Getting discovered in the age of AI

So as many of you know, who are on this call, the book industry is always facing some kind of crisis, right? It's been reshaped roughly every decade.

And each, and I'm starting, when I'm thinking about that, I'm going back to the 1970s.

I wasn't working in the industry then, but that's sort of a good starting point if we think about how the modern book industry came to be.

And each new change or shift across those decades has really one thing at the heart of it.

And that is that discovery or the way that our readers find books has moved further from the physical book, from that, you know, tactile experience of holding the book in your hands and deeper into the information that we provide or the data.

Today, AI is in place and it's really, this is not the first time that we've had machines influencing the supply chain.

So the lesson for us is that, you know, what do we need to do? We need to keep on doing what we do well.

And across those 25 years, the best practice has really been the same, and that is to maintain complete, comprehensive, structured data that's consistent and accurate.

And there's a little more focus on what data we're providing now.

So really what we need to be thinking about is this lesson that it's important to own your data and also supply it early.

Owning it means supplying it early.

If you're the first one to supply it, that's the best case scenario.

So just to set the stage, there are broadly three types of metadata.

And this classification here that I'm talking about really comes from our friends in the library and information science world.

They love taxonomies maybe even more than we do as publishers.

But there's descriptive metadata, structural metadata, and administrative metadata.

Descriptive metadata tells us what the thing is.

So what is our product? There's a title, a subtitle, there are contributors.

It describes subjects, categories, classifications, and the language that the book is published in, for example.

Structural metadata is really how the parts of the thing relate to each other.

So this is where we start getting into chapter level data, page count or extent of the product, the table of contents, EPUB navigation, and even some accessibility features.

Some of this data is data that we are supplying for the first time or newly supplying or recently supplying.

Administrative data is metadata that describes how the thing, your book, is managed.

So this is where we're now, this is entirely new.

So we have kind of the core descriptive stuff, the structural stuff that we've been starting to supply and are doing to some degree or starting to, and the administrative data, which is where we're talking about rights, including for AI, how our data can be used by AI, if at all.