PWR In Conversation with Brian O'Leary - Part One

Industry Insights and His New Printed Word Reviews Column, Friction Factor

Within hours of Brian O’Leary’s retirement from BISG, and before he could even pack for his Appalachian Trail adventure, Printed Word Reviews publisher Ted Olczak asked for an interview to introduce O’Leary's launch of his quarterly BookCAMP column, Friction Factor.

To do justice to such a rich life story, Olczak focused on the key highlights and three rough sections: Retrospective, Legacy, and Parting Thoughts; Collective Action & Market Safeguards; and lastly, Tech, Supply Chain, & Operations, with each touching on the two other segments.

Retrospective, Legacy, & Parting Thoughts (Part one of three)

PWR: AI is important in copyright and content creation, but from a BISG perspective (metadata, workflow, and supply chain) where will AI actually fix the industry's plumbing, and where will it break it?

O’Leary: That’s the big question, really. AI offers significant potential in managing and mining big data sets, but most of those data sets are tied up in proprietary databases. There’s a risk that the strongest players use AI to improve their own position at the expense of the supply chain. At the same time there’s a risk that AI-based startups will break the way the industry has traditionally worked, perhaps undermining the success of the ISBN. I’m hopeful that AI will give us tools to solve problems, while organizations across the supply chain decide whether and how to use those tools. The answers are probably a few years more in the making.

PWR: You spearheaded the Book Publishing Next initiative to modernize the industry’s tech stack. If a mid-sized publisher has a limited budget today, what is the single most critical infrastructure upgrade they cannot afford to ignore?

O’Leary: Invest in a rights and royalties management system. We did a study in 2022 that showed the payback is regularly less than a year. It allows you to expand your business and earn more money for your authors. It also avoids a multitude of problems down the road.

If you’ll allow me one other: If you’re not using ONIX 3 to transfer metadata, you’re leaving money on the table. There are ONIX 3 compliant systems available for publishers of any size. Doing things in Excel or Filemaker is not an effective option any more.

PWR: What keeps you up at night about the book business right now?

O’Leary: The data is suggesting that people are not reading long-form content.

PWR: Having served as BISG executive director for a decade, you had to represent the publishing industry as a whole.  Now that you’ve stepped down, what is the one truth about the publishing supply chain that you’ve been dying to say out loud, but couldn’t?

O’Leary: The way we handle metadata, duplicating copies of publisher feeds at different distributors, retailers, and aggregators, is set up to fail. In fairness, I have said that out loud, including the white paper for Book Publishing Next. Authors who can’t understand why something wrong in their author bio or marketing copy keeps showing up: it’s built to do that.

PWR: If you had to give one piece of parting advice to your successor, Allison Belan, and the rest of the industry leadership navigating the late 2020s, what would it be?

O’Leary: Keep your sense of humor (I am sure she will), and say “yes” to as many things as you can. Being part of the conversations helps us all get better.

Stay tuned for part two of this interview in the next issue of BookCAMP magazine.