Klobuchar Tells AAP of "Serious Concerns About Consolidation in the Publishing Industry"
Wednesday's virtual AAP annual meeting offered some more pointed remarks than usual, as the publishing industry finds itself performing well financially, while facing a variety of new challenges from government, big tech, idealists and even itself.
Most notably, Senator Amy Klobuchar, accepting the organization's Award for Distinguished Public Service in a taped message, made clear that her focus on "taking on monopoly power" is not limited to big tech alone. "As you all know, there are serious concerns about consolidation in the publishing industry, due to a series of mergers and acquisitions that combine major publishing houses," she said. "This consolidation, as well as of course, the major issues with big tech -- reduction in publishing competition -- has been not good for most authors, whose earnings have fallen by 42% over the past 10 years."
Again towards the end of her remarks, Klobuchar circled back to say, "What I do want to do is make sure that we have vigilant antitrust enforcement. It may mean divesting assets, It may mean putting conditions on, so people can't engage in preferencing their own products or exclusionary conduct. We can have more competition and a brighter future for everyone. And that includes in book publishing."
At the opening of the meeting, board chair and Wiley ceo Brian Napack sounded a general alarm about challenges on multiple fronts: "Our team at AAP is very busy these days, because those who target publishing are very busy. They are actively working to chip away at freedom of expression, which is the basis of the knowledge ecosystem; working to erode strong copyright policies we all depend on; working to undermine the free marketplace of ideas; and working to commoditize intellectual property -- the fundamental work of our authors, our poets, our scientists, our educators. By standing up to the loudest voices, the AAP ensures that we can continue to do what we have done for centuries: Advance author authorship, science, education, enable human creativity and encourage innovation." As Napack noted, "Our role -- your role as publishers -- is clear, and it is critically important: Keep the river of ideas flowing. Why? Because publishing is central to the advancement of our culture, our education, our workforce and our democracy, all of which was disrupted, and threatened in so many ways in the past year."
AAP ceo Maria Pallante expanded on those challenges in her lengthy review of the year. Echoing PRH ceo Markus Dohle, Pallante said, "There has never been a better or more important time to be in publishing." But, "Regrettably, there are actors who seek to weaken the legal protections, in order to advance their own business interests, whether that interest is in bloating the fair use doctrine to illogical boundaries, or more blatantly appropriating and monetizing your works without permission. Content is valuable."
Pallante declared that nothing less than "the exclusive rights delineated in the Copyright Act are under assault."An effective enforcement framework is under assault, one that holds pirates accountable and reforms the DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which is the basis of the takedown of infringing content on websites -- badly in need of updating. And a transparent, and competitive marketplace remains elusive, one in which authors can be discovered publishers can compete fairly and vigorously and new innovators can serve the public with our unfair manipulation by giant tech companies."
More specifically, and quite recently, Pallante addresses Maryland's passage of a bill compelling "licensing...on reasonable terms" of digital literary works to libraries (and similar actions in process in other states), which the AAP has argued is unconstitutional. She attributed the efforts on, "A coordinated strategy from library lobbyists, as well as tech-funded special interest groups, to divert copyright policy away from Congress to the states and away from the rigorous precedents and deliberations that members of Congress employ. These efforts, which target ebooks and audio books and in some cases broader digital materials, are clearly pre-empted by the Copyright Act. But more fundamentally they spin a false narrative. Are libraries, important to the publishing ecosystem? Yes they most certainly are, and publishers across the country license thousands of digital works to libraries, and every community, every day. But, authors, publishers and bookstores also have policy equities, which is why Congress enacted a singular cohesive federal Copyright Act that has addressed the ownership and disposition of books since 1791."
Speaking more broadly, Pallante declared, "Since our inception, more than 50 years ago we have protected the rights of publishers to give voice to all voices. We have protected the rights, including for authors with whom we disagree, or even many of us might disagree. Publishing is very much the embodiment of the marketplace of ideas. And so I ask, as we set a path for the future of the industry and inspire the leaders of tomorrow's industry, let's publish widely and trust readers and future historians to judge the contents of the book. As many of us learned in law school, the answer to speech we don't like is more speech."
On the topic of abundance, the closing speaker was journalist and author of two books on Amazon Brad Stone, who offered an answer to a question posed to him by the late S&S ceo Carolyn Reidy: "Help us understand Amazon. Help us understand this company that has so come to dominate book publishing and our economy overall." As he framed the answer: "Amazon builds new businesses with people and careful personalized attention, often from Jeff Bezos himself. But when those businesses get to enormous size, Amazon runs them with algorithms and automation, and often does so carelessly with negative repercussions for customers and for society."
Ultimately, Stone said, "Amazon doesn't really make its living in the book industry anymore," which "might create opportunities" for publishers "to grow their non-Amazon businesses faster than their Amazon businesses" (though the pandemic demonstrated the opposite). At least "there are probably now limits to how much Amazon wants to beat publishers down in negotiations.... The energy it once devoted to the pricing fight over ebooks 10 years ago now seems really quaint, like concerns from a previous era in Amazon history."
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