On August 10, President Obama signed into law H.R. 2765, known as the SPEECH Act. Strongly supported by the publishing community and other First Amendment advocates, the act prohibits federal courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign libel judgments that do not pass First Amendment muster. The legislation also allows American authors and publishers to seek a declaration in court that such a foreign judgment is not enforceable in the U.S., and to do so even if no attempt has been made to enforce the foreign judgment.
Peter Givler
Executive Director, AAUP
Everyone expected that this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair would be slower than usual, but no one knew by how much. As it turned out, it was slow, but not nearly as bad as the 2001 Fair that took place a month after 9/11, when there were significant last-minute cancellations and many empty booths. Attendance this year was down by 4%, according to the Fair management, and my general impression in Hall 8 (headquarters for U.S. and U.K book publishers) was that almost all the usual publishers were there, although perhaps with smaller stands and fewer people. The AAUP members I spoke with all felt the business they were doing was, if not great, certainly good enough. This was surely helped by the fact that the book trade in the U.K and Western Europe has been much less affected by the economic downturn than it has been in the U.S.
A few items of general interest. Each year the Fair designates one country as a Guest of Honor. This year it was China, which caused a certain amount of drama during the Fair because of the Chinese government’s policies restricting freedom of expression. The New York Times has provided a good summary: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/asia/19books.html.
In April, I became Chair of the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) Copyright Committee, and in that capacity attended a number of IPA and other publishing association meetings held during the Fair. One matter of general concern is how the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) so-named Development Agenda will play out. The Development Agenda basically instructs WIPO to give particular attention to the needs of developing economies. Under that directive WIPO is now considering the question of whether it should, by means of a treaty, mandate that its members implement copyright exceptions in their national laws to address the needs of Visually Impaired Persons (VIPs), and to permit cross-border transfer of educational materials.
According to the World Blind Union, 80% of VIPs in countries with developing economies live below the poverty line. No one disputes that low-cost or cost-free access to the written word in appropriate formats—large type, Braille, audiobooks, etc.–is a fundamental requirement for personal and social advancement. The only question is whether this goal can be best achieved by means of a WIPO treaty, which takes 5-10 years to create and up to an equal amount of time to be implemented by WIPO’s member states, or whether there is a faster path to implementation through voluntary cooperation among stakeholders. Representatives of VIPs, publishers organizations, and reproduction rights organizations (RROs) have been making good progress on creating a framework for the necessary infrastructure.
The ethical imperative for an exception permitting cross-border transfer of educational materials is perhaps less clear. On the one hand, there is an undeniable need for low-cost access to educational materials in developing economies. On the other, educational publishing is the bedrock of local publishing in those same developing economies, accounting for as much as 90% of the industry. So what would be the overall effect of an educational exception on the local publishing industry and the development of an indigenous book culture? From a legal point-of-view, bringing something as broad as an educational exception into harmony with the Berne three-step test will present interesting challenges. This complicated issue is scheduled to be formally introduced at WIPO later this fall.
Finally, and on a completely different note, Saskia DeVries and Eelco Verwerda at Amsterdam University Press convened a two-hour meeting of interested parties to discuss the desirability of starting a European Association of university presses. 50 people attended, representing some 30 presses from 12 countries. The challenges are obvious, but there was great enthusiasm for the idea and a wonderful discussion of needs and possible joint projects. An organizing committee was formed, and there will be a follow-up meeting at the London Book Fair next year. This is a very exciting development; AAUP began with just such a series of informal meetings held in the 1920s at the ur-precursor to BEA, and I wish our European friends every success.
Robin Derricourt
Director, University of New South Wales Press, Australia
How does a university press stay solvent, with resources to fulfill its mission, when it receives no funding in cash or kind from its parent university, has no foundation support, and operates in a relatively small and highly competitive market? One simple answer is flexibility and diversity, a willingness and structure that allow adaptability and change, with an entrepreneurial staff willing to embrace the new or different. In challenging times for US and other university presses the UNSW Press example from Australia may be of wider interest.
University of New South Wales Press (operating since 1962) has continued to expand annually and with over 50 staff is now the largest of the diverse university press operations in the southern hemisphere. We operate in a domestic market of 22 million people, but with only 40 universities whose libraries are both centralised and boast of their efficient interlibrary loan system, so they do not provide an adequate market for domestic books. To enable to us to survive and to grow we have developed structures and strategies that differ from most of our US colleagues.
The first is diversity of activities: we are book publishers, we run a retail bookshop, and we also provide marketing, sales representation and distribution services for the books of 35 other publishers. In 1997 we rebranded our sales division as Unireps (renamed NewSouth Books in 2009) and took on a wide range of academic and up-market trade lists from Australian and international publishers. Our Australian sales representatives are our own employees, operating a monthly sales cycle of 12 sales kits (not two seasonal kits) and we do the marketing and publicity for the overseas publishers, while the domestic publishers handle their own marketing. Operating NewSouth means for us we can control our own reach into the trade.
Since 1997 we have also operated our parent university’s campus bookshop, selling all books at discount while paying directly to the university a cash dividend from sales. In its first year the shop was named Australia’s Campus Bookseller of the Year and has won or appeared in this award many years since. The strength is that a textbook (and course materials) shop at the start of each semester turns into an outstanding general and academic bookshop for the rest of the year; and is supplemented by an on-line bookshop with seven-figure revenues, a secondhand bookshop and outreach for event sales.
There are several advantages to a university press in being book publisher, bookseller and book representative/distributor. They lie first in cash flow and the ability to generate a modest annual trading surplus which would not readily be achievable from publishing alone. The economies of scale support overheads in IT, accounting, operations and general management which it would be hard to maintain on the revenues of a mid-sized publishing list alone. For UNSW Press is structured not as a university department but as a not-for-profit company whose directors, including outside experts, are appointed by the university.
Australia has four university presses, in the conventional sense of fully staffed operations creating printed books for sale; some other universities have developed small in-house and e-book operations. Of the four, those of UNSW and Melbourne University operate as companies, those of the universities of Queensland and Western Australia as departments with a modest annual grant; both these include literary fiction in their programs. Melbourne formerly operated their university bookshop and now receives a large annual university grant as well as foundation funding. Queensland formerly ran the university bookshop which they have now subcontracted. Only UNSW Press has its own sales and distribution division.
Willingness to move into new areas of activity has to be matched by willingness to withdraw from them. Until 1974 we were also book printers. In 2009 we closed our 45-year old warehouse and outsourced order fulfilment: a decision brought on by the substantial growth of sales (and stocks!) and the ever increasing capital costs of software development and physical infrastructure; we were able to reduce staff numbers as a result. Australian has no wholesalers, only publisher/distributors and these provide the efficiencies of scale.
But primarily a university press is judged by the quality of its publications. We have maintained diversity in our publishing: our books win many awards, though sales revenues and public praise are not always neatly aligned. Flexibility in our list development is achieved by the energies of our commissioning but also by our structure. Publishing decisions on individual books do not involve the university or the board members; they are taken at an internal meeting of editorial, marketing, sales, production and financial staff; each contract proposal has to meet criteria of excellence, saleability and financial profile. The Press list emerged, unusually, from a tertiary textbook program but in the face of stiff competition from the multinational publishers this has been in retreat, as has a small program of professional books. The current model for quality scholarly books is to underwrite their publication from internal resources on condition of matching funding from the institution hosting the research. There are challenges here since Australia’s centralised government research funding body disallows used of grants to help publish results.
Our larger emphasis has been on important “books of ideas” for a wider audience, often but by no means always authors based in a university, aiming at a market beyond the specialist; this award winning list is one which has all the challenges of the “crossover” titles. Experiments in more ambitious trade non-fiction have had their challenges too. The most successful titles include ones which sell a substantial coedition to a US or other international copublisher. We have maintained our own books for a program of trade reference publishing, but focusing on proven strengths. And a final program is creating books which meet our criteria for content but sell back to the sponsor: institutional histories, for example. Occasionally like any publisher we have acquired lists by purchase or collaborative arrangements, but we have also been willing to sell a title or a list for strategic reasons.
All this produces a program of 60-70 books a year, spreading the publishing risks across a range of genres. And spreading risk in ever changing markets is probably a major benefit of the diversity in our operations and approach. As a university press, our primary goals lie in fulfilling our mission and in the content of what we publish, rather than in financial surplus, but our primary duty is to survive on the resources we can create so that we can continue to publish. With no external subsidy, a flexible approach to what we do and how we do it has enabled us to continue and grow.
For further information on scholarly publishing in Australia, see Robin Derricourt’s articles:
“Scholarly Book Publishing in Australia: The Impact of the Last Decade”
Journal of Scholarly Publishing 33 (4), 2002
“For a few dollars more: a future for scholarly books in Australia?”
Learned Publishing 21 (1), 2008
“Book publishing and the university sector in Australia”
in Making books: contemporary Australian publishing (ed. Carter & Galligan), UQP, 2007
In late September, Harvard University Press, the MIT Press, and Yale University Press, shipped over 5,700 books to Iraqi libraries from TriLateral, their combined warehouse operation. The presses have partnered with the Sabre Foundation (Humanitarian Aid for the Mind), as part of its Book Donation Program, which has long been a source of educational materials for countries in need. The rebuilding of library collections will help restore the Iraqi higher education system, which has been devastated by military conflict.
The donations will be focused on four libraries: the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), and the libraries of Baghdad University, Baghdad Technical University, and Mustansiriya University (Baghdad). The collections were chosen by Iraqi librarians from lists provided by the presses and include titles in a wide range of disciplines.
The 2008 London Book Fair (LBF) was another success for the AAUP Pavilion. The Pavilion is a space in which AAUP members can reserve discounted space and benefit from the proximity of other university presses. Reed Exhibitions, the organizers of the LBF, are working to make the London fair a must-go event for the international rights market. In both 2007 and 2008, the AAUP Pavilion seemed at times like a miniature rights center, with meetings at every table (and quite a few spilling over to the cafés and seating areas nearby.) Eleven member presses took advantage of the discounted Pavilion rates this April. Reed sets the rates and handles reservations and planning, while AAUP provides on-site assistance for exhibiting presses. In addition to the AAUP Pavilion, the London Book Fair became a friend of the AAUP Annual Meeting in 20008, contributing support for the association’s programs and events there. In 2009, the AAUP Pavilion will once again be offered as an option for member presses who wish to attend the London Book Fair, April 20-22. http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/
by Ana Maria Cabanellas
President, International Publishers Association
The following is adapted from Ms. Cabanellas’ address to the IPA in Frankfurt, October 6, 2006.
The International Publishers Association is a federation of national publishers associations, with some 76 members in 65 countries. Founded in 1896, it represents the interest of the publishing industry at international level, namely before United Nations organizations and wherever the interests of the publishing community are at stake.
Our two most important issues are copyright and the promotion and protection of freedom of expression. We support the interests of publishing as an economic sector and a cultural institution, as well as its role in literacy promotion. IPA is also involved in the development of international publishing standards and metadata projects, the most famous being the International ISBN Agency.
I would like to answer one question many have asked about the IPA’s concerns: why are publishers taking an initiative in Internet issues? Aren’t they too insignificant? Shouldn’t we wait and see how the music and film industry are developing online? Shouldn’t we just wait until iTunes starts selling books on a large scale?
To answer, let me ask you: how big do you think book publishing is compared to the other creative industries? Who is bigger, in commercial terms: the music, the film, the computer games industry, or book publishing? The answer may surprise you: Global book sales at publisher prices are about 69 billion Euros or US$88 billion.
This is more than four times what the music industry sells in recordings, both online and offline. It is also more than four times the size of the global sales of the computer games industry. It is twice the size of the global sales and rentals of film DVDs and video tapes.1 In fact, book publishing sales are slightly bigger than all of them combined.
The above figures do not include newspaper publishing and they do not include large parts of the magazine industry. Many of you will say: well, ok, so you are big, but publishing is surely not very highly developed on the Internet!
Few will say this about newspaper publishers whose Web sites are among the most popular information sites. But unknown to many, large parts of traditional publishing have been using the Internet from the outset. In particular, the scientific, technical, and medical publishers are technologically very advanced.
The reason why we are underestimated in the electronic environment is because we are not visible. We are not visible because our business models largely rely on payment for access. We must protect our content. The most important reason for our invisibility is that much of our content cannot be easily found using search engines.
This is something we would like to change, but cautiously, in a marketplace that has clearly established rules and where all operate under the same terms and conditions.
I would like to raise a few other issues that are important to publishers: Firstly, piracy remains a chief concern for publishers in the developing world. Secondly, state publishing is putting publishers under pressure. How can we compete against governments who think it is more efficient if they write, print, and distribute books themselves?
The final issue I want to raise is the crisis of the book in large parts of the developing world. Africa, Latin America, and the Arab region account for less than 5% of the world’s publishing output. Areas with great cultural richness, ethnic diversity, and important history are nearly white spaces in the publishing environment. This is a dangerous development. We are witnessing the collapse not only of the book industry but of the culture of reading, and the culture of books.
Many will say, well maybe books and reading are a historical medium and with the advent of radio, television, and the Internet, we no longer need a book culture. This is a very dangerous idea. Firstly the Internet remains based on literacy. Literacy precedes computer literacy. The book is, however, also a tool that teaches us abstract thinking, logic and a systematic discourse. It fosters our ability to get to the bottom of an issue. Literacy, in the sense of an active book culture, is deeply connected with the ability of a society to maintain a peaceful pluralistic internal and external dialogue.
For the book is at the heart of deep thought, the basis for substantial discourse across civilizations, across generations, even across historical ages. It is no wonder that India, the worlds largest democracy, is a society steeped in books. This is the kind of book policy all nations must aspire to.
No society can leapfrog into the information society without supporting a national book industry. The book is an essential tool.
Today the Internet brings the publishing world closer together. The books on offer at the Frankfurt Book Fair are all available every day, almost everywhere to almost everyone. There are also new competitors, namely the millions of people who write and upload information on the Internet. How can publishers react?
To be clear: I am not advocating protectionism. Quite the opposite—the Frankfurt Book Fair is proof how firmly international cultural exchange is woven into the very fabric of publishing. We love the free circulation of books and the free exchange of ideas and rights. But all need a fair opportunity. We, the small publishers can compete, provided there is a level playing field.
Smaller publishers must play to their strengths, which are flexibility, innovation, and our ability to take risks. We must be more creative and more reader-oriented. We must be quick, and know our markets well. And above all we must have quality and reliable content.
Small local publishers have a chance, but only if there is this level playing field. The same applies to competing with new services on the Internet. Personally, I am not afraid of the many excellent Web sites which provide content free of charge. They are simply other competitors. I can compete with them provided that we all play by the same rules.
On the Internet our market is quite different. We are now faced with new partners, such as the Internet booksellers, the online libraries, and the search engines. These relationships need to develop. Industries have their own cultures and we need to understand and adapt to the cultures of our new partners. Understanding means that both sides must try to step into each other’s shoes. Such adaptation needs to go both ways.
1 Music: According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry global digital and physical sales of recorded music totaled US$ 21 billion in record companies’ trade revenues (http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/library/worldsales2005-pr.pdf).
Film: Total sales and rentals of DVDs andvideo in the industrialized countries are around $45 billion (http://www.ivf-video.org/EuropeanOverview2004.pdf).
Games: The global market for consumer software (games) is $21 billion (http://www.elspa.com/docs/Fact_Card_01.pdf)
by Peter Givler
Executive Director, AAUP
In addition to being the top international venue for the buying and selling of rights, the Frankfurt Book Fair is also the locus for meetings of several international publishing organizations with which AAUP has been strengthening its ties.
The International Publishers Association is an association of 76 national, regional, and specialist publishing associations. It was founded in 1886 to promote compliance with the Berne Convention, and while copyright is still a major concern, so are the freedom to publish, standards, and literacy.
According to IPA by-laws, only one publishing association from each nation can be a voting member of IPA; for the U.S. that membership is already held by AAP. However, at the IPA Executive Committee meeting in Frankfurt, Bob Faherty, Director of the Brookings Institution Press and past University Press representative to the Board of AAP, was approved as the voting member for the U.S. on the Executive Committee.
For the last several years I have also been sitting in on the meetings of the IPA Copyright and Freedom to Publish committees; this year I also sat in on the meeting of the IPA Literacy and Book Policy Committee.
We are including in this issue of the Exchange an address given by the President of IPA, Ana Maria Cabanellas, to open a forum titled “Publishers and Search Engines: Facing the Challenge.”
The purpose of the forum was to introduce a joint project of IPA and the World Association of Newspapers, the development of a standard for machine-readable rights metadata that can be attached to copyrighted material on the Web. The standard, built on ONIX, is known as Automated Content Access Protocol. One way to think of ACAP is as the next generation of robots.txt: a way of telling spiders not just whether they can crawl/not crawl, but if they do, what the conditions of use are.
The International Federation of Scholarly Publishers (IFSP) is a new organization, of which AAUP is a founding member, whose aim “is to ensure that not-for-profit scholarly publishing is fostered and supported in all countries of the world, that the standards of not-for-profit scholarly publishing are maintained and enhanced, and that copyright and freedom to publish are strongly defended.” The principal ways of working toward those goals are by enhancing communication between the members of IFSP, and by working with and through IPA. IFSP is an affiliate member of IPA and has permanent observer status on the Executive Committee of IPA.
Currently, in addition to AAUP the other members are the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Canadian University Presses, the International Museum Publishers Association, and the International Development Research Council of Canada. Publishing associations in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin American have also been targeted for recruitment.
IFSP had its second annual meeting in Frankfurt, at which I was selected as President, succeeding Sally Morris of ALPSP. Since there were several potential new members at the meeting, the bulk of the discussion was devoted to issues relating to membership.
Finally, I should note that AAUP did not take a booth at Frankfurt this year because of an overfull schedule. It would certainly be preferable for the Association to be more visible at the Fair, and in the coming year we will be evaluating the additional cost of taking and staffing a stand in relation to other AAUP priorities.