we are going to have a great

group of industry leaders who are going to be speaking to us today and we have a wonderful ceo panel where they're going to talk about how they're transforming their organization and bring leadership to the industry. so to introduce our panel. we have jonathan karp president and ceo of simon schuster, leading essence's, numerous publishing groups and international companies. previously he was publisher and editor in chief of 12, an imprint of the hachette book group and editor in chief of random house, where he began his publishing career in 1989. i love to say that as an editor assistant. and then we have amy kochhar. she's the president and ceo. are we sorry? he's the president and ceo of baker and taylor before helming the country's largest public and academic library wholesaler, a role he assumed in 2021 after the company divested from follett corporation, he was executive vice president of software products and services and educational technology.

prior to baker and taylor, ammann was chief product officer and senior vice president of product development at mcgraw-hill. amazon, also an author of a children's book series, gene fudge. and author of oak mary mcadam. mckinney mckinney, m.s. messed that up, became president and ceo of abrams in november 2022, making her the first woman to hold the position in the company's history. her appointment marked a return to abrams after 30 years having started her publishing career there in sales and marketing. prior to abrams, can you say your name again? mcavennie. mcavennie was the chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer at open road integrated media and held senior roles at s.a., harpercollins and zondervan. and then we have peter warwick. he's the president and ceo

scholastic. prior to his appointment, peter was an independent director on scholastic's board for seven years. he has held several senior level positions at thomson reuters. reuters, including as ceo of significant business units, and has he and he began his career at pearson, first in an editorial capacity and eventually becoming ceo of its professional education and information business unit and our moderator, lucia rahilly is global editorial director at mckinsey and company. lucia is global is also deputy publisher of mckinsey global publishing, a team of more than 100 people worldwide. lucia co-hosts the mckinsey podcast and co-moderator mckinsey life. please welcome our guests today. can you hear me?

hello. hi, folks. i'm lucia rackley, i i'm mckinsey's editorial director and i am so grateful to be together with you today to speak with the leaders of some of the biggest and most respected publishing houses in the business. book publishing as you know, like many other industries, is in the throes of rapid change in technology innovation. and we'll look to our roundtable and our panelists today to illuminate what's new, what's now and what's next. in other words, how they're navigating this potentially disruptive interval and how they develop the talent and the culture and the leadership skills that will be so vital to continuing to thrive in the future. so welcome to let's dig in. and i want to start with some context on the dynamics of the industry. how do you see the state of book publishing right now? is it expanding or is it

contracting? and how sanguine are you on the trade sector? and peter, why don't we start with you? okay. thank you. well, i think i think the industry at the moment is in a period of pretty rapid change, actually. i mean, perhaps more rapid than we've seen for for some time. and in the short term, there's a certain amount of cyclicality. and i think we're in a bit of a down cycle at the moment because of the fact in many ways that we've been in quite an upcycle during the pandemic and then immediately immediately afterwards. but i feel i feel pretty optimistic now about where things are going. i look at it particularly from the point of view of children's publishing and what excites me about it, i think, really is, first of all, in terms of kids reading, there's never been a greater need than now to help

support finance and fund literacy in schools and and in homes everywhere. and that applies to many countries. it's not just in the united states, and it's partly because of the issues that we've all seen of increasing social economic polarization in the society in which we live, that that readers, the kids who get good, you know, get good schools, they've got professional parents and all the rest of it. they're by and large doing fine. but there's many kids who are not. they come from underserved communities and they need our help. and i think that we one of the good things that's happening at the moment is that state governments, particularly to some extent, federal, certainly other sources of funding, are realizing that books in the home something that really matters. and that gives me a lot of

optimism that there is actually a lot of interest in that. the second thing is that publishing is nothing, if not innovative and creative. if you look at, for example, the rise of graphics, not necessarily to every parent's taste, but but if you just think about, you know, we've we've just published the latest sort dogman pokemon and the scarlet shadow and it was published in march. and we've, i think the number of copies we've sold. so far is 740,000 something some it's about three quarters of a million copies of that book. i mean, that's through innovation that that that that whole genre has. and i think we'll see more innovation in the industry as we as we go forward. thank you. peter was looking at me during that in part because i was

bellyache to him about my children's preoccupation with graphic novels and whether i should be concerned about their insistence on buying the new dogman mary, why don't we go to you since you're also in the children's and graphic books space and we'll come back to jonathan? yeah, i think well, first and foremost, i'm super opens optimistic about the industry aside from the success we're seeing in many of the children's properties like dogman like diary of a wimpy kid. what i'm seeing more systemically throughout publishing is a real groundswell of independent publishers of independent authors, really rising up and finding their way through the. through to the consumer. and i think that is heartening for the whole industry. and i think there are a lot of lessons in that, in the way that they present themselves, the way they present their books, the

way they find their audiences. i think a lot of it is what you're going to touch on in your your questions today. and the things that we're going to be talking about. but i think that's a real more books are being published now than ever before. so and jonathan. well, actually, i want to talk about the graphics, too, because. well, no, it's true that and i don't think it matters, you know, i mean, years ago, i think one of the most popular kinds of books for those classic comics where great works of literature were presented through comics books. and i remember when i was a kid, this hbo, remember, i've never talked about this, but those those mr. magoo cartoons where mr. magoo played every major character in american literature. i mean, mr. magoo, it's like long john silver and treasure island. i mean, i learned a lot from mr. magoo. so anyway. yeah, so so the industry, you know, it's like talking about the weather, right? and elmore leonard said, don't write about the weather. and he's right about that. so if there are any writers in the audience, don't write about the weather, but, you know, some

days it's good, some days it is. and i think that generally, you know, the outlook is bright because more people are reading. and and also, obviously, the and you're going to talk about audio books later. but, you know, for the half of the population that doesn't want to buy regular books, audio books presents such an opportunity for growth. and the idea that you can also listen to audiobooks while you're doing other things expands the amount of time that's that's available to read books. so that's very exciting. thank you. and alan, peter spoke to the socioeconomic discrepancy and you are one of the biggest suppliers, if not the biggest supplier to libraries. yeah, i'm going to touch upon this from a couple of different lenses. very optimistic about the industry per se. a adults and children, i think diverse stories being told where

children and families can see themselves. there was an older concept i used to use called windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors. and to mary's point earlier, independent authors in american stories, real lived, authentic stories is where we see a lot of the growth coming in from. our goal is to enable libraries and schools to create lifelong learners so that when they grow up, they are willingly sent spending a portion of their disposable income on books. there's actually spending real money, i believe in that. that contributes to a healthy lifestyle. and so i think with more awareness about how running can be good for cardiovascular health, that reading and literacy is good for your mental health with, you know, we're we're on the verge of full mental health epidemic, if you will. and i believe that literacy and

the written word, real, authentic stories and creating lifelong learners and readers of children is the way to go. so i'm very optimist stick. i think libraries are very optimistic. there are headwinds like there have been for the last 200 years, but a special shout out, i don't know if any one of you know here that baker and taylor this year has 197 years old and it's only because of people like you and the ever evolving state of the publishing industry that we've we've been here with the support of the publishing partners that are evolving. so thank you. very optimistic. fantastic. okay. before we get too far, i want to get to the elephant in the room here, which is the juggernaut that is jen and i. how do you expect, jenny to affect the book publishing industry and how fast how

quickly? peter, let's start with you. okay. well, is it. it's yeah, it's it's it's the elephant in the room. and and i think i think that the you can look at it a variety of different ways. but i think one way of looking at it is thinking in terms of supply and thinking of demand. i think when you're looking on the supply side, there's some major concerns about the protection of authors rights and intellectual property, etc., etc., etc. we have, i think, over 40 lawsuits currently in the united states about protection of of ip in that sense led most prominently probably by the by the new york times. and we all have to think about, you know, if you take chapter have our books already entered jpt probably have once they're in you can't take them out. and so it's a major concern that we have to work as publishers

with with our authors in order to protect and get proper, proper value and remuneration for the intellectual property that that that that belongs to writers and to to publishers. i think one of the one of the other sort of impacts perhaps of of of of age and i on the supply side is an even greater proliferation of of books and all the rest of it that that. and i think that's going to be important for publishers in the sense that i think it can be even more important that publishers are seen as being a sort of, you know, you need to have a you need to have an imprint and a brand and a reputation in order to help you decide what's really good and what's not. so i think that said, i think when you look at the demand side, then i think that there's all kinds of ways in which using

jenn-air i in order to reach the right customers, in order to develop new readers and that kind of thing, there's a lot of opportunity there. if as long as jeni's used in a sort of intelligent, open and realistic way, jonathan well, i guess i'd like to disagree with your metaphor of the elephant in the room. i think it's more like the cicada in the room. so, you know, lots of buzzing and lots of screwing and and and look, i mean, you know, this is this is clearly, you know, these rights are being these rights are being infringed. and, you know, our our books are authors are the building blocks of these albums. and it's like they're they're the basis of it. it's like building a house. and we're making the cement and and, you know, i thought we got into publishing to put great works of of writing out there. and now i'm realizing that, well, i guess we've also put

some really great data out there and that data is rich. these these sentences are, you know, they're edited. they're they're obviously labored over by writers for a long period of time. and it's some of the best material that's available. google just, i think, paid something like. $60 million for the rights to everything on reddit per year. so i think that, you know, authors and publishers should ultimately be paid. i'm very happy that those 40 lawsuits are going on. and i think that eventually will work its way through the courts and be resolved to everyone's satisfaction until then, we're going to we're going to just sort of have to make our way through it. and i think it's still very early days. i'm not not really, you know, i don't think it's worth going to defcon five about just yet. and it is definitely a valuable tool. it's definitely going to make us more efficient. it's going to help us, you know, process and gather information better and hopefully allow

workers to do a higher level of work that's more interesting and creative for them. but all of the caveat to supply and we have to regard it with caution, i personally don't think it's going to blow up the world, but, you know, i know that there are some people out there who do. yeah. so, i mean, i often come down on the side of technology and this i'm in the same place here. i think there is a lot of value in what i can do. to me, it's like the birth of the internet. it's going to be that big. it's going to be that insidious in our lives. and i think it's not going away. the the genie is out of the bottle. there's nothing publishing can do to put it back in. our books are all out there in digital formats and they're out there in digital formats with the same companies that are developing a.i. so from a content creation, i think there is certainly a

cautionary tale in terms of how we approach those infringements. and i agree with you 100% on that. and i also think that in the day to day, to your point, it's enormously helpful. i think publishing needs to be more data driven and there is a dearth of capability and time in publishing companies to devote to data analytics, where i can be enormously helpful, where they can. we'll talk more later about direct to consumer and the importance of of having that relationship with your audience and understanding what they're reading and how they're reading and all of those things are critically important and all of those things are fully addressable by a.i. so it's i mean, we've all recognized it's a double edged sword. we want to use it and we're afraid of it. so i want to make a couple of points. you know, no surprise here. i had an overbearing middle

class indian parents, so so my undergraduate degree was computer science. but, you know, having actually done machine learning and deep learning here as well, i think the fundament tools of the publishing industry is to tell authentic stories, whether it be fiction and nonfiction. and i works on a principle of collective wisdom. it can only look back and draw from the experiences that it already has in its database, but it will never be able to replace the authenticity or the laborious work that goes into creating a fiction or nonfiction work of art. i was reading yesterday that scholar johanson and i in open air and conflict, because they used a voice that sounded similar to her, but they offered it to her. and now they've pulled it down and to extend the cicada

metaphor, this may or may not have a short life, but it is here to help if you want to take help, sort of. mary's point, if you just flip the paradigm of a.i. to iaas instead of it sending out edicts or what a good book maybe your work may sell, but if you use it instead of artificial intelligence as an intelligent assistant to help you get more efficient through the publishing lifecycle, there is a lot of gain to be had in here. that's that's my belief. i think it just splitting the paradigm. can we use it to support and enhance and increase productivity and time to market or reduce supply chain challenges and have this around as well? so my view is, is here to stay, but the noisy part will have a short life. to jonathan's perspective, i just can make one more point that i think it's quite interesting, which is thinking about how how gen ii

particularly has had an impact on some other areas of culture. so think about music. ai is very powerful in terms of facility setting, personalization. so if you're on spotify or you know, whatever you are, your immediate personalization quickly leads to what i think of as categorization, right? which is you usually only listen to things that are either the same or similar to things that you might have listened to before. and it also can lead to. the fact that that's all you ever do. it can lead to what happens in socio social and political media, which is you just listen to views and ideas and all the rest of it. there are have been sort of channel to you. i don't worry about that for our industry. and the reason i don't worry about it is because of the whole ecosystem of bookstores and

library suppliers and retail and everything else. one of the great joys of being a publisher is introducing readers to books they wouldn't necessarily otherwise have picked up. and they find it, you know, is a wonderful read. and that's why we need to think about ai and our whole ecosystem rather than just publishing, because i think this is where it's so important that we, you know, curated book bookstore doors, the availability of bookstores, the available ity of libraries, the availability of libraries, suppliers, i think, will mean that we don't see that personalization and categorization. and, you know, and everything that's that everything is not actually very attractive. that's that's come from that interesting here. i want to acknowledge and i'm going to introduce another metaphor and then i'm going to pass to jonathan to see if he can refine it for me. so, you know, i think of jenny

as kind of like the taylor swift left. it gets all the headlines, but is it really the only act in town really? so what is the b beyond on, jenny? what's the biggest challenge that you are facing either in your company or in your industry and how are you going about addressing it? all right. well, i appreciate the question. i think taylor swift is always a good analogy and so i think there are. raise your hand if you're literary agent. oh, good. i'm very glad, because one of the reasons i wanted to come to this was to talk to some of you, because when i when i have lunch, when i have lunch with literary agents and when i have lunch of literary agents, i ask them, you know, what they think. the biggest challenges. and i agree with them. and i think it's i think it's it's marketing. it's making the books known and and what's interesting is that when they you know, when when i get them one on one, you know, they will say, i don't think that, you know, i see the same

template over and over again. and i want to see new ideas and i want to and i want to feel more assured and in how the publishers are reaching readers. and i take that very seriously. and i and i really and i and i felt this way for my entire 35 year career. and i remember when i was at random house, we would have these conversations about marketing. and, you know, the senior one of the senior executives would say it was ever thus. and i think probably, you know, gutenberg wasn't very happy with the sales of his bible. so i do think that, you know, and and i really don't want to and i'm not critical of the people who work in marketing and publicity. i think they work incredibly hard. i know they work incredibly hard because i work very closely with a lot of them. and i also know that the literary agents really are coming from a very sincere place. they're they're representing their authors. their authors want publishers to be better at marketing their books. and so i think we all, as an industry really have to talk

about this and talk about it much more. candidly, i've i've had town halls with literary agents where i have begun the meetings by saying, if you have ideas, if there are things that you think we should be doing or were not doing, let me know. let our publishers know. we are open and we are interested in new ideas. we're looking for a new chief marketing communications officer and you know, one of the criticisms that people have of publishing is that it's too insular. and, you know, you know, maybe there's some brilliant person out there who can come in and show us something that we're not already doing. i'm a little skeptic, all of that. i'm open to it. but i do think that the basic challenge here is that we're most of us are publishing a lot of books, you know, whether it's you know, if you're a small publisher, you know, you're still probably you still probably have only a few people to work on a particular book. and it's pretty much the same ratio. no matter how big you get. and, and so how do you give each

book the attention and help it find the audience it deserves? it's a hard thing to do. i think it's i think that it is probably a perpetual challenge. but i also think that it is the challenge because if you care about publishing books and you want to get them to as many readers as possible, i do think that's the biggest the biggest question you've got to be asking. thank you, mary. yeah, that's definitely one of the biggest questions. and i was so passionate about marketing. i spent my career doing it, but i think to your point, you have to find the audience. and i think that is what i constantly remind my marketing team at at abrams to do all the time, to the point where they're probably sick of hearing about it, but it's that is definitely at the core of what publishers must do. it is the function of publishing. it is to marry those books that

we're publishing to the readers. and i feel like very often it feels like an insurmountable tasks to publishers, and it ends up being abdicated, whether it's abdicated to booksellers or a library ends or teachers. we're not putting those books in the hands of readers as the ultimate reader and we're not understanding the actual transaction with that reader. and so that has been a critical component of what we're developing. and. abrams that said, i think we also have, you know, bigger issues. i mean, time, the people's time, do people have time to read? we looked at these enormous sales gains during the pandemic. why? because there were no sports teams to watch. there were no movies to go to. there were no restaurant outs. there was no broadway. i mean, you couldn't do anything except read and people read

voraciously. so we are competing with all those other things. it's one of the reasons audio is so growing so fast because you can listen to an audio book while you're driving, while you're doing the dishes, while you're on the treadmill, and that's not convenient for print books. so i think we need to wrap our heads around how to reach book readers and how to how we're competing for their time. i'll i'll probably take a little of a different view since we don't publish a lot of our books. so we're dependent on literary agents in the publishing community to get us the books we have all the challenges, right, from the geopolitical crises for a supply chain. the book banning that we want to talk about in a minute. i'd say from our perspective, um, identity crises is the biggest challenge that we have. we've got to consistently find

value because we are dependent on our customers finding value in us as a book wholesaler, distributor continue. honestly, there's no reason why they can't go out there. they have choices and amazon still they're still selling books. apparently. and i'm running massive sales, but i'd say our challenge is identity crises, whether it be librarians, educators, parents. we are continuously fighting the battle to explain why we need to exist. and i would say that's my biggest challenge outside of everything that was shed earlier. i mean, scholastic is is, if you like, both a publisher and book distributor through book fairs and book clubs, i completely endorse what you you're saying.

the the one and one of the key issues is really trying to make books as affordable as possible. in our case, children's books in an environment where many families are feeling less wealthy and having having less means, where food prices are going up, gas prices are going up, rents are going up. and all of those sorts of things. and we do face challenges of that kind because in order to make children's books affordable, particularly for younger kids, you do have to have a global supply chain. you can't you have to be able to do manufacturing and various things in asia, in china and india and so on, to be able to make you know, four color board books available at a price that the appropriate and that is threatened at the moment for a whole variety of reasons. and we have to be concerned about that. i also think that just for for

all of us, that some of the costs of our own infrastructure and operating costs are really going up quite strongly in certain areas that we have to accommodate. the one that i pick out will be cybersecurity. if you have a strong brand. so i mean, we all have strong brands here. therefore you're a target and therefore, you know, you're looking at 15 to 20% additional expense every financial year on cyber security because you have to be it's you know, we have you just have to do that. so there are some those are some of the stresses that i think i feel that that we want to be able to provide the right books at the right price is where they're most needed. and we, to some extent, have people and the whole circumstances of fighting against us in that respect. peter, i'm interested in your perspective on what you're doing to bring more consumer ears to

books. jonathan teed up marketing, but you're capturing audience really at the outset of their reading journey. what are you doing there? well, i think, you know, i look at it. i look at i like to see book publishing, you know, within it, within the ecosystem. and so particularly in children's publishing, really what we're talking about, we're talking about books. but but we're actually talking about stories and characters and entertainment. and that comes not just in books. it comes in audio. it comes in on the screen. it comes in large screen, small screen. and i think that what we have to think about is a sort of a virtuous circle of how we how we think about that, because you've got stories and characters they can actually begin in a book, in an author's mind, in a screenwriter's mind, scriptwriters mind, whatever it

happens to be and then just taking that, it's a book. then a book is published and you begin to the books, publish the book, and then be transferred to the screen. animation live action whether it be big screens, small screen, tv, whatever it happens to be. and then that in itself can then stimulate more reading. i mean, whenever we have goose bumps or anything like that, that's recently been on disney. disney plus we see a huge spike afterwards in the number of books that we see. the goose bumps and one's live action and the books are not. they're actually aimed at different, different age groups. the live actions for older children, the books that we publish are for younger children. but just this idea of building a franchise that whereby you take it through all the different media is the way that i would think about engaging kids, because i think you've got to this is children but i guess it

might apply to to adults too is you've got to be where they are and what they're doing and then you can begin to work on that. in terms of the publishing that you do, in terms of your job books that you do, you can transform them any book into an audio book as long as you have the right reader, for example, and things like that. so i think trying to think of this is a virtuous circle whereby you start with stories and and characters that can be in the book to begin with or they can be on screen to begin with. where you begin get that, that sort of virtuous circle. and i think in children's publishing particularly, that's going to be the way that things develop and grow in the future. amanda, do you want to speak to that given your role in supplying libraries in schools. yeah, without sounding political, this is an apolitical. that's my caveat. but librarians, for all their work, must be protected at all costs.

so. you know, we can the largest publishers in the world can have 20 people in marketing, 30, 40, 50 people in marketing, but you have thousands upon thousands of these professional sales who are committed to marketing and promoting literature and creating learners and promote artistry. and, you know, you'd be surprised at the ingenious ways that they come up with in promoting content. i'll give you two examples which are which were shocking to me of the ingenuity of librarians. this is a small township and will in the charlotte mecklenburg area where i live and, the library, there's one library branch next to a park. and around the park they have boards all about, take your kids walking and you have a little game. you can check out the sort i learned about indigenous peoples today. this is what i learned about a

different food today. this is what i learned about a different dog species today. you just walking around the park and the there are two populations in libraries that are most prevalent. seniors and young families and so i think the ingenuity of what librarians can do to promote, to market the products that publishers and authors work incredibly hard to create cannot be valued enough. the second example i'll give you is that libraries are promoting artists tree and in inculcating the love of reading and writing. one of the libraries in south carolina, believer in art, has a program where there's an entrepreneur in residence and they come for 2 hours, twice a week, where can come in and have a conversation saying, hey, what is it like? what's the life you lead? being an author now? the parents may not like the answer, but you know they can. they can chat with a real

artist, whether they be a performance artist or a writer. and libraries are finding these ways. so i say it again to all of you. the value of library ownership to our country, to promoting literacy and getting young people into lifelong learners and spending their disposable income on books cannot be overstated. now to what we do, we simply support them, and we do whatever they ask us. and all i do, i spend a hundred days on the road. all i do is ask them a question how can i help? and they have a long list for both publishers and us. and i'm sure all of the publishers on you know that. but that's that's what we do. our role is to enable those thousands upon thousands upon thousands of librarians or marketing and promoting published products every day, every hour. thank you. i'm a super important in the

interest of time i want to home in jonathan on the rise of influencer and influencer marketing. how that has changed the book publishing industry, if at all, and how you see simon & schuster taking advantage of that? well, actually, i think that ties the previous question because it it's it's exciting. i think i think it's actually galvanizing because it's allowing word of mouth to spread in a kinetic way and i was talking earlier about the challenges of marketing, and i think that this is actually one of the solutions and one of the ways we can all work together, you know, agents, authors, publishers to identify audiences online, target them and get them talking about our books. i think it's actually one of the most exciting things that's happened in the last ten years is the way word of mouth has spread on on our books. and and it's also revived the sales of books that were fallow. and that's that's really a great

development. great. let's talk about audiobooks. one of you teed that up, obviously, there's been a big rise. how do you see that affecting the industry and demand for overall? mary, do you want to take that? sure, i think along with. influencers, i think any way that you can get people to discover books is a win and if people are discovering books now on spotify because of an audio relationship chip there, if people are gravitating to books because there are celebrities, readers, if people are gravitating to books because it fits into their lifestyle, that's a plus. that's a win for the entire industry. and it also creates discover and i find that people don't necessarily only they're not format specific. so people who read in audio

listen to audio will will buy books. they'll buy print books. they'll buy digital books. and i think that there is a virtuous circle around the whole discovery and demand creation that audio contributes to. peter and audiobooks not had quite the same impact in children's publishing. i mean, in the sense that kids don't drive so, so and so that's that's that's one that's one impact. but but i do think what really matters, i think, is the way in which we shouldn't just think of books as standalone items. i mean, they can and they it's really important in that and i see, i mean, certainly an expanding part of what we do in children's publishing, but it's not been quite is as strong as they as the industry as a whole kids don't drive but at least my

kids are impatient. passenger bus. okay let's we're running short on time and i want to be mindful of that. i do want to ask about censorship and book banning the resurgence of the banning of books in recent years has affected publishing quite significantly, i would imagine. how does your organizing and navigate potential conflicts between freedom of expression and societal concerns about certain content, etc. and why don't we start with you since you're at the juncture there of yeah, it's publishers and community is it's it's a big challenge and i think the fundamental way that we handle this is we respect the right for everyone to choose what they buy and bring into their home but the libraries that we serve are institutions for the community and they must be allowed to showcase voices and tell stories

that ought to be told that many of you in this room represent and bring bring. it's getting harder and harder because state wide legislature means that the book acquisition and process becomes harder, which means that we have to make sure that the professionals who are acquiring don't get into trouble. and for us to keep track of all the different metadata standards and the evolving need of metadata to go right down to levels which nobody can afford economically afford to do, is a big challenge as well. and while there are many lawsuits, some settled, some active, some in favor of book banning, some against it, this is not going away any time soon. and it's an unfortunate reality. but we stand with librarians with the belief that personal choices, personal library is our community institutions.

jonathan, any thoughts on that? well, i agree. i think it's think that the book fans are a manifestation of the larger polarization in the country. and it's unfair. the books are being used as a you know, as an instrument to make political statements, and we have to fight back. and so we're joining other lawsuits. we're working with we're working with penn and the national coalition against censorship and and the american library association and the whole thing is just unfortunate, and i hope it will eventually wane as as these as these very loud and annoying voices realize that this is a waste of everybody's time. it's a liberal. i think they one of the things to also remember is if books weren't powerful and influential, they wouldn't be banned. and we've got to we've got take heart from that that books are powerful. they make that can make change. they can persuade people and

we've got to completely support all our authors and everyone in that mission. and publishers. it's so important to to do that. and, you know, i think everything that you said, i completely agree with mary. anything to add? i mean, just to echo, you know, everything that is being said here. i agree, peter, that, you know, if our books are being banned, we're doing something right. but it doesn't mitigate that. there is a real existential threat from book bans. it feels like a handful of people are, you know, inordinately affected in so many lives, be on their immediate circles. and we have to stand with our authors. we have to educate. we have to support librarians, support educators, support independent booksellers because they're being targeted to to to really push through with, you

know, what is all of our core tenet is freedom of expression, right? that's why we're here. yeah. great. i'm going to to get to a couple of questions on talent and leadership. i would ask you to talk to us just a little bit about your own journey in publishing. what are the traits that have helped you thrive in the industry? and are those the same traits that would help folks who are starting out today? peter, why don't we start with you? um, well, i think i mean, i, one of the great things that has helped me, um, throughout my career, which i think would still be true today, um, it is true today is you have to somehow on the one hand marry creativity, the encouragement of creativity and creatives managing creatives, people, whether they be authors or

publishers, commissioning editors, marketing people, whatever. but you've also got to do that within an organization that's healthy and can be in the private sector anyway, can can make money for its for own as whether they be we're a public company or, you know, whatever, whether you're a family company or private equity doesn't really matter. it's that ability to think how right from the get go when you start career is how am i going to how am i going to reconcile those two things and my career has been sort of, you know, i started offers an academic and then in education publishing i then worked for a number of years at thomson reuters. so we have journalists who are also not creative about the news but how they present the news. um, and there's always been that, that, and of course children's publishing and its marrying those two things together that i think if you begin to think about that right from the beginning of your career and i think it would be true if you're working in the

public sector of doing libraries or whatever it aims to be, it's is trying to make sure that you can be as creative as possible within a healthy organization environment. and i think it's it's sometimes challenging, but it's something to focus. jonathan i i think that the having having really good bosses has definitely helped. um, and i've had, i've had great bosses, i really have. i mean, and i, you know, i started 35 years ago as kate medina's editorial assistant. and i've worked for such terrific people through the years. and, you know, and got off and harry evans and carolyn reidy and i just think that that probably the community of publishing has always been a very nurturing one. and i hope that it will always be that way. mary yeah, i think i think what drew me to publishing draws most of us to publishing is are the

books, the storytelling, the creative piece really giving outlet to, to the creators and, you know, respecting that process and giving them really hope in terms of their market potential. i, i, i come from marketing and sales. and so that was always ingrained in what i've done is to understand market trends, but also to understand where we can find the inroads for each book and each creator. and then just a curiosity and an openness, i think that's something that has served me well across the board, whether an author who i, you know, first meet or it's a i and what how it's going to affect our company or the industry, i'll i'll be brief see the warning, um, i'd say curiosity and courage. the curiosity to ask questions, learn, always keep asking

questions and the courage to ask for help because this is a very complex machine to find the right partner, whether it be an editor or a partner or a literary agent or a publisher than a distributor are gone. campaigns go on. it's i don't want anyone in this room if you're if you're thinking of being an author to feel like it seems complex but there are enough people here to help you along the way. so be curious and have the courage to ask for help. it'll be fine. fantastic. we are at time, but i want to do one very quick lightning round each of you. tell us what is the book that is most excited you in the past year? peter is the book i'm currently reading. it's my column tobin and it's called long island. thank you very much. um, well, now i, like i should say harry potter, but.

all right, well, i'm going to go with wonderful first novel, that avid reader, precious published called the ministry of time by colin bradley, which is if you're looking for a spy thriller, time travel rom com, this is incredible this is it. it shoots out all the lights. it's just great. midnight in the library, i'll go back to a children's favorite and rewrite. this year, after 25 years, dr. seuss, the places you'll go. oh, thank you. so much. i read mary jonathan and peter. that was wonderful. thank you for being here and welcome at particular our welcome to c-span and to all of our friends who've joined online. this i