This Single Print of Time

Before joining BISG in 2016, I worked for almost two decades as a consultant for book, magazine, and association publishers. Many of my engagements involved workflow assessments, assignments that often started with a dozen or more staff interviews where I'd ask about how things got done.

I'd usually work from a script whose most important question came midway through the interview: "Where do you see things go wrong?" Sometimes the question would give my interviewees pause, with many of the answers starting out as incomplete descriptions that would prompt me to ask for a specific example.

The worst answers always started the same: "I'll give you the perfect example." Over time, I learned to stop taking notes when someone I was interviewing said that. I'd put down my pen (yes: old school) and listen as I learned about a "perfect" example that had occurred just that morning, or maybe even yesterday afternoon.

The examples were never perfect. Responsibility for the problem always lay elsewhere, and the solutions were monolithic: "They just have to get their act together." Every example reflected our tendency to frame the most recent issue in ways that fit our own worldviews. While the examples said a lot about how much work we had to do to propose and implement a recommendation, the same examples were always highly localized, not helpful in creating a solution that cut across departments, let alone between trading partners.

I stopped taking notes about perfect examples a long time ago, so the details are fortunately lost to history. The collective experience, though–the need to dig deeper to understand and solve a problem–is something I carried with me to BISG. We're an organization led by members who volunteer their time to do what is often hard in publishing: understanding and solving problems.

Over the past decade, every committee and working group call has taught me something new. Because we support a broad agenda, learning all the time can be daunting, but it's our recipe for success. In committees, we hear all sides of an issue, fostering dialogue that often opens eyes and helps us find solutions that any one person probably would not have offered.

These are conversations that help us see around corners, working to develop solutions that escape "this single print of time." The commercial book business has been around for more than 200 years. It moves slowly enough that you might think that it has always been this way. Indeed, some of our least helpful answers are variations of "We don't do it that way?" and "Prove to me this will be better before I consider it."

The work our volunteers do helps the industry see past this single print of time. Things are always improving because people offer their time and insight to make the book business work better. In the last three years, we have seen significant efforts in Metadata and Workflow committees to prepare for accessibility mandates. The Supply Chain committee has grappled with forecasting and inventory management as well as sustainability (including the implications of EUDR). The Rights committee developed a translation rights royalty standard that will significantly reduce the amount of time spent decoding royalty reports. The Subject Codes committee has added hundreds of codes to better describe books in a market that evolves each year. Everyone has a role to play in "Book Publishing Next."

That's not a complete list of the work. If you want to understand it all, look at our committee and working group pages. Browse the reports, recommendations, best-practice guides, webinar recordings, and more in our Knowledge Center. Check out our press archive. Our members and volunteers are always building and repairing the plumbing of the book business. Without their contributions, things would change only when they broke. With their direction, BISG works to prepare the book business to deal with change at a time of our choosing.

In coming to BISG, I promised our committees that they would be supported as our most important resource. In return, I expected a lot from them. The content of the Knowledge Center, including the sometimes cutting-edge programming that looked around corners for the industry, started in our committees and working groups. We're not smarter than the book business, but we have heard from its most active members multiple times a month, every month, for the past ten years.

In the walk-up to my retirement, a friend and committee member sent a lovely note that included a Latin inscription, "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice," an epitaph for Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. I couldn't think of a better way to describe my decade at BISG: "Reader, if you seek a monument, look around."

The BISG board has invested a great deal of time and energy in searching for my successor, Allison Belan. She will bring a new and important perspective to the organization. Our committee chairs and volunteers, supported by Brooke Horn and Liz Bartek, have worked to give Allison the foundation for building an even better BISG, and I am sure she will be the leader the organization and our volunteers deserve. I'll miss the people who have made the past ten years fly by–the notes come after June 30!–but the work already lives in and around us. Thank you for building and being the monument.