Velocity of Content

At SSP, Randy Townsend has led efforts to prioritize mental health awareness and support within the scholarly communications ecosystem.

Amazon's dominance in the e-book market, according to litigation, has enabled the e-retailer to "coerce" publishers into anticompetitive deals.

The Ministry of Culture in Spain recently announced an $8.5 million grant program to support development of publishing’s burgeoning audio sector.

That government investment is expected to heat up further an already red-hot market category that includes audiobooks and podcasts.

According to the latest report from dosdoce.com on audio publishing in Spanish-language markets, production and consumption is soaring.

In 2023, the audio industry in Spanish-language markets – Spain, South America, and the US Hispanic market – nearly doubled in size. Once-scarce audio content in Spanish has also snowballed. And like other areas of publishing, artificial intelligence is set to transform the field.

Spain remains the main place of origin for these programs and services in the Spanish-language audio industry, yet South America and the US Hispanic market do have growing roles. Even in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, Spanish-language audio shows strength.

“Spanish is a global language. After English and Chinese, it’s the most-spoken language worldwide,” explains Javier Celaya, founder of dosdoce.com. “So there’s no surprise that publishing companies as well as the streaming services are looking into Spanish to grow their services and their reach.

In 2023, Celaya tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally, “US publishers in the United produced more than 600 Spanish-language audiobook titles in the US only. So there is a lot of competition for the Spanish market across the different parts of the world.”

Independent publisher Lee & Low has released a survey on diversity in publishing employment.

Founded in 1969 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Small Press Distribution is the nation’s only exclusively literary nonprofit book distributor serving small, independent literary publishers.

In 2023, SPD presses and their authors were honored with the PEN Award for poetry in translation and the National Jewish Book Award in poetry. In 2022, John Keene’s Punks, from indie poetry publisher The Song Cave, won the 2022 National Book Award in poetry.

Small Press Distribution connects underrepresented literary communities to the marketplace of the commons, according to SPD executive director Kent Watson.

“We’re here to help the marketplace equalize and allow everyone to have a voice in the community,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

The SPD business model allows it to take risks on books by new or marginalized writers, Watson explains, enabling work to develop an audience and to gain recognition.

“What we do is unlike any other distributor. We don’t have our presses come into the system by having to prove that they have such and such sales or such and such titles. A lot of large distributors require a certain outlay of not only the titles that they have, but the amount of money that they generate each year to even get into distribution, which seems kind of crazy. You have to get distribution to get distribution. It seems a little nuts.

“SPD operates as a nonprofit 501(c)(3), so we are mission-based. We do a lot of literary fiction, literary nonfiction. Most of our books are based around poetry. We do some art criticism, too. With our publishers and their authors, 60% of our bestselling titles come from people of color. 35% of our bestselling titles come from LGBTQ+ authors. And 75% of our bestselling titles come from women-identified authors.”

To jump start the rollout of hundreds of POD titles, lower costs, and providing global reach, SPD is embarking on a new GoFundMe round of fundraising from both individuals and institutions. As a nonprofit, SPD has always depended on philanthropy and small donors to help fulfill its mission.

US book publishers and readers looking for more diversion, less politics, in 2024.

Impact factor is a global standard for measuring the influence and importance of scholarly journals. Published by Clarivate, this calculation is critical for authors when considering where to publish research as well as for librarians when deciding which publications to hold in collections. For nearly half a century, the Journal Citation Reports, or JCR, have been “must reading” in universities around the world.

The latest revisions to the JCR for 2024 respond to important community requests, according to Dr. Nandita Quaderi, a senior vice president and the editor in chief for Web of Science at Clarivate. Dr. Quaderi has overall responsibility for editorial strategy, selection of Web of Science content, and inclusion in Journal Citation Reports.

“We are making two changes to JIF category rankings in this year’s JCR. Both are driven by what we see in the data and changes in the publishing landscape, and the requests we get from our users and the research community at large,” she explains.

Previously, the JCR provided separate rankings for the nine subject areas that are indexed in multiple editions. Psychiatry, for example, is indexed both in SCIE, the science index, and in SSCI, the social science index, and the JCR provided separate psychiatry rankings for these two indices.

“What we’re changing this year is that we’ll no longer have these separate category rankings, and instead, we’ll have a single ranking for each of our 230-odd science and social science categories,” Dr. Quaderi tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

A second change introduced for 2024 is the addition of ESCI journals to category rankings. The Emerging Sources Citation Index brings to light new research in emerging scientific fields as well as new journal content of regional importance.

“If you take psychiatry as an example again, what we will do is display a single psychiatry ranking that includes journals from the science index, the social science index, and from ESCI. Moving to this single category ranking will provide a much simpler and a much more complete category view for our customers,” she says.

At PubWest 2024 in Phoenix, the impact of generative AI on publishing dominated the conference agenda.

A conference keynote by Ana Tomboulian and Vincent Serpico of Decision Tree AI, an Arizona-based consulting company, offered their take on how “genAI” services like ChatGPT can assist publishers to create jacket and marketing copy as well as how authors or publishers might use AI tools to conceive the continuation of a popular book series.

“The show's closing session provided a series of short reflections on the impact of A.I. on publishing, which ranged from fearful, to hopeful, to resigned,” reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly executive editor.

The principal fear running through the conference was that AI would replace publishers and writer. Rhoni Hirst, president of Books of Discovery, a publisher of physical therapy books in Boulder, Colo., described how pirates had posted fake copies of her company’s bestselling title Trail Guide to the Body to Amazon, noting the difficulties of having it removed or otherwise rectifying the situation.

Thad McIlroy, a PW contributing editor and PubWest panelist, asserted his position that there was less need for concern than there was for publishers to embrace AI’s potential.

When Russian armed forces opened a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the ordinary lives of millions from Kyiv to Kharkiv were upended. Two years later, Ukrainians have earned the world’s admiration, not only for their courage on the battlefield, but also for their determination to maintain a functioning civil society.

The Russian invasion targeted Ukrainian culture as much as the country’s infrastructure. Chytomo, an online publishing news platform, has diligently documented the resistance by the country’s publishers and poets, as well as booksellers and novelists, to that attack.

Iryna Baturevych, Chytomo co-founder, recently described for CCC’s Chris Kenneally the Ukrainian book community’s mood today.

“The mood is to keep on fighting because we have no other opportunity. It’s very hard to understand that new bookstores are opening. New festivals are appearing in Kyiv and in other cities all over Ukraine. This is showing how much Ukrainian people want to have normal life back,” Baturevych said.

“We know that with the help of Ukrainian literature, with Ukrainian culture, we are not only normalizing our life. We’re also trying to make our society, our country, stronger. This war is something that is trying to erase our history and to erase our culture, and we are showing that we are an independent European nation,” she continued.

“This is something that’s bringing people together, but it’s also driving the industry forward. This is very important.”

Manhattan-based independent publisher Soho Press will launch a new horror genre imprint, Hell’s Hundred, reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly executive editor.

“The imprint takes is name from the New York City neighborhood of SoHo, where the press was founded,” he explains. “The now chic neighborhood had a slightly less catchy name in the 19th Century, ‘hell’s hundred acres,’ so-called for its grim industrial facades and deadly factory fires.

The first two books from Hell’s Hundred will debut this summer, Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“Soho publisher Bronwen Hruska said that the imprint wasn’t planned so much as the result of a natural confluence of a few factors: the increased cultural fixation with horror over the past few years; a bump in horror and horror-adjacent submissions at the press; and the passion of two young editors. Nick Whitney and Taz Urnov,” says Albanese.