Find a Rightsholder – An Interview with Brian O’Leary

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Brian O’Leary

On June 3, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) launched Find a Rightsholder, an easy-to-use search tool for anyone seeking rights or permissions for content published by US and UK publishers. KGL sat down with BISG Executive Director Brian O’Leary to talk about the importance of this tool and why it is necessary today.

KGL: Tell us about Find a Rightsholder and what it does.

O’Leary: Publishers, authors, and researchers, among others, are regularly looking to secure rights and permissions for published works. One of the hurdles in getting a deal done is knowing who to contact. While many publishers list an email or a web portal address on their websites, the information is sometimes hard to find. For publishers and imprints that are no longer active, there is often no way to figure out who owns the rights. We build the database for Find A Rightsholder to make it easier for anyone seeking rights or permissions to reach the people who can say “yes”.

KGL: What need were you seeing that you hoped Find a Rightholder would fill?

O’Leary: BISG sees rights as a growth engine for the book business. We wanted to make sure that anyone looking to make a rights deal knows who to contact and how to reach them. We feel there’s a strong commitment to securing permissions, as well, but sometimes the work required to get a conversation started is more than an author, researcher, or publisher can take on. We hope that Find A Rightsholder helps make doing the right thing easier.

KGL: What has been the response to the launch of the database?

O’Leary: The early reactions have been good. Publishers, authors, and researchers seeking rights and permissions have found the tool easy to use. Their feedback tells us that Find A Rightsholder is working as we’d hoped.

We’ve also seen contributions from a wide range of publishers who found that their imprints weren’t part of the launch database. We started with about 3,500 imprints, which we estimate to be about a quarter of current and historical imprints. The database we have covers a much higher share of books in print, in part because we started by compiling information from the largest publishers. We went live to help the community solve a problem with access, but we also wanted to showcase what we had built so that any publisher could see the tool and give us contact data for their imprints.

KGL: Do you have any goals for implementation and use?

O’Leary: We feel like we need another 2,500 imprints or so to reach “critical mass”, representing at least two thirds of all books published. If we can add those imprints by the end of 2026, we’ll have both a dataset and usage to show that this is an important tool for the industry. That would also give us a basis for investing in enhanced functionality, offering features that we’ll likely be asked to provide by frequent users in the coming year.

KGL: Anything else you’d like to share about the database or BISG’s work in this space?

O’Leary: Find A Rightsholder is only one of the projects supported by work done in our Rights Committee. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the committee is hosting a workshop-style presentation of a standard way to communicate royalty information between publishers. The committee has identified several dozen fields that it feels are required or helpful for publishers working to report and reconcile rights deals. They are finishing work now to define each of those fields in a way that publishers and their systems partners can implement locally. A standard approach in this area will reduce work significantly for publishers on both sides of the deal, while also addressing errors, delays in payment, and miscommunication with authors and other contributors.

The meeting will take place at 11 a.m. CET on Friday, October 17 in Frankfurt Book Fair Hall 5.0, Conference Room “Encounter”. The meeting is open to anyone with an interest in rights royalty standards. You can RSVP on the BISG web site.

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) is the industry leader in editorial, production, online hosting, and transformative services for every stage of the content lifecycle. We are your source for book solutions, rights and permissions management, intelligent automation, digital delivery, and more. Email us at info@kwglobal.com.