In Africa, Lawrence Njagi, Chairman of the African Publishers Network, issued a statement underlining the important role that publishers in Africa play in increasing literacy, education and cultural values. They called on governments in Africa to partner actively with their publishing sectors to promote books and strengthen copyright laws and enhance book procurement systems. You can read the statement online here.
In Europe, the Federation of European Publishers joined the European Writers Council (EWC) and the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations (CEATL) to call for transparency regarding AI Generated Books. The organisations called on the EU Member States and the European Commissin to protect human created books by requiring AI generated products to be labeled and to reserve any public funding for culture to works created by humans.
The call included:
- Developing a robust mechanism for transparency around AI-generated products appearing as similar to books, therefore confusing for the public, based on properly identified responsibilities, for better protection of consumers, readers, authors and other rightsholders.
- Taking special measures to avoid that EU public funding from programmes devoted to culture (such as Creative Europe) benefits coders, or GAI companies when it comes to AI-generated products similar to books. This includes, but is not limited to, studying grants, residencies or travel programmes, writing or translation grants, publishing grants, and any kind of publicly funded cultural awards and prizes (we recommend specifying this in the rules of the awards).
- Deploying advocacy initiatives and training programmes at the EU level to promote better awareness among consumers and readers of what is a cultural work and what is a scam product or a non-human compilation.
You can read the full statement here.
On a lighter note, in Germany, with the German Publishers and Booksellers association in its bicentenial year, a new postage stamp was announced celebrating books. You can read more about that (in German) here. Other initiatives in Germany included a book giveaway for over one million children and ‘Reading Journey’ for children and adults.