Karine Pansa took over as president of the International Publishers Association (IPA) in January for a two-year term. The previous vice-president, Pansa served on the IPA’s executive committee since 2016 and follows a dynamic term as president by UAE’s Sheikha Bodour al Qasimi, who championed African publishing and the role of women in the industry. Pansa’s priorities are much the same as every IPA president prior to her, “I plan to continue focusing on the IPA’s two key priorities: defending copyright protections and the freedom to publish around the world,” she said.
But the São Paolo-based children’s book publisher is adding another priority: collecting data to get an objective baseline of what is happening in the industry. “We will have a new beginning, driven by data,” said Pansa at the Digital Book World conference in New York City earlier this year. As she noted at the time, the adoption of digital publishing practices, both in production and retailing, vary wildly. In Japan, for example, digital audiobooks account for 35.8% of the total revenue of the book market, while they represent less than 1% of sales in other countries with large book markets, such as Mexico and Colombia. In Spain, digital publishing is growing in popularity, but fully 50% of the material being consumed by readers is being downloaded for free, suggesting piracy is rampant. Piracy also continues to vex Middle Eastern and African publishers, which has stalled digitization in the region.
Pansa is the owner and publishing director at Girassol Brasil Edições, a children’s book publisher in São Paolo, and first became involved with the IPA through the CBL, the Brazilian Book Chamber. Last year she organized the programming for the IPA’s International Congress in Jakarta, Indonesia, under the theme Reading Matters: Embracing the Future.
In New York Pansa acknowledged that digitization also impacted retailing, with online bookselling now dominating in Italy, Korea, and the U.K. Meanwhile, some regions of the world, such as Africa and the Arabic-speaking countries, remain reticent to engage with digital publishing due to the prevalence of digital piracy.
Part of the IPA’s mission is to educate publishers globally and sometimes this comes down to a simple reminder: not everyone is wealthy enough to afford an e-reader, high-speed internet, or even consistent access to books. In the U.K. for example, “75% of people are using e-readers or tablets to access digital material,” said Pansa, “while for many people, like those in my part of the world–Latin America–purchasing a dedicated e-reader is not possible with their salaries.”
Part of Pansa’s message was about making books more accessible to a broader demographic of people. She noted that with its population growth, Africa “offers a big opportunity for publishers to reach a growing audience,” while to reach the disabled community, publishers need to make their books “born accessible.” Pansa noted that with the passage of the European Accessibility Act, publishers will be required as of June 2023 to make all of their digital books accessible should they want to sell them in Europe.
The IPA has been central to publishing’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “We are very supportive of our Ukrainian colleagues from the Ukrainian Booksellers Association,” Pansa said, and in London the IPA is introducing a spotlight on the Ukraine. Also, today, Pansa is participating in a mainstage panel, entitled “Global Outlook and Value of the Publishing Industry,” with Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Nigel Newton, founder and chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing (Main Stage, 11.30 a.m.). She’ll also be offering the introduction to Sadiq Aman Khan, the mayor of London, who is giving a keynote speech on Wednesday.
