Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast about the art and science of making books. Arthur Attwell speaks to book-making leaders about design, production, marketing, distribution, and technology. These are conversations for book lovers and publishing decision makers, whether you’re crafting books at a big company or a boutique publisher.
Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Attwell. 15 years ago, I had a grand idea to make books cheaper and more accessible. I'd realised that every photocopy shop could print books if we'd only let them. Not beautiful books, but perfectly functional ones.
Arthur Attwell:And those copy shops were everywhere. I bet you can think of a photocopy shop you could walk to right now. They could be print on demand bookstores who'd pay publishers to be able to sell their books legally. What I needed was to find a publisher with the guts and generosity of spirit to try it with me. The story of that business, called Paperight, is for another time.
Arthur Attwell:But the bold publisher who first stepped up and saw that we could put books within walking distance of every home was Frances Pinter. Her support for this big idea made her a personal hero of mine. So it's especially wonderful to be able to talk to her here about her work and about what it means to be bold and generous in publishing.
Arthur Attwell:Frances Pinter has been pioneering in academic publishing for decades, especially in the field of open access publishing. At the age of just 23 she founded Pinter Publishers, which would become a leader in social sciences publishing.
Arthur Attwell:After 20 years there, she went on to lead the Open Society Institute's programs in publishing and education in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and established the Central European University Press. Since then, she's been the founding publisher at Bloomsbury Academic, the CEO of Manchester University Press, a fellow at the LSE and the University of London, and founded the groundbreaking organization, Knowledge Unlatched, which we'll talk about just now. We'll also talk about the multimillion dollar Open Climate Campaign, which she instigated. In 2020, she returned to the Central European University Press as its executive chair. And I haven't even mentioned half of the organizations you've worked with.
Arthur Attwell:Frances, it's an absolute pleasure to see you again. Thank you for joining me today.
Frances Pinter:Well, thank you so much. I am just delighted to be chatting with you.
Arthur Attwell:Oh, that's fantastic. I think we first met back in 2007, and I remember it very clearly.
Frances Pinter:That's right. You were doing innovative things then, and I guess you're doing innovative things now. It's really great to see what you're up to.
Arthur Attwell:I think the second time we saw each other was in 2010. You and I were both at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York, and I saw you pitch an idea for getting libraries to crowdfund the publishing of monographs, and it was very exciting to hear you pitch it. And in preparing for our conversation today, I went and watched that talk again. And I'd forgotten that at the time you called it the International Library Coalition For Open Access Books, or ILCOAB, and you offered a bottle of champagne to the person who could come up with a better name. So my first question had to be, did anyone earn the champagne?
Arthur Attwell:And was it for Knowledge Unlatched?
Frances Pinter:Well, Arthur, the Tools of Change was a truly wonderful event. But on that day, particularly, I was absolutely terrified. You have to remember it was 14 years ago, which, technologically, it was just such a different era.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:For me, it was bad enough facing a crowd of a thousand people, but there was something worse than that.
Frances Pinter:And that was that it was being relayed live over the internet, something quite new then in those days. And my team at Bloomsbury, well, they were watching me. And even worse, my husband who'd always been banned from coming to any public presentations I'd ever given, he was watching me too. But you asked about the name for ILCOAB. Well, I spent 2 years inviting people I met at conferences to send me their suggestions, and I spent 2 years rejecting all the recommendations.
Frances Pinter:I was able to explain the concept. I had the slide deck. I used it all around the world, but I had no catchy name. So in the end, my husband, David, he got really fed up with this. And one day he blurted out, "How about calling it Knowledge Unlatched?"
Frances Pinter:And so I gave him the bottle of champagne, and then I got to drink half of it myself.
Arthur Attwell:I love it. Yeah. I think our spouses spend a lot of time listening to us, and knowing the answer to our questions and just waiting for the moment. So it's great.
Frances Pinter:Well, words are a really funny thing. You know? A few years later, I was delighted that the word 'unlatched' seemed to have taken on a life of its own.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah.
Frances Pinter:It became a verb. People started talking about unlatching their books, and they still use it to this day.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah. Absolutely. Can you tell us a bit more about what Knowledge Unlatched wanted to achieve and how it was set up and a bit about, I suppose, what it became?
Frances Pinter:Sure. The well, the original premise of KU was that libraries should collectively commit to purchasing a monograph before publication, pretty much what they had always been doing, advanced publication orders. But that money would then be pooled and that particular title or group of titles would then be made open access. So the publisher knew that it would get this assured income from making the digital version free while they could also still carry on print versions to anyone who wanted to buy a printed copy. So the incentive for the libraries was a lower price on a per book basis.
Frances Pinter:And this was achieved by cutting out the big aggregators who were selling the closed versions. And so money was saved there.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:But you do need a certain minimum number of libraries acting together to make this work. So the metaphor at the time was one of ice cream.
Arthur Attwell:[laughs]
Frances Pinter:It's not perfect, but it kinda ran like this: you get the vanilla version for free, but if you wanted an ice cream sandwich, you had to pay for it.
Arthur Attwell:Right. So the the the basic book was free, but then there were other things the publisher could layer on top of that book that would then be charged for and that would be part of their business model.
Frances Pinter:Absolutely. And one of the layerings, as it were, was the printed edition, which some people still want.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:And and even now still want.
Arthur Attwell:Yep.
Frances Pinter:Of course, we now have many open access models, and and Knowledge Unlatched is better known as a marketplace for publishers to get support from libraries, for a number of different '08 models, including this original one. But the original model is now more akin to the recently developed model where a publisher says to the library community, "If together you maintain the current level of subscription for a closed journal, then we'll make it open."
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:So it's it's really good because libraries aren't actually paying anything extra, but they're doing good by making the content open.
Arthur Attwell:Kind of seems so obvious now in hindsight, but I imagine that 15 years ago, as you said, you'd had to take that slide deck around for years to get the idea bedded down. And I'm also, I suppose, intrigued that libraries collaborate successfully. That kind of large scale collaboration seems so rare. But I know that you've done a lot of work with organizing library networks, so I suppose you had a sense of how that would work.
Frances Pinter:Yes. I did learn a great deal when I was setting up EIFL, Electronic Information For Libraries, which was originally covering 30 countries, now 50, and it's a consortium of consortia.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:And I really have an immense respect for libraries and librarians, and I love working with them. And they do work collaboratively. Takes a while to get them to agree on a particular pathway, but once they do, they're all set.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah. That is amazing. You then spent several years driving industry wide research and open initiatives and open access. And one of the things that I noticed is a common thread in a lot of what you spoke about, especially during those years of essentially campaigning for the these new concepts of how to fund open access work. The common thread was that you always use the word quality when you advocated for these more efficient models.
Arthur Attwell:And it made me wonder if there's an inherent risk when processes get streamlined and digitized that people start cutting corners and the quality loses out. Perhaps it's on things like editing or design or other places that we have to invest human energy and curation and so on. Is that, do you see that risk that quality can lose out? Is it something that needs to be consciously maintained?
Frances Pinter:Well, it certainly needs to be consciously maintained, but publishers have cut corners all the time and have been doing so for centuries.
Arthur Attwell:[laughs]
Frances Pinter:Cuts don't always have to come at the expense of quality. But what's a sensible cut has always been a subject of debate. But these days, we have so many new software tools at hand, and we can experiment with new ways of reducing costs while maintaining quality. For example, a translator doesn't have to start from scratch anymore.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:They often begin with a machine translation, which is not perfect. But nevertheless, it reduces the amount of time that they need to spend on a project. So that's efficient and doesn't reduce quality.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:Executing design is another interesting area. I mean, it's huge potentials, and the technology behind the creative can make it easier and quicker to get to the finished product.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:Of course, we still have a long way to go with this, and not everybody is a Leonardo da Vinci. But I remember a time when academic book covers were really dull because publishers didn't want to spend money on design. Now it's so much easier to get something that's appealing, and therefore, it's cheaper.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah. I see so much conversation about using AI as a tool, which speaking as a software developer is really just souped up version of exactly those automated machine translations and starting designs that we've already seen. And that still publishers know and enjoy the fact that they need to put good people on top of that process or at the end of that process to make sure that that book is still beautiful, that translation is still compelling. Something else I've noticed, you know, when I look at what you've spoken about and your work is that you have a very pragmatic approach to money in publishing, which I always appreciate. I think it's so interesting that looking back at the work you've done, in the 90s, you led a project called the Hungarian Publishing Loan Program.
Arthur Attwell:You were helping publishers and banks arrange small low interest loans. And what amazes me is we're talking about Central Europe just after the fall of communism, and you're in a country like Hungary, nearby Poland is in a similar position, and they're trying to build these strong capitalist economies and connect them in with the West. And what was it like to work in that environment, trying to connect the money for publishers? What did publishing look like there and then?
Frances Pinter:Well, the 90s were a really heady time in the 30 post-communist countries where I worked.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:It seemed that everything was possible. But at the individual level, change came hard for some and more easily for others.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:So before 1989, the state was a very generous supporter of publishing. And indeed, all of the arts and education benefited from this. But it was also a form of control.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:Authors and publishers were accustomed to a very privileged and cushioned environment and adapting to the new market conditions. It was pretty traumatic for some, but energizing for others. And I was very privileged to be working with the change makers, the ones that embrace the new opportunities.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:They were young. They wore jeans. And today, I see them in suits at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Unfortunately, in some countries, as you know, we've seen backsliding against democracy. And the new autocratic governments are playing to the same tune as the communists before them.
Frances Pinter:They're investing massively in supporting the arts, the arts that they approve of, and menacingly are controlling what is publishing.
Arthur Attwell:And is this something you're seeing from your position now at Central European University Press?
Frances Pinter:Most definitely.
Arthur Attwell:Perhaps you could just tell me a bit more about what the Central European University Press does, how it works in its publishing.
Frances Pinter:It's a small university press. It publishes in the English language. Its remit when I founded it was to publish books about the region, of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It has built up a backlist of extremely fine literature from scholars, both from within the region and outside the region, and now it's expanding to being more issue based around problems that affect everybody, such as illiberalism, climate...
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:...and war. We have some of the finest books on Ukraine and Russia and the whole history that has led up to this dreadful situation that they're facing now.
Arthur Attwell:Something that I couldn't fit into the bio at the beginning is that when you originally found yourself in Eastern Europe, that was when you were working with George Soros, when he was establishing the Central European University. Do I have that right?
Frances Pinter:Absolutely. And one day, he rang me, and I didn't know who he was, in 1991, and said, "I'm setting up a university. I need a press and somebody gave me your name. Can you help me?"
Arthur Attwell:Were you still at Pinter Publishers at that point?
Frances Pinter:I was at Pinter Publishers, and I was still there until '94 when he called me one day and said, "Frances, wouldn't it be interesting if we could translate all the classics of the social sciences and humanities of the West into all the languages of the East?" And I said, "Yeah, that's an interesting idea." And he said, "Can you do it?" And I took a deep breath and said, Yes.
Frances Pinter:But then I had to sell Pinter Publishers. I had a base in Budapest, but working, oh, from Mongolia to the Caucasuses, Poland to all of Russia, with just amazing experiences while we got that translation program going and other projects too to support the development of the independent private publishing sectors.
Arthur Attwell:Fascinating. And was open access a piece of the puzzle then, or was this before that model really came together?
Frances Pinter:Well, you have to remember that in those days, in the '90s, it was a time when journals were only just going digital. It was in 2000, 2001 where the Budapest Open Access Initiative was drawn up. And that was really the first statement that got people thinking about the fact that publicly funded research should be publicly available. And it's had a huge impact on the way open access has developed.
Arthur Attwell:That's so interesting. I hadn't quite put those pieces of the puzzle together. The Budapest statement was, of course, in Budapest, and that's where you were partly based at the time. Was there a connection between the organization of the Budapest statement and the the gathering there and the work of the Central European University?
Frances Pinter:It was part of what was then called the Open Society Institute, and now that's the Open Society Foundations. It had a number of people from that group, but it also had Americans, deeply committed scientists and— also from Western Europe— who could see that something wrong with the old model given that we now had the digital affordances that could make something else possible.
Arthur Attwell:20 something years later, 2013, you said in an interview that and this is, I hope, an accurate quote, "What we really need here is to change the way we fund the publishing of quality content." And I think the keyword there is the way we fund the publishing. Because as I said, you've got this pragmatic approach to money and to see that the way that money normally works in publishing or the way it's seen, I suppose, from the non publishing mainstream, is that the only way money works in publishing is that customers pay for books at the end of the day, but that there are other ways that money can move around.
Arthur Attwell:I feel like things have changed a lot in the last 10 years when it comes to how money moves through publishing and how books get made, but I can't quite make up my mind whether I think that change feels like progress or not. If your 2013 self or earlier saw the scholarly world— scholarly publishing world— we have today, what would disappoint you, and what would make you happy?
Frances Pinter:Many things make me happy about what's going on since then or what has gone on since then, but open access has brought along with it a lot of additional questions and issues that need addressing. But if I start by going back 15 years, that was a point where I was still called a "copyright terrorist" by some of my more conservative publishing colleagues. They just couldn't see how you could make something open and still make ends meet. And we've come a long, long way since then. A long way.
Frances Pinter:Most people understand the benefits and they've gotten used to open licenses such as Creative Commons which protects copyright, and the evidence for the beneficial impact of open access with society, it's incontestable. The stats themselves show many more multiples of usage than similar closed content. But for me the most outstanding piece of evidence of progress came during the early days of the pandemic when everyone made their content open. And this was done primarily so that students who couldn't get into classes and libraries could at least read books and journals at home. But at the same time, scientists who were working on COVID vaccines, they suddenly had access to so much more research than ever before.
Frances Pinter:The vaccines were developed, tested, and brought to market so much more quickly than any other vaccines had ever been. Now we didn't get the politics of vaccines right globally, but in the end many lives were saved by getting these out earlier than other vaccines. But at the same time, I think one of the things we have to be careful about is in preserving the independence of publishing. And there are a number of threats that I hadn't foreseen in 2013 and it all has to do with money.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah.
Frances Pinter:For example, the huge investment in technology, that's taken the global players into the stratosphere in terms of their reach and power and predominance, an advantage over smaller publishers. But having said that, these big publishers are now offering their services to smaller ones as a way of amortizing their huge investments. So it's not all bad news, but you do have to keep an eye on it.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:And, of course, the way open access is funded through institutions and research funders means that these bodies could compromise the editorial independence of some publishers in some parts of the world.
Frances Pinter:And that's a big issue, an [unclear] issue, but something we need to be aware of. And, of course, the possibilities of a AI, they were seen by a few nerds in 2013, but I wasn't one of them. I would have been very excited about it if I had, and I am still. But I guess with a healthy dose of caution, I mean, we need to find balanced ways of regulating AIs.
Frances Pinter:And one of the things that has come up recently with the ability to put so much out there on the web is that we really need to do standards of integrity in publishing in particular. I mean, just as trust in political life has dwindled, so has trust in academic publications. And we really take care of our best brands and make sure they earn that trust every day. And some of those brands are big and some of those brands are small.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Arthur Attwell:That's fascinating. I suppose that's such a tricky balance to strike, how to use the AI. And when you're not in those big organizations, they just seem so completely enormous. I like to think that those big organizations, at the end of the day, are just individuals making individual decisions and maybe there's a way to sway their opinions to help them make better decisions. It is a bit nerve wracking.
Frances Pinter:Well, I think you have to be careful with that. I mean, many of the individuals, of course, are wonderful, and they're talented and they're doing great stuff. But at the end of the day, these large— usually publicly listed— corporations are responsible to their— accountable to their shareholders— and their job is to make money. If the academic community doesn't like that, and a big sector of it doesn't, then they have to find other ways of taking care of their publications. But you can't ask a leopard to change its spots.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah. I certainly found when I was working on my Paperight startup, trying to empower publishers to do things a little differently, learning some hard lessons about the fact that incumbents just aren't in a position to change. It's the same kind of thing that Clayton Christensen was writing about years ago in The Innovator's Dilemma. I would love to ask you also about how you see the future now that we are talking about AI, among many other things, and the innovations you want to focus on next. I think innovating is often about finding an incentive based solution to a collective action problem, like a clever way to get people to do the right thing that they didn't have a good reason to do before.
Arthur Attwell:And I'm curious to know what you think are today's big collective action problems that you are watching or working on, and perhaps that is also a good time to tell me a bit more about the Open Climate Campaign, which sounds like one of those collective action problems.
Frances Pinter:Well, recently, I pondered over the benefits of OA to the COVID vaccine research. And I thought to myself, what if we could do the same for climate change and biodiversity? I mean, after all, it's the most existential problem that faces all of us.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:And at the moment, it's only under 50% of all research publications in those fields are open. And so I thought, well, it'd be nice if the rest could go open. And so with some colleagues of mine, we raised some money from Arcadia and also from the Open Society Foundations to set up the Open Climate Campaign. And the approach here is to make governments and research funders around the world aware of open access and then to ensure that when new policies are put in place, that mandates are issued and followed.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:Redirecting funding flows is the next step. But this is a challenge that is actually different in different parts of the world.
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:But it's a third pillar of getting this done. So we need policies, we need mandates, and then we need the funding flows to go where they should be going.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Frances Pinter:The campaign is producing the tools for others to advocate for this change, kind of a cascade model. And there's lots of resources and things to look at on their website. We're only in the 2nd year, and there's lots more to be done.
Arthur Attwell:Fantastic. We'll, put that URL in the show notes so it'll be available for everyone to have a look at. And then as we wrap up, I'd like to jump all the way back to your publishing beginnings for a moment. When you were just 23 and you started a social sciences publishing company and then actually made it work, which is hard enough, doubly hard when you're 23. And I can't imagine you knew what you'd achieved, though I imagine you were pretty determined.
Arthur Attwell:When you see someone else starting out like that now, are you excited for them or terrified for them?
Frances Pinter:Mostly excited. That's because I've never known a year in publishing where people didn't wring their hands and say, "This is the most terrible time for start ups."
Arthur Attwell:Mm-hmm.
Frances Pinter:And yet here we are with a much more successful and sophisticated industry than it was when I first came into it. And for anyone starting out now, I'd say, hold on to your vision and go for it. There are now many more innovative partnerships that can be developed with peers and with the bigger fish in the sea. I'd join as many trade associations as I possibly could. They really can help you.
Frances Pinter:It really is a very collegial and supportive environment in which to create something new. I love publishing, have done so for decades, and will never stop.
Arthur Attwell:Well, thank you. Your work and journey has been an inspiration and an absolute pleasure talking more about it. Frances, thank you so much for our conversation today.
Frances Pinter:Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it tremendously.
Arthur Attwell:This episode was edited by Helen le Roux and researched by Jade Toweel. How Books Are Made is supported by Electric Book Works, where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com.