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Association of University Presses 2024 Recap

artificial intelligence

Westchester Publishing Services participated and was an exhibitor during the Association of University Presses Conference which took place in Montreal, June 10-14, 2024. This was the first in-person annual meeting since 2022 and turnout was respectably strong. Here are some of the insights shared by Bill Foley and Hugh Shiebler, who were in attendance.

Man wearing light button down shirt and brown trousers stands behind an exhibit table covered with a dark blue tablecloth and topped with neatly organized notebooks, papers, and pens.There were many topics covered during the conference session and in discussions among attendees in the exhibit hall and elsewhere. While everyone’s conference experience is different, these two themes seemed to continually feature in the conversations we were having with clients and fellow attendees:

Accessibility – with the European Accessibility Act coming into force about a year from now, this is understandably a very hot topic. Publishers have a relatively small window of time to figure out the best way to balance the needs of the EAA and prioritize the titles within their backlist that need to be updated to adhere with the guidelines. As a Benetech-certified vendor, we have been having a lot of conversations with publishers about how to adapt their workflow to make frontlist “born-accessible” and ways they can effectively manage converting backlist content to meet accessibility requirements. Along these lines, you may be interested in the webinar, “Path to eBook Accessibility” on July 10, hosted by Ingram Content Group, with the panel including Michael Johnson from Benetech, Richard Orme of DAISY, Cathy Felgar from Princeton University Press, and Westchester’s Tyler M. Carey.

AI – This vowel combination is dominating conversations everywhere you turn and not surprisingly, it received a considerable amount of attention at the conference. While there are some proponents who are excited about the potential it offers, the general sentiment about artificial intelligence among people within the AUP community is highly skeptical. Understandably, with the proliferation of fake books being sold on sites like Amazon, there are practical concerns about the ability for AI to ingest copyrighted materials without attribution, consent, or compensation, risking reputational and financial harm for authors and publishers. AI is evolving at a very rapid pace and discussion about where to draw the boundaries from ethical, legal, or financial standpoints will continue for the foreseeable future. In April the Stationers’ Company, with support from Westchester hosted the webinar “Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on Rights and Intellectual Property” which explored some of the complex challenges the publishing industry is encountering.

While these situations get sorted out, Westchester will continue to be here to support university press and academic publishers as they shepherd their content through the publication lifecycle. When assessing your next season’s list of new titles, backlist materials, or content acquired content from another entity, let us know how we can guide you through your editorial, production, design, or digital conversion challenges. We’re here to help, so Contact Us to talk about how we can make this a less cumbersome process for your press.

by Hugh Shiebler, Director, Client Solutions

Hugh ShieblerAs Alvin Toffler wrote over fifty years ago, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The ever-quickening pace of change – and the necessity of adapting to that change – was a main theme of the New Directions in Scholarly Publishing Seminar, held October 4-5, 2023 and hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I attended both days of this year’s seminar, titled “Navigating the Shifting Sands: Managing Disruptions in Scholarly Communications.” The timeliness and depth of the presentations was matched by the quality of the questions asked, resulting in a lively dialogue.

picture of Society of Scholarly Publishing conference attendees sitting at tables in a conference room, looking at pulldown screens containing information about a session topic.Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) threaded through most of the presentations. Sessions such as “New Directions in Research Integrity: Values to Value in Research Publishing” and “Authorship in the Age of AI” emphasized embracing new technologies as tools without compromising one’s values or losing touch with the human elements that make scholarly publishing what it is. Dr. Rebecca Brendel, the Director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, delivered the keynote address, “New Directions in Research Integrity: Values to Value in Research and Publishing.” Dr. Brendel reminded all of us that integrity in research depends upon the integrity of individual researchers, administrators, and publishers. And, that core values such as honesty and transparency will be even more critical as AI continues to pervade the research and publication processes. Following the keynote address, Simone Taylor, the Publisher of the American Psychiatric Association, moderated a discussion with Dr. Brendel.

You may have seen our recent blog post on AI or my colleague’s appearance on a recent podcast discussing our view on how to integrate it into publishing workflows. We’re excited about the potential to continue expanding our offerings and ways we can help publishers.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

headshot of a bearded man wearing glassesIt’s been a busy few weeks for me, meeting with some of our clients about expanding our support for their lists, this year. During these meetings, two topics have been coming up again and again. Accessibility — and AI.

For the former – accessibility – Westchester has a lot of resources that we can bring to bear to help. If you’re at all looking for further support in making your content — whether upcoming titles or backlist — accessible, please do reach out. Westchester became a GCA-certified vendor in 2021 to help publishers with their accessibility needs for ePubs. We also joined DAISY to further our knowledge and support for accessible content. In an ongoing basis, we’re keeping track of emerging trends in ePubs, Accessible PDF’s and more, including these recent changes for ePub files from the W3C. Personally, I’m on the Workflow Committee of the Book Industry Study Group, where my talented colleagues on the committee recently released this update regarding fixed layout ePubs. We’re helping with tasks from WCAG compliance to creating alt-text entries to large-scale backlist scanning and conversion projects. This recent IBPA webinar I participated in with Michael Johnson from Benetech covers some highlights to consider.

For the latter topic – AI – well, I’m not sure any of us have a clear vantage into how GPTs and emerging tools will impact our business in the long term. The team at Westchester have been using scripts and natural language processing for years to help automate repetitive tasks and run some of our comparisons and checks. Much as indexing software became a tool for trained indexers to use to organize keywords and condense the time it takes to index a book, AI will likely be used to help improve accuracy and create even more efficiencies in various parts of the publishing workflow. The talented publishing professionals at Westchester Publishing Services establish the gold standard in our industry, and using a variety of technologies to provide high quality solutions for our clients is simply part of our DNA. I know we’re already harnessing AI in specifics areas of our toolsets. I’m looking forward to seeing how our team will continue to evolve and develop more solutions that benefit our clients and the industry as a whole.

In case you missed it, this article by Thad McIlroy in the June 6 issue of Publishers Weekly, provides a bit more of a stimulating viewpoint on the subject. And this article exposes perhaps the extreme case of trying to automate as much as possible with AI – and the negative impact it can have on content and the people who collaborate with you on your content.

While these strategic discussions are happening in all of our shops, I still remain grateful that the majority of my time is being spent exploring the editorial and production services the industry has come to expect Westchester to handle with care since the launch of our company in the 1960s. Much like the rest of the publishing industry, we continue to pivot and evolve, but remain steadfast to striking the right balance between technology and human expertise to allow our clients to trust their publications with Westchester.

How can Westchester help you for the balance of the year on your projects? Whether it’s helping with manuscript prep, typesetting, copyediting, or other tasks for your titles and assets, just reach out, we’ll be here for you.

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

It has been longer than I would have liked since I last shared a post-conference blog post. I am glad that NYC’s Digital Book World (DBW), held January 16-18 at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue, afforded me the opportunity to reconnect in person with many of Westchester’s partners and those of our clients who were able to make the trip to New York for the meeting.

As noted by Lorraine Shanley in her coverage of DBW in MPI’s Publishing Trends newsletter, the attendance was a bit upside down with far more vendor and industry types than publishers, it appeared. That said, the panels presented provided more than a little food for thought on topics ranging from the role of AI in publishing, to how to market books effectively online in the current landscape, to where we’re all headed as an industry.

Screenshot from keynote speechIt was on that latter topic that Margot Atwell, the executive director and publisher of The Feminist Press, provided an insightful session. She revisited a presentation she had shared at London Book Fair in 2019, in which she had identified a number of trend lines in the industry – including equity, consolidation, and the financial health of the industry – and updated her analysis and predictions for 2023. Whether you were representing a vendor, a large publisher, or a start up, her insights on how to foster equity, continue to adapt to a distributed workplace, and navigate the financial and societal challenges in our industry resonated.

Aligned with another one of Westchester’s core principles was the panel on accessibility hosted by Bill Kasdorf, who was a panelist on our September 2022 webinar about accessibility and sustainability. Joining Bill were Michael Johnson from Benetech, Madeleine Rothberg from WGBH, and Richard Orme from the DAISY Consortium. As a Benetech GCA-certified partner, Westchester is keen to help amplify the messaging around not just the needs for accessibility but also the best practices that publishers can adapt into their workflows. Each panelist shared a headline and several discussion points with one another to help further discussion about the needs for publishers to accelerate their adaptation to support readers requiring accessible content. As the coverage of Day 1 of the conference in Publishers Weekly emphasized, Michael Johnson laid out numerous examples of the prevalence within the population of individuals who need or use adaptive technology to consume content. With an estimated 20% of the world’s population having a need, this isn’t a nice to have, it’s a necessity for ensuring as many readers can consume your content as possible.

Bill Kasdorf put perhaps the finest point on the subject by pointing out that due to the European Accessibility Act, if you plan on selling any ePub content in Europe by 2025, that content has to be created accessible or converted to accessibity standards – including backlist content – or it will be illegal to sell within the EU. But, to the point of everyone on the panel, that doesn’t necessarily mean a gigantic investment of resources or a total revision to how you create content. Micromoves internally and with partners can help pick away at the pile quickly and affordably. One key topic that seems to frustrate many publishers is that of alt text. While there are commonly accepted practices, the ‘right’ alt text is not codified the way that say metadata rules might be. As Michael Johnson pointed out, the same image could have different tags depending on its use. An image of the Eiffel Tower in a cookbook about crepes may be ornamental – not relevant to how to make a crepe – so it could just be labeled as “Ornamental” in its alt text entry. In a book about Paris, perhaps a few brief sentences describing the image of the Eiffel Tower would be appropriate. In an engineering book, the Eiffel Tower image might be being used to augment some content about the tensile strength of steel so a different, brief entry would be called for. But in none of these instances is a thoroughly written, revised, and breathtaking narrative called for – alt text entries are there to tell a reader what is in the image, not replace the content that is already in the text that the image is intended to augment. And to Madeleine Rothberg’s point, there is a metadata field called “Accessibility Summary” in each file that allows you to make notations re: pieces that are works in progress, absent, etc., understanding that there will be exceptions and things that may need further attention after initial creation or conversion. We’re all learning new things regarding accessibility – even those of us who are deeply involved in accessibility – and this field serves as a placeholder to indicate where we think something may need to be revisited.

To help us all navigate the world of accessibility, and better plan for the looming EU deadline referenced above, a number of resources were shared by the panel that Bill Kasdorf consolidated here. I highly encourage you to review these resources and share them with any of your team involved in working with authors, editing content, and producing digital files.

Other excellent sessions included Ingram’s presentation about its Ingram iD platform, which allows for direct-to-consumer marketing, sessions from Scribd and Spotify about different revenue models for content distribution, and sessions from AI firms showing how audiobooks and more can benefit from AI.

Westchester’s Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, Deb Taylor, attended DBW as well, and provided this commentary about ChatGPT coming out of a session hosted by another vendor in our space.

Deb shares:

DBW’s sessions were typically not company/product commercials, although like most conferences, a few did lean that way. When the Trends in Content Creation Using AI and Smart Technology session by PageMajik started, I think most expected it to be a carefully disguised commercial about their services. It turned out to be a micro master class in how to think about AI and, in this case, the “controversial” open source AI, GPT3 (or ChatGPT). Keep in mind, PageMajik wasn’t the only one discussing AI and how it has many places in publishing – we learned about interesting uses of AI in audiobook production workflows, and in the use of synthetic voice, too.

So while ChatGPT has been banned on some school networks due to fear of plagiarism, this session reminded us that this is just technology – clever technology, mind you – but still just technology, and we, as humans can make a choice in terms of how to use and deploy it.
“We can be lazy, or we can be productive. The choice is ours.” And yes, we should be mindful that clever technology like GPT, does need some guardrails so it can be harnessed with positive productivity, not laziness or malintent.

For those who are wondering how ChatGPT can be purposeful in the publishing industry, here are a few thoughts:

1. One potential use case is for content generation, where the model can be trained on a specific topic or writing style, and then used to generate new articles, blog posts, or other written content. Additionally, ChatGPT can be used for editing and proofreading by identifying grammar and style errors in existing text. It can also be used for summarizing long articles or books, creating headlines and summaries for news articles, and even writing personalized responses to readers’ questions or comments. Overall, ChatGPT offers a powerful tool for automating and enhancing various aspects of the publishing process.

2. Another area in the workflow that often requires much back and forth with authors and copyediting teams is the reviewing, checking, and correcting of references and citations. ChatGPT can help with reference citation checking in manuscripts by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to identify and extract citations from the text. Once the citations have been identified, the model can then compare them to a database of references to ensure that they are accurate and properly formatted. Additionally, ChatGPT can also be trained on specific citation styles, such as MLA or APA, to ensure that the manuscript adheres to the appropriate guidelines. It can also be used to check for missing references or duplicate citations in the manuscript. Overall, ChatGPT can provide a powerful tool for automating the reference citation checking process, which can help to save time and improve the accuracy of the final manuscript.

I’ll leave you with this final disclosure: Both the paragraph on use cases and reference citations were written by ChatGPT, in seconds. Would that be categorized as lazy? No. I believe it was incredibly efficient, however, the best use may be more in the middle. Let ChatGPT be the tool to help you formulate your idea but perhaps not be used verbatim. After all, it’s just technology, and it’s using what it has access to. You still need to validate the information. Try it out for yourself here. And then make sure to ask what its limitations and challenges are.

In general, these new aspects of technology are exciting and ones that we should not be fearful of, but figure out how to use to improve and advance our industry as a whole.

While there was a bit of humor artfully weaved into Book.io’s session, Digital Ownership, NFTs and Revenue Streams for Publishers, there were some interesting things to think about as it relates to the personalized marketing opportunities and the new potential revenue stream that blockchain could offer. eBooks, as we know, are meant to be licenses to the individual to “view, use and display” without any permissions to sell, rent or distribute otherwise. Digital books on the blockchain change that paradigm, and also enable the publisher to experience an ongoing revenue stream from books sold here. Per Book.io, it will increase the intellectual property value of the content. There is also the opportunity for the publisher to direct market the owner since there is more visibility in the digital ownership – think here about gating content with permissions, and even price points to owners vs non-owners. There are efficiencies (multiple languages), interesting design opportunities (different cover designs), unique targeted marketing ideas, and more here. As with all new technology, let’s not dismiss or fear it, but rather let’s get to know and harness it to continue to advance our industry.

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Further coverage of DBW 2023 is available in this post from Publishing Perspectives that provides thorough coverage of keynote speaker Karine Pansa’s presentation about her mandate and expectations for her term heading the International Publishers Association, as well as this article from Publishers Weekly highlighting information for publishing start ups.

As always, US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services is keen to learn more about which portions of your book production workflow you are navigating, in the hope that we can help. Over 500 publishers rely on Westchester for services ranging from manuscript preparation to editorial services to quality, on-time printer file production and accessibility remediation. Contact us today to talk about your publications and how we can help.