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From Inbox to In-Person: The Power of Community at AUPresses 2026

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By Dan Verdick and Alli DeMan

woman and man flanking a roll up banner for the 2026 Association of University Presses Conference The Association of University Presses annual conference in Seattle was a productive event, with nearly 500 staffers from academic and university presses attending the meeting. The three days of sessions were focused on addressing the many challenges facing publishing these days, some perennial along with others that are particular to the times we currently find ourselves in.

Things kicked off with a festive scene at the hotel where the conference took place. The Egyptian World Cup team was in town to battle Belgium and were staying there, as were dozens or perhaps hundreds of their fans who had traveled to the US. The fans were proudly sporting their team’s colors and celebrated in the lobby and street outside as the bus was loaded to start the journey to the stadium, and they continued the party after the game and through the week.

AUPresses 2026 and the Power of Community

AUPresses 2026 was a reminder that publishing, like the World Cup, is fundamentally a community effort and a team game. Between the opening reception, networking sessions, plenary talks, exhibit hall conversations, and breakout sessions, the conference created space for the kind of information exchange that helps publishers manage costs, create strategies, and come up with ways to keep their programs surviving and thriving. The tone of the first in-person AUP meeting to be held on the West Coast since 2018 was a bit less festive than the World Cup, though, as this Publishers Weekly recap of the meeting shares the details of the serious issues university presses are facing, including enrollment cliffs, hiring freezes, political attacks, university relations, funding questions, and more.

The conference agenda also made it clear that university presses are navigating in a fast-moving and swiftly changing landscape, with crises ranging from the challenges that have always faced publishers to newer ones from operating in a politically charged environment where vital funding can be quickly rescinded with little warning. Sessions on accessibility in production, WCAG AA compliance, remote work and inclusive recruitment, AI in publishing, rights and permissions, and resilient publishing all pointed to the same conclusion: sustainable publishing now depends on flexibility, collaboration, and the ability to adapt thoughtfully.

Westchester’s Role in Supporting University Presses

That flexibility and collaboration was a major thread running through the conversations we had with both longtime customers and new friends who visited the Westchester Publishing Services booth. Along with our longstanding service portfolio for university presses, we’ve added solutions to meet the changing needs of our customers, from remediating ePubs in large batches to meet budget grant deadlines to editorial services provided by our highly experienced UK staff, and collaborating with the Duke University Press Scholarly Publishing Collective and Scholastica on our new Allied Journal Publishing offerings, designed for the specific requirements of independent journal publishers across several areas, including peer review, distribution, hosting, and subscription management.

According to AUP’s website, the seeds of the Association were planted in the 1920’s. This June, a little over a century later, Alli was ecstatic to attend the conference for the first time. Having joined the publishing industry in September 2025, she finds enjoyment in sharing her fresh perspectives on experiences and events that colleagues have been familiar with since before she was born – and AUPresses was no exception.

After spending several months cultivating relationships online, collaborating on workflows, and solving problems via email or video calls, getting to meet university press clients in-person was a highlight that underscores why we do what we do. AUPresses’ commitment to amplifying the collective voice of the university presses in attendance was very inspiring. Listening to the common threads and shared challenges running through every conversation confirmed a comforting reality: we are all in this together, working as a collaborative ecosystem with a shared goal of moving scholarly publishing forward.

A session called “Rethinking the Divide: Journals and Books Programs Integrate and Thrive” on the second day of the conference provided a helpful perspective on what scholarly publishers are struggling with, and what potential solutions could look like. Understanding the goals publishers want to achieve and the specific challenges they are encountering in the process, allows us to build workflow solutions that take these factors into consideration.

The sheer energy and passion driving this sector of the publishing industry is incredibly contagious. We left Seattle feeling more inspired than ever by the community that welcomed us so warmly. To everyone who took the time to chat, grab a coffee, or share a laugh with us during the conference, thank you. It was an incredible week, and we’re looking forward to keeping the momentum going as we continue to build these partnerships.

Westchester helps you level the playing field

Westchester Publishing Services supports over 70 university presses in the US and around the world, providing a full range of services including composition, editorial, and digital conversion services for print and ebook formats. Download our handy solutions checklist, and contact us to learn why dozens of your peer presses value our full range of customizable workflow solutions for their books and journals programs.

We sent a team to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit which took place in New York City on June 17. The summit is one of their largest annual events, where cloud and AI practitioners gather to see what’s next. The agenda was packed with over 200 sessions covering everything from agentic AI to data strategy to code modernization.

We came back with pages of notes, a lot of excitement, and a few things we think are worth sharing — whether you’re a tech veteran or someone who’s just starting to wonder what all this AI talk actually means for your business.

Here’s our plain-English breakdown of the biggest takeaways.

AI Is Moving from Chatbots to Agents — and That’s a Big Deal

A lot of people are familiar with AI chatbots: you ask a question, you get an answer. What dominated the conversation at this summit was something a step further — AI agents.

An agent doesn’t just answer questions. It takes actions. It can look up information in your databases, draft a document, query your CRM, pull a report, and hand off results to another agent — all on its own, with minimal human hand-holding.

Amazon is betting heavily on this shift with a platform called Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, which became generally available in late 2025. Think of it as the infrastructure layer that lets you build, deploy, and manage these agents securely — at any scale. The important thing for non-technical readers: you’re not locked into Amazon’s AI models. AgentCore works with Claude (from Anthropic), OpenAI, Google Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and others. You pick what works best for your needs.

Alongside AgentCore, AWS released an open-source toolkit called Strands SDK — essentially the coding toolkit developers use to actually write the agent logic before deploying it on AgentCore. The two work together like a blueprint and a construction site.

Your Data Is the Foundation — and Most Organizations Aren’t Ready

This was perhaps the most honest, ground-level conversation of the day. Speaker after speaker made the same point: the quality of your AI is only as good as the quality of your data.

That sounds obvious, but the implications run deep. Before you can build a useful AI agent, you need to answer some hard questions:

  • Is your data clean, or is it full of duplicates, outdated records, and gaps?
  • Is it organized in a way a machine can understand?
  • Do you have good metadata — descriptions, tags, categories — so the AI knows what it’s looking at?

The recommended pipeline is straightforward but requires real investment: Raw data → Clean data → Enriched data → Ready for AI. Skipping steps leads to what one presenter bluntly called “data failure” — an agent that confidently gives you wrong answers because it’s working from bad inputs.

For publishing and content-heavy businesses, this is especially relevant. Unstructured content (PDFs, Word docs, files in Dropbox or SharePoint) needs to be properly chunked, tagged, and indexed before an AI can search it meaningfully. The term for this process is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — and getting it right is what separates a useful AI assistant from an unreliable one.

Amazon Quick: The AI Workspace You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

One of the most interesting products shown was Amazon Quick — Amazon’s all-in-one AI-powered workspace for employees. Imagine a smart assistant that can search across all your company’s tools and data simultaneously, in plain English.

It connects to 40+ business systems out of the box: Salesforce, Slack, SharePoint, Gmail, Dropbox, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, and many more. Ask it a question and it pulls answers from across all of them — respecting your existing security permissions so people only see what they’re supposed to.

One feature worth calling out specifically: Amazon Quick in QuickSight lets you build business intelligence dashboards and reports just by describing what you want in plain English. No SQL. No data analyst is required for routine reports. That’s a meaningful shift for smaller teams.

AWS Transform: Getting Your Legacy Code Up to Speed

A less flashy but very important announcement: AWS Transform has been expanded significantly. This is Amazon’s AI-powered tool for modernizing old codebases — automatically.

If your organization is running on aging software, outdated programming languages, or legacy infrastructure, AWS Transform can analyze your code and handle a lot of the migration work that would normally take months of expensive developer time. By their numbers: over 4.5 billion lines of code analyzed since launch, saving customers more than 1.6 million hours of manual effort.

The new capability announced at the NYC Summit is continuous modernization — an AI agent that monitors your codebase on an ongoing basis and flags (or fixes) technical debt as it accumulates, rather than waiting for a big migration project every few years.

For development teams under pressure to ship new features while keeping existing systems stable, this is the kind of tool that can quietly save a lot of headaches.

What This Means for Westchester Publishing Services

We didn’t go to this summit just to learn — we went with our own operations in mind. Here’s where we see the most relevance for what we do:

Knowledge management: Tools like Amazon Quick could make it far easier to search and surface information across our own documents, files, and internal systems — saving time that currently goes into manual navigation and retrieval.

Workflows: AI agents that can pull data, generate status updates, and route tasks between systems.

Code and system health: For any development work we maintain, AWS Transform’s continuous modernization capabilities are worth a close look.

Data readiness: Perhaps most importantly, the summit reinforced that the organizations getting the most from AI are the ones who invest in clean, well-structured, well-tagged data. That’s the homework that pays off later.

Final Thoughts

The theme running through nearly every session we attended was this: AI is only as smart as the information you give it, and only as useful as the problems you point it at. While the technology is advancing rapidly, many organizations are still working toward the strategic clarity needed to determine where to start.

As we continue to explore these tools, we continue to be guided by our core principles:

  1. Protecting the security of each title and client’s IP
  2. Always maintaining high quality and accurate output
  3. Ensuring transparency, choice, and scalability for our clients
  4. Always keeping a human in the loop

Keep an eye on this space and our LinkedIn page as we share more information about technological developments and how they can become part of publication workflows, following the core principles outlined above. If you’d like to discuss how Westchester can help you with any aspect of your editorial or production workflow, contact us to have a conversation with a member of our team.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Conference panelists seated on the stage for session about accessibility in publishingAttending the PCPA 2026 conference on behalf of Westchester Publishing Services was an energizing and rewarding experience. From the opening plenary through the closing sessions, the event delivered thoughtful, practical content that spoke directly to the opportunities and challenges facing publishers today. 

One of the biggest takeaways was the strength of the programming. The keynote sessions offered a solid mix of strategy, innovation, and real-world application, especially around artificial intelligence, accessibility, and discoverability. I was especially glad to take part in the accessibility panel, where I had the opportunity to moderate a meaningful discussion on how publishers can better serve more people through inclusive content and technology. It was encouraging to see how much momentum there is around making publishing more accessible, sustainable, and audience-focused. 

The workshop lineup also reinforced just how much our industry is evolving. Sessions on AI tools for publishing operations, accessibility best practices, metadata, translation, and digital marketing all offered practical insights that attendees could take back to their organizations right away. The content was consistently strong, relevant, and well delivered, making it clear that this conference was designed to provide real value rather than just high-level talking points. 

Just as valuable as the sessions themselves was the opportunity to connect with so many partners, clients, and colleagues across the publishing community. Those conversations in the hallways, during networking breaks, and on the exhibit floor were a highlight of the event. It was a great chance to strengthen existing relationships, make new connections, and hear firsthand about the priorities and challenges others are navigating. 

We’re proud that Westchester Publishing Services was part of this year’s conference, and we left feeling inspired by both the quality of the content and the incredible people who make this industry so collaborative and forward-looking. 

by JodieAnne Sclafani

Last week (April 9, 2026), I attended the 2nd annual AI Summit at Marist University in Poughkeepsie, NY. The day opened with two questions that have stayed with me: What is possible with AI? And, just as importantly, When is it right to use AI?

In an industry moving as fast as ours, the first question gets most of the attention. The second one is where the real work is.

Attending the summit was not an exercise to discover new tools to deploy, but to listen, think critically, and ask hard questions on behalf of our clients and our craft. What I heard confirmed something Westchester already believes: the organizations that will serve publishers best right now are not the ones racing to implement every new capability. They’re the ones willing to slow down long enough to ask whether they should.

That’s a more difficult posture to hold than it sounds. The pressure to adopt, automate, and accelerate is real and, in many cases, the technology genuinely delivers. AI can handle the routine with speed and consistency, freeing skilled people to focus on work that requires judgment, nuance, and expertise. The most meaningful work—the kind that builds trust and craft—lives in the process, not just the deliverable. We see real value in that, and we’re pursuing it thoughtfully.

But the summit was a useful reminder that speed without intention carries risk. Speakers were candid: AI is advancing faster than the ethical and policy frameworks designed to govern it. Accountability doesn’t transfer to the machine. When something inevitably goes wrong, responsibility lands squarely on the humans and organizations that deployed the tool. That’s not an argument against progress. It’s an argument for moving with clarity about your values and your obligations.

For Westchester, clarity comes from decades of working side by side with publishers. We are editorial and production experts by training and by practice, and technology is one of the ways we extend that expertise. We build, adopt, and invest in tools—including AI—where they strengthen the publishing process. The methods evolve but the core mission does not.

What we’re focused on is purposeful integration: tools that enhance the quality and consistency our clients depend on, with human review and accountability built in from the start. Client data stays protected. Craft stays central. And the judgment that comes from more than 50 years in this industry stays in the room.

AI is changing publishing. We’re paying close attention and asking the hard questions. We’d love to hear what questions your team is sitting with. Reach out now to start the conversation.

We’re hosting a webinar about “AI and Its Opportunities in Publishing Operations” on May 19. Panelists include George Walkley of Outside Context, Ltd., David Stafford from Dropbox, and Jarin Pintana at Green Book Alliance.

A group of colleagues standing inside a trade show booth for Westchester Publishing Services and Westchester EducationThe Westchester team – with representation from our offices in the US, UK, and India – had a very busy London Book Fair. The Olympia, for all of its pros and cons, has been a hub for our industry for over a decade, and it will be a culture shock to shift to the Excel next year. (For a look back on that, please check out this LinkedIn post.)

Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller did fantastic jobs with their coverage of the Fair. Key topics that the attendees were discussing were AI (for and against), accessibility (with a phenomenal session moderated by Simon Mellins including publishing experts like Princeton University Press’ Cathy Felgar), print on demand, and global disruptions to our industry. The above linked articles do a good job showing what was being discussed in panels and on the floor, and I encourage you to check out their coverage.

For this final year at Olympia, what was on publishers’ minds? We met with over 60 publishers and these were the top topics:

  • Accessibility – While many publishers may feel they’ve heard it all about accessibility at this point, the adoption of ADA Title II, and its expected impact on library acquisitions in the US provided an opportunity to reaffirm workflow decisions, talk about their backlists and what they may wish to do to ensure futureproofing their files, including the potential AI offers to address alt text and language shift tagging needs.
  • AI – As a recent PwC commercial represented, it sure does feel like everybody’s trying to wedge ‘AI’ into their product descriptions and solutions the way everyone said ‘blockchain’ about 8 years ago or ‘AR/VR’ about 10 years ago. That being said, one publisher caught some flak for saying that AI is a worker skill that we can’t ignore (see PW article above), and they’re not wrong. As an industry we have every right to be concerned about AI due to the lawsuits against Gen AI platforms that enthusiastically abused publishers’ intellectual property. But, learning and – where appropriate – putting into practice AI skills in the workplace will be our industry’s competitive gap as compared to other media verticals like recording, film, and journalism that have in some cases advanced the use of non-content-led AI within their workplace. Comparing documents from business partners, answering questions (with attribution) regarding complex topics, doing market analysis, and more are business needs that any business has. Our discussions around AI have emphasized that Westchester is not using AI on client content with the exception of cases where clients want us to use it – and have signed contracts to do so – to support tasks like crafting alt text. This PW interview with our CEO, Deb Taylor, talks about how AI can be powerful when used with appropriate consent and human review, but not as a catch all to all problems or needs. Our discussions with clients and prospects seemed to echo this – a cautious enthusiasm but the need to have trust, transparency, and a human in the loop. I’m very curious to see how the industry has progressed on this topic by the time of next year’s London Book Fair.
  • Speed to Market – Driven by our ability to help publishers like Zando and Sourcebooks edit and typeset their pick ups and key titles quickly, we saw a number of publishers identifying use cases where upcoming books may only have weeks instead of months to move from the copyediting stage to printer files. Several of our discussions focused on the specialized workflows Westchester has developed to help move important titles on your list into the market quickly.
  • Sustainability – Likely driven by our launch of Sustainable Typesetting® – in partnership with 2K/Denmark – we had many discussions about how we can help publishers take extra-long titles and reduce the page count by 20%, meaning less paper required for printing, less weight for freight, and other practical savings across a book’s life cycle, while also supporting the sustainability initiatives many of our clients are pursuing.
  • Journal Programs – Increasingly, our society and university press clients are acquiring journals that need varying levels of support, from as far upstream as peer review through to our copyediting and production offerings and then to digital distribution, sales, and more. We’ll be announcing a new set of services at the Council of Science Editors (CSE) conference in a few weeks, but if you are publishing journals and need to evaluate different service levels or needs, please reach out.
  • Repurposing Backlist Content – This was especially interesting to our education clients. Many educational content providers – especially those serving the library market – see topical opportunities arise for state adoption, general interest library sales, and more, but acquiring or packaging new titles to support those needs can be cost prohibitive depending on the market opportunity. Never fear, Westchester has a great, cost-effective solution. We are increasingly helping our educational partners take backlist titles – in some cases deep backlist titles – and updating them as new editions with new covers, updated interior text, new art, and more, all resulting in quick-to-market printer files and accessible EPUBs. This approach generated a great deal of interest from our partners, as a way to support expanding their lists without the large expenditure.
  • How to Get it All Done – Lastly, for many of the publishers we met, they are trying to get more books done without raising headcount. Seasonal spikes don’t always translate to continued productivity throughout the year, so many of our discussions revolved around how we can help publishers manage those peaks by providing project management, copyediting, design, production, and accessible digital services for titles where adding staff is difficult to justify. We work with many publishers where we augment their capacity during busy seasons, and are open to exploring these kinds of solutions with you, using staff from our US, UK, and India offices, based on a book’s needs and budget.

Which of the above topics are affecting you the most? Contact Us to discuss how we can help. And we’ll see you on the conference circuit this year at PCPA, CSE, AUP, and more!