Transcript: From Notre Dame Fire to “Fire and Fury” A Year of Covering Books Around the World

Recorded at BookExpo May 30, 2019

For podcast release Monday, June 3, 2019

KENNEALLY: Welcome to Covering Books Around the World, featuring a panel of journalists and industry analysts who cover books and the publishing markets in Europe and North America. My name is Christopher Kenneally, and I am host of Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series, Beyond the Book.

In the digital environment, the world becomes a crowded place. Smart phones and 24/7 internet access connect us to everyone whom we know and don’t even know around the world. In our every present moment the past and the future collide and abide.

Our own business of books and reading and publishing is no different than any other. Best seller lists in 2019 may one week feature contemporary hacks and another week showcase a literary giant out of the 19th century, all depending on the latest headlines. Print is dead and print has made a comeback. Book stores are vanishing until they are thriving again. Business models and marketing strategies cycle and recycle. Authors flirt with every new social media format, and a review in The New York Times remains the gold standard. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a bestselling author in his day of poetry and essays, as well as a great editor and the trusted friend of celebrated authors, once observed that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in which direction we are moving.

My companions on this stage today have come with compass in hand and can point us safely to the next port. I want to welcome them now. I’ll start at the very far end.

Javier Celaya, welcome, Buenos dias.

CELAYA: Buenos dias.

KENNEALLY: Javier Celaya is the CEO and founder of Dosdoce.com, as the Vice President of the Spanish Digital Magazines Association and a member of the executive board of the Digital Economy Association of Spain. He launched a Dosdoce for the purpose of analyzing the use of new technologies in the cultural sector, and he publishes annual studies related to trends in the creative industries.

To his right is Fabrice Piault, who comes to us from Paris, bonjour. Fabrice Piault became editor in chief of Paris-based Livres Hebdo in 2015. In 2018 he also became executive director at Electre, a bibliographic database of French media and publishing. Fabrice joined Livres Hebdo, which reports on the publishing industry in France, as well as booksellers and librarians in 1987, as a reporter. He is also president of the Association of Critics and Journalists, covering graphic novels and comic books in France.

To his right is Dana Beth Weinberg, Dana, welcome. Dana Beth Weinberg is Professor of Sociology at Queens College-CUNY. She’s a graduate of Harvard Universities doctoral program in Sociology, is author of “Comparing Gender Discrimination in Traditional and Indie Publishing,” and as an indie author herself, she writes fiction under the pseudonym D. B. Shuster, and is author of the Russian mafia crime series Kings of Brighton Beach and the Cold War spy novel To Catch a Traitor.

To her right is Andrew Albanese. Andrew, welcome. Andrew Albanese is Senior Editor and Features Editor at Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon and the “Big Six” Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight. A former editor at Oxford University Press, he has covered the publishing and information technology field for more than two decades.

And immediately to my left here, is Porter Anderson, Porter, welcome.

ANDERSON: Thank you, Chris.

KENNEALLY: Porter is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, founded and operated by Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He previously reported for CNN and CNN International, as the Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and The Bookseller. In March, at the London Book Fair, Porter received the inaugural International Book Trade Journalist Prize from the London Book Fair International Excellence Award. So congratulations on that award, and again, welcome to my panel, and welcome to all of you for our discussion today.

And Fabrice Piault, I would like to open our chat about the industries around the world by looking at some interesting phenomena, and in particular the return to the best seller list of an author who hasn’t had a author appearance for quite some time, and that would be Victor Hugo who, immediately after the tragic fire at Notre Dame in April found himself back on the bestseller list. Tell us about that.

PIAULT: Yes, it was really an immediate impact.

KENNEALLY: The next day.

PIAULT: Yeah, the next day after the fire, the sales of Notre Dame de Paris from Victor Hugo went up and it was difficult to find some in bookshops, actually. So they have to do some reprints very quickly. In Livres Hebdo, we were not so surprised because we had seen the same phenomena in 2015 after all the tourist attacks against Charlie, and also in the –

KENNEALLY: In the (inaudible).

PIAULT: Yeah, absolutely. And with the success of the Hemingway book about Paris.

KENNEALLY: We should just explain. So immediately after those terrorist attacks, people’s concern for Paris and their love for Paris drove them to want to read A Moveable Feast.

PIAULT: Yeah, that’s right. But the difference with Victor Hugo is Notre Dame, actually, is that it’s not only the book of Victor Hugo, who was in the bestseller list, but several other books about Notre Dame. Actually, in Livres Hebdo, we did what we do usually on our website when there is such an event. We just announced which are the books related to the event. And we have a number of clicks on our website which was huge – it’s thousands and thousands of clicks, and this led to – by a consequence, we decided to do other articles about sales, about what we’re doing, booksellers. I think we’ve done something like six articles in only two days or three days. It was really a huge phenomenon. Many publishes decided to reprint some books. And maybe you’ve seen that Ken Follett has announced books about Notre Dame, and we have French author well-known in France called Sid Vantassant. (sp?) He decided to collect two articles he has already done and to write one, and there’s publishers who published a very fast book with these three articles. I think it’s very interesting, but it shows that the publishers have to react very fast and to take all opportunities to get some success and some sales.

KENNEALLY: Right, and this wasn’t just reporters chasing the story, the response was immediate and dramatic, the bestseller list, fiction and nonfiction became dominated by all of these books. It’s really a fascinating story, and it is pointing to the importance of watching the data to see where the opportunity lies. So as you say, it wasn’t simply the one obvious novel by Hugo, but it was a real opportunity for publishers of all kinds, even religious books.

PIAULT: Yeah, religious books, art books, books about architecture. Yeah, many types of books actually.

KENNEALLY: We have a seen a similar phenomenon, Andrew Albanese, as far as following the news in this country, known colloquially as the Trump bump. We have had a series of books that have done well, or at least gotten a lot of attention in the media. Some have sold better than others. There was the Bob Woodward book, of course, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury dominated the bestseller list early last year, has sold four million copies to date. So we’re moving from the fire of Notre Dame to the fire and fury in the White House. We will see another book from Michael Wolff next week. Tell us about the last year from the perspective of the Trump White House related titles.

ALBANESE: This is going to be tough, but OK. Yeah, it’s been the Trump bump, I think that’s been the story of publishing for the last year or two, at least. Last year we had five million selling books. We had Fire and Fury, which got the year off to a tremendous start in terms of book sales. We had James Comey, Bob Woodward – these were huge selling books. I think what we’re now seeing in 2019, and it’s something that David Walter from NPB Books talked about earlier today is that there is some political fatigue setting in.

KENNEALLY: So that’s not just the concern, that’s really happening.

ALBANESE: Well, we’re starting to see it in the numbers. Yeah, we’re starting to see. But again, you had Fire & Fury really sort of skewing the first quarter sales last year. It really did very well at the beginning of last year, and it set the tone for 2018. I don’t think we’re going to see another Fire & Fury, and no disrespect to Michael Wolff who has a new book coming out next year, but I don’t –

KENNEALLY: Next week.

ALBANESE: Next week, excuse me. I don’t think any of us are, at this point, surprised by what’s coming out of Washington. I think the cake is baked, and I’m not sure that we’re going to see the same interest in those books. At the same time, they do take a lot of energy from people.

KENNEALLY: I was going to say, that’s a good news/bad news story because on the one hand it doesn’t hurt publishing to sell four millions copies of any book at all.

ALBANESE: Certainly not.

KENNEALLY: On the other hand, though, there’s only so much oxygen in the room.

ALBANESE: Yeah, it’s harder to break out your new novelist. It’s harder to get coverage of your books that are not Trump-related when the cable news networks are showing just constant coverage of the administration. It’s difficult.

KENNEALLY: Right. And you mentioned novelists, this is the critical point that there has been this real focus on nonfiction over the last several years, probably going back at least to the 2016 election in this country, and we have seen the numbers of adult trade fiction drop, consequently.

ALBANESE: Yeah, it’s been fairly disturbing to watch, but over the last five years we’ve seen – it’s roughly a 16% decline in fiction sales, and that’s significant. This despite there being, in my opinion, more greater fiction from a number of independent publishers than at any point in my term covering publishing – well, in publishing, which is well over 20 years. There’s just so much great fiction to read, it’s just harder to break it out and find it.

KENNEALLY: Dana Beth Weinberg, you know that story only too well, personally and professionally. The research that you have done has been following the market for independently published authors – you are one, yourself. Respond to what Andrew was just saying about the way that the focus on certain types of enormous titles really makes it so much harder for independent authors today to gain any audience at all.

WEINBERG: So one of the statistics that you often hear is that Amazon is putting 9000 books by indie authors every week – I don’t know if that’s actually still accurate, but it gives you a sense of the order of magnitude of what’s happening. You even walk around upstairs here at Book Expo and you see all of these fantastic books that have just come out. The market is just full of books. And yet American adults are reading less than ever, and there’s this competition from these big blockbusters, and they might even be blockbusters from a long time ago with long-dead authors. So the competition is really, really fierce.

As an indie author you’re thinking, here’s my baby, I’m putting it out. What do I do? How do I get people to read it, and even how do I get to be a best-seller myself or quit the day job or whatever it is – there’s all of these aspirations that people have. And it’s getting harder and harder. There’s a whole industry that’s risen up around trying to give people advice about what to do.

But one of the difficulties is if you look at how people start to discover books, that’s starting to change. It used to be that we would go to the bookstore or the library, we’d browse, we’d ask for recommendations, things like that. Word of mouth was always an important factor – what were your friends reading, maybe that’s what you would read – and it’s gotten more and more important as the market has gotten flooded. So as we start to think about what am I going to read, it has to do with what’s in front of us. So if the news is talking about something, if it’s talking about Trump, or it’s talking about something else, we’re starting to think about reading those things. Part of it is because the also we get to not only read the books, which we’re having trouble deciding what to read, but now we can participate in a social conversation around them, too, because other people are reading them.

But that blockbuster model makes it even harder, I think for an indie author with a small following to rise up above the noise and get discovered.

KENNEALLY: Dana, I want to talk about that social media conversation because that’s really critical to independent authors. A few years back they saw social media as the way to reach an audience. They were able to get around the traditional business models and go directly to their readers. But in the last year, we have seen a kind of – if not an attack, at least a real series of questions raised about social media, about fake news, about data privacy, all these issues, and that must be of concern to individual authors who were relying on social media for their livelihood.

WEINBERG: Yes. Social media was immediately attractive to indie authors and to other businesses in general because it seemed like an inexpensive ways to reach audiences. You didn’t have to do print, you could reach a lot of people, there weren’t a lot of upfront costs involved. As more and more companies are using social media to try and reach their audiences, audiences are getting fatigued. We talked about fatigue for other things, it’s happening here, too. So you think about how often you sign on and you’re getting ads popping up in your windows. As you’re reading an article, there’s an ad flashing in front of your face.

Facebook used to be one of the places that was very readily available, especially to authors, for doing book discovery because they had so much backend information about people that you could target to try and find the audience that would be most interested. So you could really maximize the push of your dollar by really targeting in on the people who most wanted to hear what you had to say. As things changed, starting last year in January, after the big scandals with Cambridge Analytica and the fake news issues and the election concerns, Facebook changed its model for how ads were going to work. They wanted to move more toward people getting feeds from their friends and their groups that they were interested in, and less from businesses and things like that. So they started to change how it all worked.

Well, what that meant for people who were using the advertisements was that now all of a sudden there was a different set of expectations about what an ad would do and how people would respond to it that also had to do with how much it cost to put the ad out. So if Facebook saw that an ad wasn’t performing as well in terms of getting the engagement that they wanted from people, they weren’t going to push it as hard, maybe, or it might start to cost more per click to get people to respond to it.

When you’re working as an indie author and you’ve got a book that’s priced somewhere between 99¢ and 9.99, your margin isn’t as great. When you think about there’s a lot of people who have to see your ad before they start responding to it, if you’re so lucky that somebody clicks on what you have and then they come to your sales page, there’s another huge drop-off in who actually buys the thing. So by the end of the day as you’re paying for all of these clicks, by the time you finally get a sale, you might not have actually made any money.

So there’s all kinds of courses out there, and advice from people about how to work the algorithm, but they’re always changing.

KENNEALLY: One outfit that has its own algorithm built in, Porter Anderson, is Wattpad. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, a publishing phenomenon, a media phenomenon. You have covered it extensively in Publishing Perspectives. I bring it up because it pulls together a number of these issues here. It’s an operation that allows for independent authors to come on the platform to take advantage of the audience that’s collected at Wattpad and reach that author. Itself, it’s collecting its own data and sees what’s of interest, and it’s able to help push forward titles that may have a certain potential that wouldn’t be realized unless they really were given a nudge. And it has also reached out beyond the book world, or beyond, I should say, the text world, because they obviously started online, to begin its own publishing house, to begin a studio. Talk about the way that this is all merging so that when we speak about the book business, we really are speaking about something else entirely, a media world.

ANDERSON: Yeah, I’ve been talking a lot about Wattpad not least because it’s international, and that’s our purview at Publishing Perspectives, so it’s kind of a perfect fit for us. But I’m happy about that because it is also, I think, a kind of wave of the future, I think a model of the future. And it fell into this, frankly. The original idea was simply to have a place where readers and writers gathered to read and write each other’s work, always in serial form. About 70 to 80% are women. They are mostly millennials and younger, so it’s a very specific kind of work for the most part, although there are different materials out there.

But what’s happened it they’ve discovered themselves that as they learned with their IT folks to surface various stories for a publisher like Simon & Schuster or Harper Collins, now Sara Sargent over at Random House for Young Readers has become one of their biggest fans. She goes in, she tells them, I would like a story about a heroine who has this happen to her and this happen to her, and then that’s the conclusion. They can go in and use what they’ve nicknamed their story DNA, algorithmic technology, and bring out, from the 500 million stories that are online there, these factors. They can actually start finding the right plot material and finding the right characterization stuff and finding the right authors who are writing the material (overlapping conversation; inaudible).

KENNEALLY: Just to say now, you are not pulling a number out of the air. They have 500 million works.

ANDERSON: And that’s conservative. Actually the last number I heard and it’s probably a couple of months old, so it’s more than that. They have 70 million users around the world active every month, all of them mobile – almost all of them – 90-something percent are mobile.

So the film houses have started watching, the film studios and the production conglomerates have started looking. Their biggest fish to date, with what they now call Wattpad Studios, very correctly, is Sony Television – Sony Pictures Television has come in, and it’s watching the material because if you find the story that you want to make as a film, that you think you are right to have putting through your production house and taking it to a studio, if you find that film on Wattpad and it is one of the popular stories, and that’s one of the factors that the IT team is using, then you’ve already got several million viewers waiting to see that film.

The material comes with an audience in the same way publishers learned it came with readers because you’re selecting a story that already had three million reads, then they go out and buy the book. Now they’ll go out and see the film. So film houses from Germany to Indonesia, they have a Southeast Asian office now in Hong Kong, they’re rolling out into India, they are everywhere. It’s just astonishing. They’ve become the perfect vehicle, and to my mind, the perfect model of not only where story content can be discovered and taken from text into the screens, but also where self-publishers can be found.

Again, however, it is within a rather strict genre definition. Usually romance, YA, teen. What I’m hoping to see someday is that one of the film studios comes forward and says we want a very adult book about this, we want a Hitchcock. I want to find the new Hitchcock who’s writing and see that material. They swear to me it’s out there, that it’s on the platform, we just aren’t asking for it.

KENNEALLY: Nobody’s asked for it yet. Maybe we’ll run out and do that. Javier Celaya, where I want to turn to you and discuss is the way this merging of media of entertainment forms may be leading us on the business side because in Spain you’re beginning see pick-up for subscription models for books which is exciting and perhaps troubling to some of the publishers here. Tell us about that. You’ve got some numbers to share with us.

CELAYA: Yeah, in the last five years, especially with the arrival of platforms like HBO, Netflix, and Spotify (inaudible) in Spain what we call culture of subscription. If we had this conversation five years ago the answer will be there was no subscription service or revenues at all. Three years ago, subscription reported to publishers less than 3% of the total sales. Last year it reported close to 20%. So in three years it went from 3 to 18-something, close to 20%, and continue growing. I know in the US many publishers believe that subscription can have license unit sales, but in this emerging markets war there was no digital, or very few digital, no audio. We then gone from the past to the future without going through the present, meaning that from no consumption at all of the (inaudible) to consuming under this subscription model because we’re becoming accustomed to pay something every month. We had huge piracy rates in Spain because people were not willing to pay for digital (inaudible). So now the good news is that yes, they’re willing to pay for it, but you have to provide them a good service, meaning that you have to provide them a price that is not to high, not to expensive, a lot of content, and unlimited views.

KENNEALLY: And in that culture, there is no unit sale, that’s really the critical point, and that must be concerning publishers whose business lives, at least, live and die on unit sales.

CELAYA: But I think we live in the 21st century and the unit sale model was a 20th century and previous one. In the 21st century, we basically paid for service for everything. U-verse and all this new subscription economy or attention economy is based on service being provided to you. And you cannot continue measuring sales based on units, because that’s not 21st century. It doesn’t mean that the unit sale will go away very rapidly, but today in the Spanish markets – when I say Spanish markets, Spain and Latin America, it represents 80% of the total revenues, and going down. The only thing that is increasing every single year, double digits, is subscription.

KENNEALLY: And within those subscriptions, of course, are audio books. Tell us about the state of audio books in Spain. It is beginning to look a lot like the North American marketplace, becoming very popular.

CELAYA: As news are international everywhere, audio books are becoming also the major trend in all the markets. You hear in all book fair London, Frankfurt, now here in Book Expo, audio becoming the talk of the town. And yes, there was this legend that there will never be an audio market in the Spanish markets in Spain and Latin America because 20 years ago Alfa Watta, (sp?) one of the leading publishing houses now owned by Penguin Random House tried to create that market. I think they were ahead of the times. Twenty years ago, this was not –

KENNEALLY: We did not have iPhones.

CELAYA: We had a Sony Walkman, similar, and you put the tape, or the CD, and it was not very comfortable. Now, because there’s more offering, meaning that this year there was a new study that’s been released that there will be close to 10,000 audio books in Spanish available by the end of this year. I know this figure compared to the US – you guys produce 50,000 audio books every single year, we might look small, but if we had this conversation three years ago, the figure will be only less than a thousand, so in less than three years has come from 1,000 to 10,000.

KENNEALLY: And Fabrice Piault, in France, if we had this conversation last year, there wouldn’t be anything to talk about, but this year there is a fair amount to talk about with audio books. There is going to be a Salon du Livre Audio coming to just outside of Paris in June, and some 40 different publishers are involved.

PIAULT: Yes. Audio books is still a very small market in France, I think. It’s less than 1% of the sales, but it’s really a market who’s growing now really very, very fast. Yes, there will be in June the – there were already some very small festival for audio books, but it was very marginal, and now there will be one near Paris in June, and it’s with all these 40 publishers involved. All the big groups have created special imprints for audio books, so I guess it will increase. It’s the only segment of the digital books who is growing, actually, in France.

KENNEALLY: And obviously that growth, which has been phenomenal, Porter Anderson, has gotten everyone’s attention, but there may be something lurking in the shadows there that you’re concerned with.

ANDERSON: Yeah, and in fact to the point that everyone is making here, we’re finding, when you talk to Storytel, based in Stockholm, they are the largest and most aggressive of the international rollouts in various countries of subscription services based in audio – also E-books, but mostly audio, what they’ll tell you is their biggest problem when they get into the Arabic nations – they just went into the UAE last summer – there’s not enough content to support a subscription, and so they’re having to actually create original stories and original materials themselves in order to stock up enough to support a subscription. Their most recent is Singapore, that’s their 16th nation.

The concern that Chris is talking about that I had mentioned to him about earlier was raised – I was so glad – by David Walter of NPD this morning. I’ve been saying this and getting run out of the room because of course publishers don’t want to hear this, since it is selling and we’re all glad that audio books are selling.

KENNEALLY: You don’t want to ruin the party.

ANDERSON: I don’t want to ruin the party, exactly. But my fear is that as we drive more and more of our consumers to listen to stories instead of reading the stories, what are we doing to reading? I think we’re better at recognizing the danger of visual arts to reading than we are at recognizing the danger of audio arts to reading. We’re glad in the UK, for example, about audio books because guys are listening, and this is important. They’re not going to read. Maybe that’s a group, just let them listen, for God’s sake, if they’ll take a story in any form, thank God, right? But for everyone else, I’m concerned that if we all start listening and listening and listening, we’re already having trouble being able to sit down and read a book. It’s hard to get into the immersive act of reading, and I’m worried we may damage it with this, and so is he – he brought this up.

KENNEALLY: And Dana Beth Weinberg, that’s a concern for you because you see this happening in the classroom at Queens College, and probably everywhere in a classroom these days, getting students to read is a real challenge.

WEINBERG: Well, getting students to do their schoolwork is often the real challenge.

KENNEALLY: Getting them to do their work, yeah.

WEINBERG: But my students are wonderful. But one of the things is we have so much storytelling. Last year when we were at this panel, Porter had talked about how storytelling was moving also to other modalities like Netflix, right?

ANDERSON: Right, exactly.

WEINBERG: And so the jury is out about the audio books and whether that’s as good as the reading. I think one of the things that’s different about that than watching a movie is that if you’re going to actually invest in the audio book, it’s going to be somewhere between five and 12 hours of listening, so you’re engaged with content for a long time, and you’re hearing all of the words with it. Whereas when we take things in otherwise, if you’ve got 140 words for a tweet or you’re looking at Instagram, which is no words, really, or you’re watching a movie that’s only an hour and a half, your level of attention and engagement and tracking of an argument is very different.

I was actually, in preparation for the panel this morning, looking back at old research about the dangers of television that we used to read about a lot in the 1990s, so this is almost ancient history in a way, and how we were going to damage people’s minds if we let out children sit in front of Sesame Street or something for too many hours. I think that we’re starting to see that there are changes in the way that not only are people interacting with each other, but in the way that we interact with ideas as we’re moving away from these long forms of engagement to other ones, taking it in these different snippets. I’ve been seeing over time that there’s a real difference in the way that my students come prepared to write. I think you have to read in order to be a good writer, and I’m not talking about creative writing, I’m talking about nonfiction arguments about things, the rhetoric pieces. So organizing thoughts and doing anything – a small essay is OK, again a short form of engagement. When I take them up to their 25 pages of reports that they have to write, all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to track all the way through. So we’ve had to do much more skill building in recent times. I’m not sure whether that’s just from the reading thing, there’s many other social factors that may be involved in it, but it’s definitely something that I’m concerned about.

KENNEALLY: I looked at some numbers, the trends in independent publishing, and a couple of them were interesting. Some of the platforms do recommend to authors that they think about length and think about shorter rather than longer. If they’ve got a longer novel they should break it up because people do want to get to the end of the story. But also poetry has done very well in independent publishing, and this may be related to this – people are looking for something shorter they can enjoy, but they don’t really have to devote an entire evening to.

WEINBERG: Just a funny aside on this. Coming out of academia, we’re like the kings and queens of these sentences that go on for four or five lines before they end. I remember when I started writing fiction, the advice that I got – if you look at an academic page, there’s almost no indentations, there’s big blocks of text. When you look at fiction books, it used to be that there would be these large chunks of texts, but if you look now at what’s coming, especially on the E-readers, there’s a lot more white space, and that was one of the pieces of advice that I was given early on as an author, that in order to make the audience more comfortable, even if I had the same content, it should be more broken up so that there were more stopping point s and white spaces for people.

KENNEALLY: Andrew Albanese, as you and I chat every week on Beyond the Book about the latest news in publishing, and you’ve got some issues that you follow pretty closely, one of them is related to everything that we’re talking about today, which is freedom of expression and concern over, in this country, at least, net neutrality, which we could devote an entire panel to, but I wonder if you can relate it to the publishing world and your concerns about this loss of net neutrality that’s occurred as a result of changes in the FCC’s regulations, and maybe there’s an effort to bring it back, but why would you want to see net neutrality return?

ALBANESE: I think net neutrality is an important issue for the publishing industry. I’m not sure, are you aware of net neutrality? I’m assuming most of you have heard of the issue at some point? Right, yeah.

KENNEALLY: It’s essentially allowing all content online to be treated in the same way.

ALBANESE: Correct. The issue that I have and why I think it’s such a threat to freedom of expression, and why many people do, is because it would allow platform providers to essentially control speech on their sites. To me it’s an enormously important issue and one that I think that the industry has been silent on.

ANDERSON: Too silent, yeah.

ALBANESE: It’s dangerous. I think the silence can’t continue for much longer. Library groups, author groups, virtually anybody who’s involved in the publishing industries, aside from publishers themselves have really spoken up about it.

KENNEALLY: Porter Anderson, you agree. I hear you.

ANDERSON: Yeah. We actually had some wonderful responses to efforts by the Trump administration, of course, to try to block material that they didn’t want to see. Speaking about Wolff’s first book, and the later book from Carl. (sp?) But what we’re not seeing is this response to what is coming from very much the same political realm, this effort to try to make it possible for your service provider, your online ISP to decide where your speeds will be, so that if you’re reading the kind of thing they don’t want you reading, they might just slow you down to the point that you don’t want to be on that anymore, and you start changing your patterns and what’s coming into your life at the very moment we’re trying we’re trying to – I’m talking as a journalist now – get people to read more and listen to more, and especially watch more on television from more than one medium. We need people to read in a diverse way so that they understand more political angles on things. This would actually be a way of controlling that and keeping them from going. You would funnel them into the one that had the fast speed and looked the beset online. That’s the worst case scenario, but it’s very scary, and I think publishers need to be aware of this.

WEINBERG: It would also have to do with when you do a search, what pops up. So again, thinking about people buying their ads and how that works, and how much is paid for it, and what actually gets the space and the attention. We’ve come from a competition model that we think of as democratic, and already it’s problematic because so many people are vying for those spaces. But now we’ve changed the rules of the game yet again so that it’s not an equal playing field, and it’s not just a playing field that’s unequal based on money, it’s unequal based on all of these other factors.

KENNEALLY: And a diversity of voices, Javier Celaya, is one that’s critical to this particular trade show Book Expo, and there are voices – Spanish language voices – in this country, in North America. It’s a very important market, but one that isn’t so well represented perhaps. Share with us your view from Madrid about the Spanish language market from a global perspective.

CELAYA: I’m still very surprised the lack of representation of Hispanics in Book Expo because they are 57 million Americans that are first and second generation Latinos that were born in this country that work in English and study in English, but they go back home, and they want to keep their Latino roots. They watch the news in Spanish, actually the Spanish news channels like Univision and Televisa. (sp?) They have bigger audiences than CBS or NBC. They are the biggest media conglomerates in the US. And they listen to music in Spanish, and now they read also in Spanish, in print and E-book, and listen to audio book. So I think the sooner the US publishers understand that they have another market next door in their domestic market, and they can start exploiting those rights in Spanish and producing their books in print, E-books, and audio. Most likely print is going to be very difficult. Barnes & Noble used to have a very good section of Spanish, but that’s been diminished as a whole, as Barnes & Noble as a whole. But in E-book and audio book where you can really take those products anywhere in the US, and also export it to Mexico, other Latin American countries could be a source of profit, of revenue to many publishers in this country that are not exploiting properly.

KENNEALLY: And Fabrice Piault, one last point on diversity of voices and perspectives, and, indeed, format is one that you know very well because you are, as we said, working on the association in French known bande dessinée, the graphic novels, we might translate it as comic books in some perspectives. Tell us about the role, the place of the bande dessinée, the graphic novel in the French publishing scene, and how has it benefited, perhaps, or not from some of the changes we’ve discussed?

PIAULT: Bande dessinée has always been an important sector in France, especially from the ‘90s, and it’s also one of the two segments who are growing fast. It’s children books and bande dessinée are comics and graphic novels. I say bande dessinée because it’s like graphic novel or comics, but when you speak about comics, you think about superheroes. When you say graphic novels you think about small audience books. Bande dessinée is a word who cover every (overlapping conversation; inaudible) –

KENNEALLY: It’s an absolutely popular format. Everyone – adults, children – everyone’s involved.

PIAULT: Yeah, any types of books, but drawn like this with small illustration or images. It has been diversifying a lot. Some years ago it was mainly fiction – any type of fiction, but now it’s also nonfiction. It’s a think you can find among the mangas production. Mangas – Japanese mangas, it’s fiction but it’s also nonfiction. You can repair your car with a manga, you can cook with a manga. A manga is just a way to push some information to the customers. Even the literature segment, the literary fiction suffers a lot like everywhere in the world in France. Maybe one of the best sell – it’s not the best seller, but one of the good sells during the last what we call the rentrée littéraire, last autumn, the last full season was actually an American graphic novel from Emil Ferris, What I Love is Monsters. I don’t know what is the exact title in English, it’s something like What I Love is Monsters. It’s from Emil Ferris, if you know it.

KENNEALLY: Not familiar.

PIAULT: So it shows that there are some changes among the public with the people who would have read literary fiction some years ago can read this type of graphic novel, actually it’s a difficult graphic novel, it’s not easy to read it.

But if I can add something about the internet and net neutrality and so on, I think one thing which I’m quite concerned with is how the social network are now becoming the best tool to develop some sort of popular censorship. There was a time when you talk about censorship, you talk about just court, justice and so on. Now censorship is just a campaign on the social network. Any community can do this. If there is a book you don’t like, you just do a campaign on the internet and through the social network. You have this in the United States here, and it has an influence on what is published now because you have some specialized people called – how is it called – people who are controlling the books don’t hurt some specific communities. I don’t remember the –

KENNEALLY: There are some specialists who are reading books in advance of publication –

PIAULT: (overlapping conversation; inaudible) –

KENNEALLY: – I am familiar with that, to cut off the potential for offense or that sort of thing. Sensitivity readers, thank you. Thank you (overlapping conversation; inaudible).

PIAULT: Sensitivity readers, (overlapping conversation; inaudible). Sensitivity readers. We don’t have sensitivity readers in France. We have lawyers who do the same work, but it’s not like in the United States, of course –

ALBANESE: Oh, we have lawyers here, too.

PIAULT: You have lawyers, too, yes. But we had several examples of books who are not forbidden by justice, but were attacked and even some bookstores put the books out because the campaign was so strong that it was not possible for them to keep them. This, I think, is an important concern.

KENNEALLY: You’ve raised an important issue, and I think in the last 45 minutes we’ve been very well informed, and I think given a sense of what we should be watching for in the year to come. I’m very happy to have the privilege to join this group today.

I want to thank our panelists, Javier Celaya from Madrid, Fabrice Piault from Paris, Dana Beth Weinberg from New York City, Andrew Albanese here at New York City’s Publishers Weekly, and wherever you are, Porter Anderson, you’re somewhere wonderful. He travels around the world, he’s the Editor in Chief of Publishing Perspectives. Thank you all very much indeed.

(applause)