As reported to ALA Council and at other venues during the 2012 Midwinter Meeting, I will be leading an ALA delegation next week to meet separately with Penguin, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. I am now pleased to announce that Random House has invited ALA leadership to meet with them as well. The four meetings involve senior executives at these publishing houses, and the Macmillan and Simon & Schuster meetings will also include their respective CEOs. The meeting with Random House includes Madeline McIntosh, president of Sales, Operations, and Digital.
Core to the library mission is bringing authors and readers together. This happens to be core to the mission of the publishing industry as well. Libraries and publishers have a long history of working together with great benefit to the nation. We believe that such benefit should and must continue in the digital age. Since ALA speaks to issues for all types of libraries, we expect that our meetings will be an important step in improving communication at the highest levels about issues central to academic, public, school, and special libraries.
Currently, libraries face difficult challenges with respect to e-book lending and related issues. We look forward to discussing library community concerns with these publishers. Also, we look forward to a better understanding of publisher concerns. Perhaps most of all, we look forward to improving our dialogue with these four (and other) publishers as we all work to maintain the essential role that libraries must continue to play in our democratic society in the rapidly evolving global digital world.
The ALA delegation includes Keith Michael Fiels, ALA Executive Director; Maureen Sullivan, ALA President-elect; Robert Wolven, cochair of ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group (and associate university librarian at Columbia University); and Alan Inouye, director of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy.
Molly Raphael
ALA President