Chicago Distribution Services

Two hundred seventy-three thousand square feet. Nearly twelve million books in inventory. Nearly fifty thousand active ISBN's. More than nineteen thousand units shipped daily. Welcome to the Chicago Distribution Center.

CDC receives, picks, packs, and ships orders for the University of Chicago Press's Books and Journals Divisions. What really makes its services impressive, however, is that it also functions as the hub for more than 95 scholarly publishers. Since 1991, CDC has provided many of the world's finest academic publishers with state-of-the-art fulfillment, customer service, collection, and reporting.

Comprehensive, professional, up-to-date, and flexible, CDC offers its client publishers the following services:

• Warehousing and receiving
• Order entry and customer service
• Picking, packing, billing, and shipping
• Title Management
• Eloquence data feeds to customers
• Special services
• Credit and collection
• Inventory management
• Electronic order processing (EDI, Pubnet, and Easylink)
• 800 number for orders
• Web shopping cart
• Order consolidation across distributed clients
• Sales, royalty, and inventory reporting
• Digital printing center located in the warehouse (CDDC)
• Repository and distributor for digital book files (BiblioVault)

History of Chicago Distribution Center

The Chicago Distribution Center was founded in 1966 to serve the needs of the University of Chicago Press Book and Journal Divisions in warehousing and distributing their publications. In 1991, CDC began offering its comprehensive services - warehousing, customer service, business services, order fulfillment, returns management, collection, and all attendant information technology - to other university presses. The University of Tennessee Press was the first CDC client. By 2012, the CDC was serving more than 95 publishers.

Full-service marketing

The University of Chicago Press offers a complete sales, marketing, and distribution program for scholarly publishers who want to outsource this work. Our services can be employed worldwide or on a territory-by-territory basis.

The University of Chicago Press’s marketing services program combines the expertise of the Chicago Distribution Center with that of the University of Chicago Press’s marketing department. The services provided by Marketing include:

• Sales representation
• Inclusion in the University of Chicago Press’s trade catalogs
• Branding by publisher
• Direct marketing
• Web marketing
• Promotion and publicity
• Advertising
• Exhibits

To find out more, contact our Marketing Director, Levi Stahl, (773) 702-0289 or levi@uchicago.edu

Our marketing distribution clients also have full access to the services of BiblioVault.

Sales

The University of Chicago Press also offers a program through which our sales representatives will present your books to the trade in the United States and/or Canada. This service is only available to publishers who use the Chicago Distribution Center for warehousing and business services. If you are a CDC client and are interested in learning more about this program, please contact our Sales Director Laura Waldron at (773) 702-7248 or lwaldron@uchicago.edu.