Recommendations For Speakers in Meetings and Conferences

[Excerpt] It is not easy for a speaker to prepare documents and presentations especially when speaking to diverse audiences, i.e. when people have different languages, different backgrounds, different level of knowledge or include people with intellectual disabilities. Sometimes, speakers do not know how they can transmit information to people with intellectual disability

Recommendations for Organizers of Meetings and Conferences

[Excerpt] Planning and organizing a conference, a meeting or any other event is a complex task, often involving numerous different people. The objective should always be to make the event as beneficial as possible for all participants. Increasingly, also people with intellectual disabilities actively participate in events together with many other participants. This shows the growing inclusion of this group of people in our societies and should be much more promoted. Of course, these participants are often very disappointed when they cannot follow and participate in an event because some basic guidelines for accessibility have not been followed. As organizer of an event, you are in the critical position to include considerations about its accessibility from the beginning of the planning process. Taking care of these issues from the beginning has proven to be most effective and avoids costly changes to programmes and venues

Roundtable Book Discussion

Discussion of Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

The Global Publishing Industry in 2021

Mixed forces shaped global publishing activity in 2021. The spread of different COVID-19 variants throughout the world still caused hardship and widespread social distancing. At the same time, the rollout of vaccines helped to contain the pandemic’s impact and enabled a recovery of the global economy, which grew by around 6 percent in 2021. The preliminary release of data from WIPO’s global survey of publishing activity shows that recovery extended to the publishing industry. Still, industry performance varies by country, reflecting the nature of book markets and other local economic forces. The highest number of books published and deposited in a national repository in 2021 was recorded by Germany (413,158), followed by the United States (197,931), the United Kingdom (152,355), Japan (116,914) and the Republic of Korea (100,242). China’s 2021 data are unavailable, but in 2020 the National Library of China received 414,409 books, similar in magnitude to Germany. Data for all countries where available are presented