Day 2 picked up from where day 1 left off with Member States asking questions of the facilitators of the Second Revised Draft Text for the WIPO Broadcasting Organizations Treaty.

IPA past President, Ana María Cabanellas, shares her first post for the IPA's literacy working group within the Inclusive Publishing and Literacy Committee.

The theme for UNESCO’s 2023 International Day of Education is ‘to invest in people, prioritize education’. I know what UNESCO Is getting at, but I would argue that their statement could easily be turned around: ‘in order to prioritize education we need to invest in people.’

What a feeling - the exhilaration (and a little relief after chairing the programming committee) – following the end of the 33^rd International Publishers Congress. After nearly 2 years of preparations we had over 600 delegates and speakers registered from 63 countries to Jakarta to discuss, dissect, analyse and celebrate our international publishing sector. 

The theme for UNESCO’s fourth International Day of Education is Changing course, transforming education and the last two years have shown how educational publishers have been able to pivot quickly, changing course, to keep pupils learning.

Hugo Setzer, IPA Past President and head of the IPA's Accessibility Working Group spoke to Paul Gillijns and Sanne Walraven of the Dutch Educational Publishers and Dutch General Publishers Associations respectively about their 18 month programme to train publishers in accessibility ahead of the implementation of the European Accessibility Act in 2025.  

Day 3 of the hybrid SCCR 40 saw the Exceptions and Limitations discussions take centre stage. Given the decision of Member States to limit interactions at this meeting to stock-taking, the main focus was on the 130-page report issued by WIPO following the three Regional Seminars held in 2019 in Singapore, Nairobi and Santo Domingo and the subsequent international conference held in Geneva last October. The IPA participated in all these events, gathering together local publishers and coordinating closely with representatives of other stakeholders, including authors and CMOs.  

Francyne Harrigan, the Director of the UN's Information Centre in Jakarta talks to us about how she brought the UN SDG Book Club initiative to Indonesia with a local twist.

Rachel Martin interviews Sherri Aldis, Chief, United Nations Publications.

As part of Global Goals Week, associations from the Brazilian and Portuguese book sectors came together to announce a new SDG Book Club that will launch in 2021.

An Interview with Ellen Sporstøl and Kristin Orjasater on how Norway is inspiring the next generation of readers to become more sustainable. 

This week is Global Goals Week, an annual week of action, awareness, and accountability for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2020, there is a sense of urgency. We have 10 years to achieve the ambitious targets set by the SDGs and that is short amount of time. At the end of 2019, the UN announced that the world was not on track to meet this target. Furthermore, they issued an urgent call for action to accelerate the partnerships, collaborations and projects that are needed to achieve the goals. 

Persian Twitter is filled with an image showing two different covers of the third-grade math textbook in Iran these days. One is from 2019 depicting two girls and three boys playing outdoors. The second one, that caused the storm of fury, is the 2020 version in which the two girls are deducted!

Diversity & Inclusion in the publishing industry is not only relevant for the workforce in our industry (see my previous blog on key surveys measuring exactly that), but also for what we publish. Important questions that arise are the representation of women and minorities in books. Prof. Judi Mesman of Leiden University in the Netherlands studied this very topic and I asked her a series of questions which resulted in the following blog.

The conclusions are relevant for publishers: ‘do you want to aim for tradition, reflection, or emancipation’? Do we see ourselves reflecting today’s situation of women and minorities, or do we see ourselves as catalysts of change, as inspiration for a society that is more diverse and more inclusive, and that will install a sense of belonging for all, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the other lenses of Diversity & Inclusion? 

This also links to a broader discussion taking place at the Educational Publishers Forum addressing the value of (educational) publishing. Educational publishers stand for local solutions, i.e. have a local industry that is publishing text books that represent local society - in terms of gender, but also other lenses of D&I (here is a great example from Canada). 

Over to Prof. Mesman:  

The first day closed with Dr Kenneth Crews waiting to be grilled by delegates and observers. He was given the opportunity this morning, but the highlights today were the side events and the ripples from some late-night messages to delegates.

While the publishing industry was gathered in Frankfurt last week for the most important international book fair in the world, the action was already starting at WIPO in Geneva with an International Conference on Exceptions and Limitations on Friday and Saturday 18-19 October.

At last week’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), organised by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, many delegates asked for educational materials to be made copyright free.