The Publishers Association’s Annual Report 2014

Along with letters from the President and Chief Executive, our annual report contains summaries of our political engagement, sector-specific activity for consumer, academic, and education publishing, copyright protection, campaigns, products and services.

Our political engagement included publishing our first-ever publishing manifesto Publishing for Britain and close engagement with the Intellectual Property Office on a number of new and amended exceptions to copyright. We also produced a paper on the digital single market and established a new cross-sector policy group to provide a forum for publishers to discuss policy areas of interest to them, including copyright, taxation, business and enterprise policy.

For consumer publishers, we worked with the Booksellers Association on the second Books Are My Bag campaign; with the Society of Chief Librarians on an e-lending pilot with four library authorities; and with the Association of Authors’ Agents on a new set of guidelines aimed at improving communications between publishers and agents on contracts. In academic publishing, we organised the first research and scholarly publishing forum at the London Book Fair and published a report on the economics of journal publishing for the Publishers Research Consortium steering group, of which we are a founding member. For education publishers, we continued to engage with the Department for Education and other stakeholders to demonstrate the quality of UK educational resources.

Our international work focused on the protection of publishers’ copyright in the major territories of India, China, Pakistan, and Turkey, as well as hosting our annual anti-piracy breakfast at the Frankfurt Book Fair in partnership with the Association of American Publishers and the International Publishers Association.

As a result of long-term efforts, our political and media interlocutors are grasping that the digital world is, far from being a threat to our industry, a source of growth and development where we are the drivers of change.

Dominic Knight, President of the Publishers Association

The Books are My Bag and World Book Day programmes saw us working in great collaboration with the Booksellers Association and both initiatives look set to be hugely successful in future years.

Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Asociation