electronic information technologies are transforming the world. . . . An essential, core addition to community, college and university library Writing/Publishing collections."
—Midwest Book Review

"The Family Business is must reading for any student of book publishing—regardless of your role in the industry ecosystem."
—Publishing Research Quarterly

"This long-overdue business biography tells the inside story of a great American family-owned business, one that has an impressive 50-year history by any standard."
—Independent Publisher

"Hunt, an advisor to the Ingram family since 1995, gives an inside look at the Ingram Content Group, one of the publishing industry's key players, in this comprehensive account. . . Anyone interested in learning about the modern history of book publishing would do well to check this out."
—Publishers Weekly

"There's one company responsible for bringing just about every book you've ever read into your life, and you may not even know it exists. In The Family Business, author and journalist Keel Hunt charts the history and contributions of Ingram Content Group, a little-known, family-owned business based in Tennessee that has shaped the publishing world for 50 years."
—BookPage

"The Family Business is a somewhat timeless story of the twists and turns in one business' life, and the lessons that can be learned from it."
—Clear Purpose

"Meticulously documented. . . It is a great story, a great education in the book business, and a book everyone in the business of books should own."
—Porchlight Books

"Ingram has proven itself time and again to be an ideal partner—trustworthy, innovative, resourceful, relentlessly self-improving, and even visionary. Reading The Family Business, it is a deep pleasure to see the creativity and commitment to principle through which the company's leaders forged its present-day excellence. The book is a history of our industry as well as of one company, and the accounts of Ingram's navigation of crises and opportunities provide business lessons that I will carry forward gratefully."
—Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette Book Group

"My longstanding respect and appreciation for Ingram's enormous contributions to book publishing have always been matched by curiosity over how this privately-held company came to be so essential to our business for so long. As only an insider can do so authoritatively, Keel Hunt has entertainingly relayed so much I never would have known about the story of the Ingram family and organization, and their indelible impact on the book economy and our culture."
—Madeline McIntosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US

"Ingram Content Group celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year and is commemorating the occasion with the publication of The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books on April 20. Author Keel Hunt conducted extensive interviews with many of the key participants in building ICG over the years."
—Michael Cader, Publisher's Lunch

"We often take companies like Ingram for granted, they are a mostly invisible part of how the economy operates. Yet the role they play is crucial for entrepreneurs and large companies alike. Ingram turbocharged our entry into an existing distribution ecosystem. All of this makes me appreciate Ingram even more deeply. Ingram is a company that has always served its partners, growing as we grow and never at our expense. Reading this history I learned how Ingram's process of constant reinvention began long before the current era. This is a story rich in both inspiration and practical lessons for any business that intends to stick around for the long haul."
—Tim O'Reilly, founder, CEO, and Chairman of O'Reilly Media (from the foreword)

From the Publisher

"Ingram Content Group celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year and is commemorating the occasion with the publication of THE FAMILY BUSINESS: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books on April 20. Author Keel Hunt conducted extensive interviews with many of the key participants in building ICG over the years.


Former Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos says in the book, 'If you look at the last fifty years of trade publishing in America, Ingram’s evolution is as important as anything that’s happened…. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to run a great publishing company without Ingram’s help and support.'


But the story of Ingram’s growth and adaptation to key industry intermediary throughout the digital transformation might have come to an abrupt halt over 20 years ago. And that story remains relevant as regulators currently review the proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House.
[Included in the book] is a chapter that tells the story of 'The Marriage Not Meant to Be' (between Ingram and Barnes & Noble.)"

"We often take companies like Ingram for granted, they are a mostly invisible part of how the economy operates. Yet the role they play is crucial for entrepreneurs and large companies alike. Ingram turbocharged our entry into an existing distribution ecosystem. All of this makes me appreciate Ingram even more deeply. Ingram is a company that has always served its partners, growing as we grow and never at our expense. Reading this history I learned how Ingram's process of constant reinvention began long before the current era. This is a story rich in both inspiration and practical lessons for any business that intends to stick around for the long haul."

Tim O'Reilly

My longstanding respect and appreciation for Ingram’s enormous contributions to book publishing have always been matched by curiosity over how this privately-held company came to be so essential to our business for so long. As only an insider can do so authoritatively, Keel Hunt has entertainingly relayed so much I never would have known about the story of the Ingram family and organization, and their indelible impact on the book economy and our culture.

Madeline McIntosh

There’s one company responsible for bringing just about every book you’ve ever read into your life, and you may not even know it exists. In The Family Business, author and journalist Keel Hunt charts the history and contributions of Ingram Content Group, a little-known, family-owned business based in Tennessee that has shaped the publishing world for 50 years.

BookPage

Ingram has proven itself time and again to be an ideal partner—trustworthy, innovative, resourceful, relentlessly self-improving, and even visionary. Reading The Family Business, it is a deep pleasure to see the creativity and commitment to principle through which the company’s leaders forged its present-day excellence. The book is a history of our industry as well as of one company, and the accounts of Ingram’s navigation of crises and opportunities provide business lessons that I will carry forward gratefully.

Michael Pietsch