IPA President, Karine Pansa, delivered her first speech since assuming her new role with the opening keynote at Digital Book World in New York City. Pansa underlined the importance of data in communicating effectively about the digital book market and urged the sector to work together to bring more consistency to available statistics and to reduce the number of markets where no data is available.

Karine Pansa took delegates on a tour of the digital book world, starting in her native Brazil, heading through Colombia and Mexico before reaching the USA. She noted the discrepancies in definitions and also the varying degrees of granularity of data in these markets.

Moving across the Pacific, Pansa looked at top level data from China and New Zealand before moving to Africa and the Arab world where she noted the almost complete lack of data. With huge population growth expected in these regions, and therefore many readers of the future, Pansa called for urgent action to improve data availability there.

Pansa closed with Europe, where there is a rich supply of data, but not necessarily comparable or with harmonized definitions.

You can see the full presentation here.

Pansa and IPA Secretary General, José Borghino, took advantage of their presence in New York City to meet with colleagues and collaborators from Publishers Weekly, New York University and the United Nations and then with the Association of American Publishers in Washington DC.