Supply Chain Committee Charter (2026)

Defining “Supply Chain”

A supply chain is the network of all the individuals, organizations, resources, activities and technology involved in the lifecycle of a product. A supply chain encompasses everything from the delivery of source materials from the supplier to the manufacturer through to its eventual delivery to the end user, followed by returns and eventual disposal. Any assessment of a supply chain includes its economic, sustainability, and political impact, among other variables.

Current State

The book industry supply chain is made up of silos of information within different segments including publishers, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors, libraries, retailers and industry partners. As a result, the constituencies have limited visibility into what’s happening across the supply chain, making it challenging to forecast supply and demand and use data to guide business decisions.

The current supply chain was built in an era of physical products (print books, audiobooks on tape). It manages most aspects of print sales and distribution (ordering, receipt and return, and sales reporting) and supports orders between established trading partners. Legacy systems from the 1980s and 1990s don’t take advantage of new approaches, and enterprise solutions built with custom integrations have trouble adapting to new business models.

New use cases require development of one-off solutions. Interoperability across systems for things like sales reporting proves elusive. Repositories are proprietary or not employed, reducing transparency and industry-wide understanding. Opportunities exist to deliver better data going out (metadata, in particular) and coming back (inventory data, sales data by channel, real-time reporting). This committee seeks to identify and implement ways that we can redesign the supply chain to support transparency, product visibility, improved revenue, reduced costs, and the ability to adapt and grow.

In a fall 2025 survey, committee members identified automation and AI integration in the supply chain, enhancing forecasting and inventory management, and navigating regulatory changes, tariffs, and trade impacts as areas that the committee should consider in 2026. Several respondents also pointed to the importance of making progress against Book Publishing Next deliverables. The survey was distributed before the EU excluded books from its implementation of EUDR, but interest in regulatory changes overall was a priority for more than half of those responding.

Objectives

• Increase awareness about changes and challenges in the book industry supply chain through research, communications, and other actions.

• Explore the impact of developing longer-term partnerships on the efficiency and effectiveness of the book industry supply chain.

• Examine the opportunities and issues related to sustainability considerations affecting the U.S. market

• Promote the value of prevailing standards and best practices.

• Update or implement standards and best practices that are of value to multiple parts of the supply chain.

Stakeholder Impact/Benefits

• Standards that are used consistently across the supply chain reduce overall cost and increase transparency in reporting. As the nature of inventory and demand shifts, this transparency underpins the industry’s ability to track what is going on within and across channels. More widespread use of appropriate standards, including e-commerce packages, ONIX, EDItX, and interoperable file formats can reduce costs, increase flexibility managing reprints, and improve supply-chain effectiveness.

• Discussing emerging trends, including capacity, interoperability, transparency, sustainability, and piracy and counterfeiting, informs the community and provides a foundation for coordinated change. Communication and outreach also provide BISG with opportunities to demonstrate how its committee approach yields benefits across areas that in many other parts of the industry remain siloed.

• Creating a shared understanding of the current supply chain and the potential impact of changes promotes a shared understanding that allows the industry to focus on opportunities as well as issues and threats that it can address through enforcement, updates to standards, and potentially lobbying conducted by organizations like AAP.

Deliverables

1. Advance and support the Book Publishing Next initiative to develop and modernize industry standards through the following projects:

   1. Develop an approach to report real-time availability and inventory data sharing

   2. Develop a template for print lead time planning, especially for titles switching between digital and offset models.

   3. Begin work to promote technology adoption across the supply chain, in areas that can include vendor-neutral metadata and inventory APIs, forecasting platforms to align demand and production, and supply chain tracking dashboards for print and digital delivery

   4. Consider global print and digital distribution options that would be supported by improved data sharing and planning

2. Organize the monthly Supply Chain Lunch & Learn webinar series

3. Oversee work done by the Sustainability Working Group and contribute to their two main efforts: 1) create and promote an approach to carbon calculation and 2) support Ooligan Press in their work to publish a guide to sustainable publishing

4. Offer support and engagement opportunities for new student members following the introduction of a new student dues level

Blockers

Because the supply chain committee works to solve problems that affect multiple segments of the publishing industry, its membership must reflect all of those segments. Representation in key areas (paper suppliers, manufacturing, distribution, third-party sales) is limited and needs to be bolstered in order to fully address industry issues. Trying to update systems and workflows across legacy investments requires careful and persistent planning.