The first day of this year’s IPA Congress set the tone for a week of shared insight on some of the global industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.

By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox

Yesterday was the first day of the 35^th International Publishers Association Congress, hosted by the Malaysian Book Publishers Association (MABOPA) in Kuala Lumpur.

Co-founder of Publishers Without Borders Prashant Pathak served as Master of Ceremonies for this year’s Congress, which was themed “Publishing Intelligence, Sustaining Forward.”

In his opening remarks, Sheikh Faisal Sheikh Mansor, President of MABOPA, set the goals for this year’s Congress to “discuss AI, educational publishing, copyright, freedom to publish, sustainability; discover new market, exchange ideas, begin conversations that may become lifelong partnershps among other key topics,” and engage with the 200 Malaysian publishers attending this year.

This year, the Congress hosted the Asian Rights Fair (ARF) for the first time to help foster more rights deals around the world.

Referencing this year’s theme, Mansor noted that “intelligence is not only artificial, it is also human intelligence, cultural intelligence, and the collective wisdom that emerges whenever publishers from different countries come together to learn from one another.”

Looking Backward, Moving Forward…Together

This year marks a series of anniversaries for the IPA – the 35^th Congress, the 20^th anniversary of the Prix Voltaire, and the 130^th anniversary of the IPA itself.

In her opening remarks, IPA President Gvantsa Jobava talked about the founding of the IPA in 1896 by French publisher George Masson with a purpose to foster “peaceful relations between nations.” That dedication to not only supporting collaboration among nations but also to protecting Copyright and the Freedom to Publish holds true today.

Jobava shared that the IPA Executive Committee was asked to identify the trends they are seeing that the industry needs to engage with to help provide a path toward the future. They responded with:

• Artificial Intelligence – Not only how to use the technology, but the skills needed to transform the workforce.
• Publishing as a Trusted Source
• Trinity of Freedoms
• Sustainable Access to Knowledge
• Changing Geopolitical Trends and National Policies
• Market Consolidation
• How to Battle Piracy and Protect IP

Jobava encouraged attendees to engage with each other to share their own trends and any insights they have about their own markets in a show of collaboration.

“We are here together now, and over the next two days, we ask you to engage with the conversations off stage, challenge each other, find your favorite speakers, ask them questions, share your experiences.”

Courage

One of the key topics of day one of the IPA Congress was the courage that publishers must have, particularly in today’s political environment.

“Not only do we take responsibility [for being there for readers of all ages], we are brave,” said Jobava in her opening remarks. “Today we publish stories and facts that are dangerous and contentious stories that powerful people do not want to hear.”

Later in the day, the panel featuring past Prix Voltaire laureates and the award ceremony for this year’s winner illustrated some of the fearlessness that can be seen in the industry and emboldened the audience to band together to protect the trinity of freedoms.

Battling Misinformation

The need to band together to incite change was echoed in the first panel of the day, “Ethics of Publishing: Accountability in the Age of AI and Misinformation,” featuring Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, United Nations and Kai Zenner, Head of Office & Digital Policy Adviser, MEP Axel Voss (Germany), moderated by Richard Mollet, Head, European Government Affairs, RELX (UK).

Today, publishers are not only faced with those entities that seek to suppress stories and information, they are actively battling artificial intelligence which can propagate misinformation at an exponential rate and ultimately erodes trust.

“We’re finding the public trusts what they see less and less, and this is demonetizing the very quality content that people actually would trust, so we have to find a way to pull people back to trusted sources of information,” said Fleming. Through developing policy and guidelines and working together, there is some hope of fighting the fake news and hate speech.

Thad McIlroy’s keynote just before this panel highlighted another important opportunity which publishers should take advantage that could also help battle bad information – licensing deals to further train existing LLMs on specific, niche topics.

Collaboration is Key

Many of the panels over the course of the day focused on working together, whether that means working together to create guidelines for the global industry around education, technology use, or publishing policies or working across types of media (film, gaming, books) to develop a larger story world to appeal to viewers/players/readers or even supporting each other as we fight for the publication of important but challenged work, protecting intellectual property, or the trinity of freedoms.

More coverage of the IPA Congress to come tomorrow.