Velocity of Content

In a publishing environment buffeted by digital disruption and calls for open access, university presses in 2024 must manage to remain relevant and sustainable even as their audiences grow.

At the biennial Public Library Association (PLA) conference in Columbus, Ohio., last week, PLA officials were expecting about 6500 attendees. In the end, close to 7600 individuals joined the program, reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly executive editor.

“We are talking about yet another conference that has greatly exceeded expectations after the pandemic—remember the London Book Fair this year was also very strong event,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“Bear in mind, this show in Columbus wasn’t without its challenges,” Albanese notes.

“The opening reception at the Columbus public library was canceled at the last minute for a tornado warning. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates canceled the night before his talk, and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who was also set to speak at a program, did not make it either.”

A top seller for Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, the Miami-based Spanish-language division of the US Big Five publisher, is a book for the entire family filled with gripping tales of good battling evil.

La Biblia, the Bible in Spanish, is perennially popular and available in dozens of editions from PRHGE.

Publishers Weekly international editor Ed Nawotka tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally that sales of Spanish-language religion titles have especially climbed towards the heavens in recent years.

“You have an audience that is primarily Catholic or Christian. In Latin America, evangelicals are the fastest-growing sect,” he explains. “You’re also seeing a lot of economic stress in immigrant communities. And that lends itself towards people seeking more depth in their spiritual practice.”

Across all trade publishing categories, including children’s books, there is growing demand in the US market for Spanish-language books, says Nawotka, who follows the state of Spanish-language publishing in the US.

Founded in 1969, Small Press Distribution was the nation’s only exclusively literary nonprofit book distributor serving small independent literary publishers.

Last week, 400 publishers were shocked to learn that SPD had abruptly closed.

“SPD was the only book distributor that focused on literary publishers, and they had just started wrapping up the first phase of a program they thought would keep themselves viable going into the 21st century,” reports Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly editor-at-large.

According to Milliot, the abrupt closure of Small Press Distribution has left many SPD clients feeling stranded.

“They are in the process of trying to find answers,” Milliot tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “They’re also trying to find out how they can collect the outstanding payments they’re owed. It’s uncertain how that’s going to play out. The only thing they do know is that the Superior Court in California is going to handle a liquidation process.

“It’s going to hurt the publishers themselves. It’s also going to hurt the authors quite a bit.”

In surveys conducted in 2014 and 2020, hundreds of early-career staff working in scholarly publishing disclosed surprising details about their career ambitions and the barriers they face to realize them.

European Science Editing, a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal of the European Association of Science Editors, published a report on those surveys in May 2022. In early 2024, that article received “Best Original Research and Review” honors from the journal’s editorial board.

A third survey, just concluded, may reveal whether efforts to provide career support, especially mentoring programs, are making a difference.

“In the surveys, we were looking at people who were based in science, technical, and medical fields, as well as humanities and social sciences. The respondents work mostly within editorial departments, on books and journals. They were working in editorial, production, marketing,” said Rachel Moriarty, Publisher, Oxford University Press.

Along with Erin Foley, Director, Rightsholder Relations, CCC, Moriarty was a co-author of the ESE article.

“They told us, ‘I know lots about mathematics. I know lots about social sciences. But I don’t know about open access. I don’t know about different publishing models.’ That was a lot of the information we got back in terms of what skills were they looking for that we could support,” Moriarty told CCC’s Christopher Kenneally.

The surveys of early-career professionals necessarily capture a moment in the past. Nevertheless, according to CCC’s Foley, it is possible to look into the future and discern new business roles beginning to emerge, based on the general direction of responses.

“I think we will see a need to be more familiar with AI and with AI tooling, depending on your job function especially,” she said. “Candidates will need to be more aware of what’s happening in the AI space. Whether it seems like it touches publishing or not, AI will eventually touch publishing.”

In 2024, Simon and Schuster marks its centennial year. Publishers Weekly notes the milestone with a special report.

“As the company celebrates its 100th anniversary, CEO Jonathan Karp said the DNA of the company is very much the same as ever,” reports Andrew Albanese, PW executive editor. “S&S, Karp says, remains an independent-minded publisher that has always taken a chance on authors and books.”

One of the Big 5, the publisher was founded in 1924 by Richard Simon and Max Schuster. S&S’s first full list featured a biography of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who was a hero of Schuster’s. A year later, S&S published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and in following years, books by Ernest Hemingway, Dale Carnegie, and Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, among many others.

“Leon Shimkin—the silent, third S, one might say – joined S&S in its first year as business manager. He was just 17 at the time, but he quickly became involved with virtually all the publisher’s major business decisions,” Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Shimkin worked with Robert Fair de Graff to launch America’s first paperback publisher, Pocket Books, in 1939.

Shimkin eventually became sole owner of S&S. He sold the company to Gulf+Western in 1975, kicking off the corporate era of publishing, Albanese noted.

Book Industry Study Group membership includes publishers and libraries as well as manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. Together, they form the links in the industry’s supply chain – the network of organizations and individuals responsible for creation, production, and distribution of a product.

The next time you sit down to read a book, remember to thank all of them.

Brian O’Leary, BISG executive director, explains why an initiative to forge a shared vision for the future of supply chain communication in publishing is needed.

The supply chain for publishing, especially in the digital age, isn’t static, but is in constant motion and evolution, O’Leary tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. He was candid about how the state of supply chain communication in publishing today.

“Well, it’s broken. It was built for the 1970s and 1980s. It was good then at supporting one-way communication and there were fewer business models,” O’Leary admits.

“What’s happened particularly with the advent of digital content and digital business models, most notably with the launch of the Kindle in 2007, is that the number of different business models has exploded. You can still buy a book, but you can also buy an ebook, which is really more of a license.

Libraries buy books today on a variety of different terms that didn’t even exist 30 or 40 years ago.

“We’re trying to find ways to support the more complex business models that are now used to sell and license books, and we’re also trying to find ways to take costs out of the system.”

In a report released earlier this month, the American Library Association (ALA) counted 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in schools and public libraries. The number of titles surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, according to ALA.

While many books are removed from shelves after a lengthy and public review process, accounts are mounting where the titles were surreptitiously withdrawn from collections, reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly executive editor.

On March 11, Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally, Gothamist reported that hundreds of new books featuring characters of color and LGBTQ themes were found among trash at Staten Island’s PS 55.

Some of the books, pictured in the report, were marked by sticky notes that indicated the titles were “not approved,” along with reasons such as “boy questions gender,” “teenage girls having a crush on another girl in class,” and “witchcraft.”

“A coalition of publishers whose books were discarded have teamed with the newly formed group Authors Against Book Bans to pen a letter to New York City’s Department of Education about the book removal,” Albanese says, call the alleged action “unlawful censorship [that] violates authors’ and students’ First Amendment rights.”

No prizes were given for guessing the hot topic for publishers attending the London Book Fair this week.

AI.

AI – artificial intelligence – will transform the global economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. And as they have done since the digital age dawned, scholarly and academic publishers are already embracing this latest technology.

While they explore how AI can improve their business practices for the benefit of researchers and information professionals, many publishers are also proactively asserting their rights when generative AI solutions that create text, images, and other media use copyrighted material to develop and train large language models.

Publishers recognize that gen AI depends on high-quality content for success, and they contend the tech industry must seek permission for its use.

Opening the show on Tuesday, CCC organized a panel discussion, “Publishing, Copyright & AI: Taking Action” that included representatives of leading UK scholarly publishers.

Sarah Fricker, Group Head of Legal for IOP Publishing – the Institute of Physics and Claire Harper, Head of Global Rights and Licensing at Sage shared with CCC’s Chris Kenneally what they are doing when it comes to facilitating permission for copyrighted works to train AI models.

“This is work that’s been created, that’s original, that people have spent a lot of time putting together and publishing, and it only to me seems fair and reasonable that if tech companies want to use [published content] to improve their tools that they get the permissions they need from the copyright owners to do that,” Fricker said.

“And there are benefits on both sides,” she continued. “The big tech companies can be sure they’ve got the right version of the article, which is so important. But equally, there’s value placed on that work, and the copyright owner is getting recompense for that value. I think that is a very important balance.

Harper also cited licensed content as trustworthy. “We want to make sure that the content going in [to train Large Language Models] is reliable. Are we going to trust what an AI tool is telling us if it’s just pulling from a random source on the internet? The internet is full of fake news. We know that. So if we can license the content in, we can be a bit more assured that the content coming out is going to be more reliable and accurate.

“As publishers, we’re trying hard to make sure that we get streamlined processes, we get ways of licensing to make this easy as possible, because that’s in our interest as well,” Harper told a standing room only audience at the London Book Fair.

“We want licensed content to go into it. We want to be remunerated for that content. So we want to make it as easy as possible. I think having a collective license would be great. When photocopying came about, that was very disruptive to the industry. But we found a way to license that. So I feel like we could do that in this case as well.”

London Book Fair welcomed thousands to Olympia Hall this week.