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Code of Ethics

SG: What's the most important challenge facing the publishing industry? The AAP addresses so many issues - it's hard to prioritize them.

PS: Well, I think our Board has prioritized very well. Obviously, our Google suit is taking a tremendous amount of resources and time and energy. And there are multiple digital issues around that, as we move into this new world of search engines and digitization and so forth. It obviously hit the movie industry and the recording industry first, but it's caught up, and here we are.

I think, too, that the Patriot Act has been a real concern for everyone in the book industry, and we've been very involved in lobbying on freedom to read and freedom to express yourself. Our Board's been very active on that, I'm proud to say.

There are multiple other issues… We have a very aggressive group working on trying to get to get more recycled paper for the industry. We have a very aggressive group working on more diversity for the industry. Obviously, our School Division, our Higher Ed Division, and our Professional and Scholarly division all have different issues concerning education - education funding and textbooks and those areas. So, we're not short of issues.

We also have all of the issues around piracy overseas. We continue to find that our books are just ripped off everywhere. In China, for example, we have discovered that, at every university we've gone into, the universities are using US textbooks. They just take them and copy them. Sometimes they even put a hard cover and their own university seal on them! Lovely! It's just so brazen! We've seen a lot of digital piracy, too.

SG: Is the piracy issue in China tied in with other trade issues?

PC: Well, it's not only China. Obviously, India and China are the huge markets we look at, but we've been very involved through our anti-piracy group in Thailand, in Malaysia, in Korea. As you know, we ran one of the largest raids ever in South Korea, and so forth… So, in the whole area we see lots of piracy. The issue is that higher ed textbooks that are produced in America are the platinum standard for the world. Everybody wants them. They want the most up-to-date, the most current, and so they just copy them. That's true all over Latin America, too. We've had trouble in every major country.

And then, of course, there are the trade books, the Harry Potter books and the Clinton books. I remember Secretary Powell telling me he had something like 13 books on his shelf that were all pirated that people brought to him from different countries, thinking that it was such an honor for him to have a copy of these books - [laughing] only none of them were legal!

SG: You mentioned the digital problems. Have legacy publishers been slow to respond to that?

PS: No, in fact I think they've been ahead of the public. If you remember, about ten years ago, it seems like every week in New York there were at least three conferences on ebooks. We got all exercised and created the digital object identifier. And we had a huge standards thing that went on with publishers and outside folks trying to get together standards for digital and ebooks. We built it and no one came.

Now, the professional and scholarly publishers did use the digital object identifier, and they are publishing most journals in digital and e-form. But the rest of the publishers just found there wasn't any market for it. They got ready, but the market didn't come. People didn't like the devices, or they didn't want to buy the expensive device. It didn't take off.

SG: It's much to our credit that we were ahead of the game. In the library community, it's often said that we were too late to respond to the demands of the internet. But this is not the same sort of problem.

PS: No, I don't think so. Anyone who's been around the industry knows that publishing houses moved to ebooks and digitization big time. And it didn't take hold. In fact, there were some experiments where they gave university students ebooks and most of them went out and bought the book, too. It wasn't an age thing either. It was just that people somehow felt more secure with the books.

So, publishers have been doing it and they're continuing to do it because they keep thinking there is going to be a market.

SG: You said last year that there was virtually no demand for online textbooks. Is that still the case?

PS: It still seems to be. We really thought that would be huge, because students would like the books to be cheaper, and it's easier to update books online, obviously. Publishers have created all sorts of online ebooks, but they haven't caught on. They've been built and nobody came.

SG: That's strange because the price of textbooks has become such an issue.

PS: Well, it has, although it's a little phony in that when you look at what they say about the price of textbooks, they don't take the Bowker lists and look at the full range. Every publisher is presenting books in multiple forms - the ebook form, the black-and-white form, the fancy hardcover form, all sorts of different things. What they're trying to do is pick the top of the line and screen. It's like taking if you only looked at Land Rovers, or if you only looked at Hummers, you' d say "The price of cars is outrageous!" You've got to look at the whole range.

But - you're right. You'd think the hard-core environmentalists or the young people would like digitized books. They're the most tech-savvy. And you'd think it would help with costs, which it certainly does. But - again - it has not caught on.

SG: I presume it's just a matter of time, then.

PS: I don't know. People complain about the weight of the books and how heavy they are in their backpacks and all. So you say "Great - here's the solution." And then everybody says "No - not that bullshit [laughing] We're upset about all these problems, but we don't like that solution."

SG: Last year, total book sales increased by nearly ten percent. Inflation was four percent, so even considering inflation, it still sounds good. Should we be very encouraged by the increase in sales last year?

PS: Yes, although we would like more. I'll tell you what drives me crazy. About every two weeks, you see some new study - we've never done any of them, they're from all over the world - that says that the best indicator of children's success in school is having books in the home. It's such an easy fix - getting books in the home. And yet you read the statistics about how many children never see a book before they start school, don't have any books in the house, have no books around them anywhere. And it makes me flaming crazy, because this is just a very, very easy thing to do. People who enjoy books are enjoying them more because it's almost the last place left where you can get in depth on any issue. On TV, seven seconds is about as long as you get to say anything, and the newspapers have less and less in-depth journalism and much more slice-and-dice material. And they all look the same.

So if people really are interested in ideas and in what's going on, books like The Earth is Flat just soar out the door. And that's very good - but we still have a large segment of the population that don't seem to understand the value of books in their home, in their culture, and for the success of their children. We've got our Get Caught Reading Program, we work with all sorts of literacy groups… we've worked with the National Endowment for the Arts, and we're very excited about The Big Read, with all these cities rolling out. But somehow, I don't know how we dent it.

SG: And digital literature isn't meeting that need.

PS: No, that's not going to go to them. That's just going transfer to people who already have books. Doing this digitally is going to increase the number of children that have books around, because we're talking about families that don't have access to a computer. It might be a lot easier to get just plain books to them.

SG: Because I'm a librarian, I'm interested in the digitization of libraries. In an article on technology The Washington Times mentioned mentioned our lawsuit against Google and then wrote "Imagine if that ancient library in Alexandria could have recorded books on computers instead of parchment. We might still be reading the ancient masterpieces destroyed by fire." Could your respond to that?

PS: Oh, that's right! And we've always agreed to allow people to archive. Archiving is not the issue. Google is not a library archive - it's a huge commercial concern that's interested in what you're looking for because they sell that information to advertisers for a huge chunk of money. Archiving is an entirely different issue. Our issue with Google is that we're not talking The Library of Congress or a non-profit. We're talking about a for-profit company whose profits have grown more than oil companies', and the reason is that they have a hell of a business plan. You take what other people produce, you don't pay them anything for it, you digitize it, and you use it and you sell advertising around it. And they claim that's fair use [laughing]! I think that's why librarians haven't jumped on their case. Most librarians are well aware that that's not fair use. That's a commercial use.

So, while they keep talking about how they do no evil and the Library of Alexandria - beware of billionaires in T-shirts!

SG: When do we expect the suit to be resolved?

PS: You now the courts…long and slow. And they're gonna drag this out. They're going to see if they can't bleed us white. Meanwhile, they're going full speed ahead about copying.

SG: Finally, Pat… In April, BusinessWeek wrote about The Caravan Project. It calls for books to be delivered simultaneously in five formats.

PS: That's interesting, and I think that's what most publishers plan to do eventually with this digitization… having it in accessibility format for people who are visually impaired… audio… everything… That's part of why most of the legacy publishers are very excited about digitization. More and more you're seeing them releasing both hard and paperback books at the same time. And the audio books have been coming out at the same time, so that are beginning to do that.

SG: It sounds then that we can be optimistic about the future of paper books and assimilating digital technologies into the publishing industry.

PS: I think so. I think the industry has strongly embraced digitization, and moving forward, contrary to how people portray it. I think that's the optimistic part.

The depressing part is how you reach the tremendous number of people that aren't reading. You know, it's such a Renaissance of writing - of wonderful authors. There's all sorts of stuff going on out there. At the same time, you have more newspapers not doing reviews, people cutting back on reviews, fewer local TV shows authors can get on and talk about their books. The same with local radio shows - you end up with a couple of these massive radio stations that rule the world. And TV all gets fed the same stuff. It's getting harder and harder for people to learn about this. And then there are some people who just aren't in the game at all.

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