It was 1896: Ten years had passed since the signing of the Berne Convention, which even today is still the most significant international agreement for the protection of published works and the rights of their authors — harmonizing, as it does, national copyright laws under some basic principles and minimum standards.
As previous IPA President, Fernando Guedes, put it in his 1996 book, International Publishers Association, The First Century, ‘Once the Berne Convention had been signed, and as a result of growing internationalisation, the time had come for publishers to organize on an international scale. And this is, in fact, what happened.’
This growing internationalisation prompted a congress of publishers in Paris in 1896, marking the birth of the International Publishers Association.