For Immediate Release

March 23, 2007

Contact: Judith Platt
Ph: 202-220-4551

Association of American Publishers Joins AACP Project

Washington, DC, March 23, 2007: The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has announced that it has joined ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol). A joint project of the International Publishers Association, the World Association of Newspapers, and the European Publishers Council, ACAP is developing and piloting a standard system allowing publishers to express digital content access and usage policies in a language that search engines can be programmed to recognize. A goal of the standard is to serve as a key building block for e-commerce in the online publishing world by making publishers' licensing terms and e-commerce information universally machine-readable.

AAP’s director of digital policy Ed McCoyd pointed out that "ACAP's specification can serve as a win-win-win for publishers, search engines, and Internet users, and dovetails nicely with the standard the AAP has been working on for digital content discoverability. The standard under development at AAP will help search engines, retailers, and other intermediaries lead users to publishers' digital book content databases and pages, and the ACAP standard will help make licensing, permissions, and access seamless once the user has found the online content."

Mr. McCoyd noted further that ACAP's work “will improve publishers’ ability to make their content available to a larger audience without the limitations currently imposed by the lack of a widely-adopted standard for machine readability, and search engines will be able to provide users with access to a much broader array of quality content.”

For additional information on AAP’s work in this area contact Ed McCoyd in the AAP New York office (emccoyd@publishers.org)

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry. AAP’s more than 300 members include most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies—small and large. AAP members publish hardcover and paperback books in every field, educational materials for the elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and professional markets, scholarly journals, computer software, and electronic products and services.