“Hello, and welcome to the Digital Book Conference.
Our annual meeting now goes beyond just questions related to digital books. Each year, we attempt to explore, in a broader way, the relationship between books and computer technologies.
Advances in research, the increased power of machines, the availability of data in immense quantities, provide us today with tools based on generative artificial intelligence with astonishing performance.
After having modified the way in which books were produced, then multiplied the ways of reading them, technologies today seem capable of modifying the way in which they are written, edited, published and marketed.
Once again there arises the fear of “this will replace that”, and some fear a world where book factories will automatically produce titles calculated to please readers who are themselves robotic.
Fear is the worst position when it comes to technology. Fear paralyzes us, makes us want to flee. Against fear, and avoiding succumbing to blissful technological enthusiasm, we will cultivate curiosity.
Curiosity, yes, because it will lead us to approach what intrigues and frightens us. It encourages us to seek to understand, know, and tame artificial intelligence. It is the condition for reasoned and regulated use. The future of technologies is determined by their use. Turning away from it prevents us from weighing on this future.
This is why we are offering you an entire morning dedicated to artificial intelligence, a morning which gives a voice to those who took advantage of these tools very early on, to imagine services, to develop tools intended for publishers. , to explore new creative avenues.
We have often invited, to deliver the inaugural conference of our Conference, personalities working in cultural sectors different from ours, in order to defocus ourselves a little, to breathe a different air, to compare approaches. This is the case again this year with our first guest, Marion Carré, whose company, Ask Mona, works mainly in the museums and monuments sector.
Then return to our core business, with two presentations of applications intended for publishing houses and booksellers, and based on AI, followed by a round table which will bring together education professionals, simply titled : “Artificial intelligence at school”.
We like to praise curiosity. We would also like this to be reciprocal. We, publishers, learn about AI to use it in a meaningful way. AI companies, too, should learn to know and respect the ecosystem that produces the books they included in their training datasets. The risk is great, if we consider books as raw materials and if we treat them as mining or oil resources have been and still are, of leading to an equally distressing result: impoverishment, the drying up, the decline, the endangerment of the great balances.
Hey OpenAI, hey Google, hey Antropic, hey Meta, hey Mistral! … All these books that improve the IQ of your AIs, they were written, edited and published by human beings! they are part of a history, an economy, a cultural and legal environment.
Nothing allows you to ignore it. Nothing allows you to use them without authorization or compensation. Listen, later, to what Arnaud Robert, who chairs the SNE legal commission, has to tell you on this subject.
If it has definitely not replaced the printed book, the digital book carries a promise, that of broadening the circle of readers, by including people with disabilities.
Digitized, the text can be enlarged, read by a synthetic voice, its font can be modified… We have been working on this promise for years so that all publishers can keep it for the greatest possible number of digital books. From June 28, they will be obliged to do so in application of the European directive on accessibility. From this date, new digital releases must be natively accessible digital books. Accessibility was the central and unique theme of our meetings last year. We still devote the majority of our afternoon to it, to provide a useful update a few months before the directive comes into force.
We are welcomed at the BNF, where we scrupulously deposit the books that we have published, within the framework of legal deposit for several… centuries, books that the BNF carefully preserves and to which it gives access, books that it digitizes as soon as they enter the public domain, or as part of the digitization of unavailable works. We will be pleased to welcome Matthieu Gioux, who will close the day with a presentation of the BNF digital library, Frenchof which he will show us all the facets.
— And that’s good, because our curiosity is insatiable.
Yes, I thank the BNF which welcomes us, but also SOFIA and the CFC which support our Assises over the long term, and our partner Livres Hebdo. I would also like to thank the members of the office of the digital commission, in particular Agnès Fruman, Florent Souillot, Nazeli Kyuregyan-Baron, Elodie Sanlaville who participated very closely in the programming of the day. Thanks to Hélène Conand, who directs SNE communications and will be responsible for announcing the speakers today. Thanks also, of course, to Clémentine Guinebert, who took care of this event, as she takes care, with great attention, of our commission.
A big thank you, finally, to all those who agreed to speak, and to all of you, and to all of you, who chose to come here today.
Good day ! »
Photo © Frédéric Berthet
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