Print Unit Sales Soar in Mid-January (publishersweekly.com)

A new guide from Royal Mail Marketreach explains the sustainable benefits of mail and how those benefits can be boosted by the right choice of materials and suppliers. For some time now, direct mail has been one of the most sustainable forms of marketing available to companies and organisations. The fact that the paper industry uses a large proportion of renewable energy to process paper sourced from carefully managed forests combined with Europe’s high paper recycling rate means that mail is a key part of the circular economy. But while most people in the paper industry are fully aware of its environmental credentials, others in the wider marketing sphere aren’t, so Royal Mail Marketreach and industry body the Strategic Mailing Partnership have teamed up to produce a handy guide to making mail campaigns more sustainable.

Member companies of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Internet Archive (“IA”) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit asks the Court to enjoin IA’s mass scanning, public display, and distribution of entire literary works, which it offers to the public at large through global-facing businesses coined “Open Library” and “National Emergency Library,” accessible at both openlibrary.org and archive.org. IA has brazenly reproduced some 1.3 million bootleg scans of print books, including recent works, commercial fiction and non-fiction, thrillers, and children’s books. The plaintiffs—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House—publish many of the world’s preeminent authors, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Newbery Medal, Man Booker Prize, Caldecott Medal and Nobel Prize. Despite the self-serving library branding of its operations, IA’s conduct bears little resemblance to the trusted role that thousands of American libraries play within their communities and as participants in the lawful copyright marketplace. IA scans books from cover to cover, posts complete digital files to its website, and solicits users to access them for free by signing up for Internet Archive Accounts.

Additional second quarter service performance scores covering Jan.1 through Feb. 18 included: *First-Class Mail: 86 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 3.1 percentage points from the fiscal first quarter. *Marketing Mail: 91.2 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 1 percentage point from the fiscal first quarter. *Periodicals: 79.4 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 1.4 percentage point from the fiscal first quarter.