Where commitment is the cornerstone

Q&A/ Peter Booth Wiley

chairman of the board and a sixth-generation member of the family in the business, who was in India recently

Two hundred years is a long time for a publishing company to survive. What lies behind Wiley's success?

Our commitment to what we do, for one "" we live in the world of content-generation and books, and these things have been a passion for several generations. There are very few surviving records from the early years, so we don't really have any philosophical statements as such.

What we have is the basic history: when Charles Wiley started the company it was a very exciting time and he played a vital part in the development of a new American literary movement. Like India today, the US of the early 1800s had a colonial history and it was a time when people wanted American writers who could compare with the great Britons "" Walter Scott, Charles Dickens "" and Europeans Wiley was friends with and published the early work of people like James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and Washington Irving.

What caused the company's shift away from fiction into specialised areas?

We're not entirely sure, but around the time of the second or the third generation the family decided that fiction wasn't working for them. They moved into "need-to-know publishing", in areas such as engineering, mathematics, architecture, botany "" which were known as the Useful Arts. As it happened, the Industrial Revolution was around the corner and Wiley happened to be well-placed to provide knowledge on technical subjects.

To stay within the same family all this time is incredible.

It's interesting because over six generations you expect a family to have dispersed. But it's been the other way round in our case "" it's what I call the "shrinking gene pool syndrome" "" so that today my siblings and I are really the only Wileys of our generation.

Tell us about your India operations.

We came to Delhi as early as 1962. My father and his associates were aware that India was very seriously investing in education and we started producing inexpensive versions of our textbooks for this market.

While our overall compounded annual growth over 1997-2007 has been at 11 per cent, in India we have grown at 25 per cent in the last six years. Books in finance and management are quite popular here. India is also becoming an important centre of ideas and research for us. In fact, one sign of our being a truly global company is that we have combined technology developed in Russia with a publishing programme developed in India, and we are taking this to the Chinese market!

How has technology affected you?

Technology has never been a threat for us, it's been a great opportunity. We have put all our journals online and have made them fully searchable "" even linking them to other publishers' databases. We have a Wiley Plus programme of e-textbooks for engineers. And we have made it possible for our consumers to customise content: for instance, a professor can take two chapters from one textbook and combine them with three from another book. No student likes to pay for a hefty textbook where only a couple of chapters are relevant.

Why did you wait until your 40s to join Wiley?

Actually, I interned with Wiley at 19 (laughs) but then I left to pursue my interests in politics and journalism. It was the 1960s, the time to be rebellious! Anyway, I couldn't quite get away from publishing "" a friend and I started a political magazine in 1969, very anti-Vietnam War. And I worked as a journalist until I joined Wiley in 1984.

I occasionally miss my writing, but I've been helping to research and put together an authoritative history of the Wiley family, which should be out this year.