The Frankfurt Book Fair 2009

The GuestRoll – the Guest of Honour baton passes hands at the Book Fair

The GuestRoll has a wooden core, which represents the Book Fair. Around the core, new rings are added every year - each ring containing a literary text from the next country up to be Guest of Honour.

This time, the texts printed on the plexiglas in small letters were by the Argentine writers José Hernández and Jorge Luis Borges. The GuestRoll is something like a baton in a relay race, which is passed on from year to year - from one Guest of Honour to the next.

On Sunday at 3.30 p.m., you could really feel the emotional weight of this act in the Forum, as China handed over its role to Argentina.

At the handover, Juergen Boos said “Literature must reflect society, even if it hurts”. Over the last few months, and particularly over the last five Fair days, we “were marching side by side with Beijing and discovered the people behind the books”.

China’s literature - often characterised by brutal realism - has now opened itself a little more to an audience of international readers.

GuestRoll handover from China to 2010 Guest of Honour Argentina: Wu Shulin passes on the GuestRoll to Magdalena Faillace

Zhang Fuhai, Director of the Chinese Organisation Committee, expressed what being in Frankfurt has meant to his country: “China has experienced a highly diverse, colourful and absolutely satisfying Fair”. Then he thanked the Germans for so warmly welcoming them.

Magdalena Faillace, Director of the Argentine Organisation Committee, said: “We have been preparing for this moment for quite some time. I hope we will be able to live up to the role - it is a great responsibility and a great honour”.

Just before the handover, Chinese writer Wang Meng and Argentine author Osvaldo Beyer read brief excerpts from their works - each in the original language.

Chef Chakall

A shiny turban and a good helping of dry humour are his trademarks. His vision is piercing and a tiny bit unhinged. And yet, he captures the imagination of a crowd of about 100 at the Gourmet Gallery in Hall 5.0. The Argentinean Chef Chakall and his able assistant Chef Dario, enchanted their audience by preparing a sublime three course meal (which those present helped prepare).

While he’s creating fresh Tuna fillets, Chakall says that he must have music playing when cooking. “Louder,” he promptly hollers out to the sound technician. A rousing rhythm echoes through the hall and Chakall and Dario do a spontaneous jig. Meanwhile, a fabulous ‘Pear and Polenta’ cake is baking in the oven. The third course is a finely flavoured ‘Sea Bream in Vanilla Curry’.

This is the second time that Chakall has made an appearance in the Gourmet Gallery, and he proves once more that he’s not only a supremely gifted cook but also a talented showman. In between he chats with Anrietta Pogany, whose Eintagsküche sponsored the show-kitchen. “Every cook brings his own knife and his own salt,” Anrietta says. The ingredients for his dishes, however, were bought in Frankfurt. “Chef Wan and Chef Chakall were initially a little worried about whether they would be able to get the ingredients they needed here. But as soon as we entered the Kleinmarkthalle their eyes lit up and they found everything they could possibly need. This came as a big relief to Chef Wan, whose spice bag was lost on the flight to Germany.”

Cooking shows and discussions about nutrition and fine-food drew interested audience all week at the newly introduced Gourmet Gallery. The most popular event was a book release by celebrity chefs Horst Lichter and Sarah Wiener, who drew a crowd of over 200 people. Naturally, Chinese food was a top theme at the Gourmet Gallery, with Author Yu Zhang providing fascinating insights into the South-Chinese kitchen while presenting her book ‘Buddha Sprang over the Wall’.

All those who were critical about the decision to invite China as the Guest of Honour at Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 should reconsider. I must admit that I was skeptical as well, but by the end of the fair I’ve changed my mind. What turned it around for me was witnessing the mass of people who gathered in Hall 6.1 this afternoon, at an event called ‘The Forbidden Reading – Tibetan Political Literature’. The benches were all occupied, the floors covered with sitting people, and those that stood spilled over into the Malasysia Pavilion adjacent to the Forum Dialog. Everyone assembled listened intently to works – read by German actor, Hannes Jaenicke, and Tibetan literature scholar at Oxford, Lhamajab – that told of repression, of issues of identity and of the ground realities of life in Tibet.

The audience claps enthusiastically at the end of every piece, as if to say they stand in solidarity with the people of Tibet. Just below in Hall 6.0, at the official China exhibit, the aisles are more or less desolate. It appears that giving this platform to China has turned the spotlight onto things - unpleasant and uncomfortable things - that the Chinese government is keen on sweeping under the carpet.

The event opened with a short film showing the activities of the International Campaign for Tibet, which works to promote human rights and democratic freedoms for the people of Tibet. Since protest against Chinese rule was reignited across Tibet on March 10, 2008 the Chinese government has responded by adopting a systematic and harsh approach to silencing and suppressing “reactionary” writers. Many of whom have been detained or have simply ‘disappeared’. Despite the terror and the fear, a stream of defiant work has continued to flow; resisting oppression and remaining hopeful that change will come.

A new collection of writings by Tibetans inside Tibet, including extracts from books that are banned by the Chinese government and work by writers now in prison, was launched at the end. The new book, ‘Like Gold that Fears No Fire: New Writing from Tibet’ features stories of imprisonment, interrogation, death and loss, as well as perspectives on a better future that reveal an unquenchable spirit and deeply-felt Tibetan identity.

Lhamajab (extreme left) and Hannes Jaenicke (extreme right)

The first poem read out is Tsering Woeser’s ‘A Sheet of Paper Can Become a Knife’ and a rather sharp one at that too. It hasn’t drawn blood yet, but it’s a knife nevertheless and it cuts to the point. Much of the literature chosen for the reading are blog posts. The internet has become a powerful tool in the hands of Tibetan writers to spread political literature and the voice of dissent. It is a medium in which lost voices can be found and can communicate with each other; a battleground in which hegemonic and subversive forces fight it out.

Ironically, many of these blogs are written in Chinese. The Tibetan language and culture have been all but erased, with ‘colonial’ education being the only education available in Tibet (the Tibetan government in exile in Dharmashala, India is headed by the 14th Dalai Lama, and runs centers to preserve cultural traditions). Make no mistake, these writers don’t bend down low to authority. They have appropriated the language to their own ends. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the people of China can read them in the original. They may not want to, because of the fear of falling into the net of a government that closely monitors those surfing onto forbidden sites. Two months ago, 19-year-old Passang Norbu opened a page, at an internet café in Lhasa, with pictures of the Dalai Lama and was arrested on the spot. Where he is now and what has happened to him, remains a mystery.

One blog entitled ‘What human rights do we have over our bodies?’ beseeches truthful eyes around the world to look their way and recognize the brutalities committed against Tibetan people in the name of law. And for a brief moment it appeared to me that the audience joined in remembering and memorializing, louder than the gun fire.

Earlier this year, I blogged about another trade show, Book Expo America, for the US trade journal Publishers Weekly. My topic was Sunday, just like today’s topic, but that post was an outraged post, and this post is a post of praise for while Book Expo America never opens up to the public, the Frankfurt Book Fair does.

So as some international visitors began to trickle out yesterday morning, many more domestic visitors were rushing in to replace them. It was thrilling to watch - mothers and children, grandfathers and grandchildren, freaks and geeks, academics and poets flooded the book fair, in search of books.

Why then, did I hear so much grumbling from some of the international visitors? Sure, we’re running from appointment to appointment, and it can add a couple minutes to our journey but… People! these folks pay your salary. The fees paid to designers, the advances and royalties paid to agents and authors, the retainers paid to scouts, all that money? That comes from the gaggle of girls all got up in manga outfits. They and their friends and their parents are what keep you in business.

An author is, for sure, still an author without them. But we, we publishers, we are nothing without them. Yet they don’t lord their status as our paymasters over us! No, they’re too busy browsing, scavenging, plundering, buying, spending hours of time building costumes so they can dressing up like their favorite characters and tell the world how much they love the experience our books give them.

So next year, on Friday as we anticipate their arrival, and on Saturday as they flood in, giddy with booklust, and on Sunday, as they being to explore the less familiar parts of global publishing, the American publishers stands, the Estonians, the art book publishers, let’s not be contemptuous, or whiny, but be thinking instead, how can we harness this energy? How can each of us get more of our readers this excited about books?

As I just posted in discussing the lessons of this week’s Book Fair in regards to business models, the future is now here. And since we are still on the Frankfurt time that I described in my opening post, this means that tomorrow, tomorrow will be the first day of Frankfurt 2010, so let’s use the intervening 360 days of nonFrankfurt time to be, yes, embracing the digital as well as the print, but above all to be embracing the reader, who makes all this possible.

As readers of the Book Fair blog have by now ascertained, my beat certainly encompasses matters digital. And now we’re done with the Fair, the fog is beginning to lift and allowing certain features of the landscape to become more distinct.

All Will Change, Change Utterly (Again and Again)

First a warning, an admonition, really - a core organizing principle of our landscape is that it is now “emergent.” (In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.) Or, in relatively simple terms, each action by hardware companies, software companies, media companies, artists, writers, publishers, and retailers affects the landscape.

The falling of barriers to entry has increased the number of these actors operating on the landscape, and their degree of interdependence has grown. So not only will things continue to change, the rate of change itself is likely to increase.  We are not just in transition from one state or model to another state or model, we’re in transition to a state of permanent accelerated transition where the model is continuous rapid reinvention.

Publishing will never be stable again.

(Skeptics, remember: if Moore’s Law - which asserts that processing power will double every eighteen months - continues to hold up, and it has held up for 35 years, then 25 years from now the iPhone will fit inside a blood cell.)

Getting with the Reality-Based Program

So, with that caution in mind, let’s look at what the panels and conversations and announcements of the first half of the Fair suggest. My co-blogger Alex summarized a superb conversation Wednesday amongst a pretty much perfectly representative sample of companies facing the digital challenges: Victoria Barnsley (CEO, HarperCollins UK), Richard Charkin (Executive Director of Bloombury Publishing), Andrew Savikas (VP of Digital, O’Reilly Media), and Ronald Schild (MD of MVB Marketing). It was clear from the comments that for all the discussion in the industry of pricing in terms of “should,” ie. what should we charge for digital content, prices are going to be set by consumers, plain and simple.

To allay your skepticism, I should say that this was the trade publisher CEO, Victoria Barnsley, who was saying that. I chatted with Charkin after the event and he emphasized that regardless of where one stands on the law and philosophy of copyright, the business models have to reflect the reality that even if individual shouldn’t hack, copy, pirate, they can, and some will, so the models need to be predicated on that reality, not a fantasy in which some combination of automated takedown notices and digital rights management manages to eliminate illegal copying from the planet.

What this means is that we (publishers, authors, agents) are going to need to make decisions based on the world that is (people will make unauthorized copies, people will undercut your price), rather than the world we will wish for. Until recently, it was not clear that the publishing industry accepted this, but these statements by Richard Charkin, Victoria Barnsley and other industry decision-makers are powerful indicators that this approach has solidifed to the point of consensus.

There is no such thing as an eBook

This is not in fact to say there is no such thing as an eBook but to say that the digital transformation facing the industry is not one is which files downloaded to a reading device are replacing print books, but that digital information and entertainment over the course of the Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences” and it is cear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of  pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as a opposed to personal license) rights. And other yet to be named or thought up!

The World is Your Oyster

There are a billion web-enabled cell phones. Lexcycle’s Stanza reading app has been downloaded 2.5 million times in 75 of the 80 countries in which the iPhone is now available. There will be 20 Android-based smartphones by the end of this year. This is not an American thing, or an Asian thing, this is worldwide. For example, the country-by-country breakdown shows that while the U.S. is the largest market for O’Reilly’s Snow Leopard OS Missing Manual app at 35%, Italy was second at 23%. China’s Shanda has 4 million people signed up to buy and read novels on their mobiles.

Not only, it turns out, are the readers of the world looking to buy our content if we can deliver it to them digitally, but the world’s leading hardware companies are looking to help us. Along with Sony, iRex, TXTR, and other dedicated reading device manufacturers exhibiting, presenting, and working the floor, two Apple executives were traversing the halls of the Fair to let publishers know all the opportunities that await them on that platform. (Let it be said: that platform, right now, is the iPhone. Not any other rumored device. Apple has not been in private discussions about a larger device and reports that they have are a hoax. But Apple does believe in the opportunity for the publishing industry’s content, contrary to the occasional snarky comment from Jobs.) Apple is working to improve the Books section of the App store to make it more browsable, and they are trying to help publishers find the right developers to work with.

The Takeaway

This year’s Fair has made clear that:

1. This is happening now, the future is already here.
2. Everyone can benefit, no-one is exempt.
3. The transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.

Much of the change will not be apparent in the tradition consumer print supply chain for a while, especially in countries with a protected marketplace and/or fixed consumer prices. Take advantage of that breathing space and do not take its longevity for granted - fixed prices are not fixed sales. Instead, use the cushion that that social compact has afforded you to continue the process of advancing the cause of literature in whatever format or experience your country’s reader might desire.

I really do love book fair and publishing people and the business of publishing and the discovery of new artists. I love drinking too much, knowing that when I sip my first beer at a 5 o’clock Australian reception that I’ll be talking, mingling, and imbibing for the next eleven or so hours.

I love that despite all this- which must seem a bit decadent to outsiders - that business gets done. That I can find a Flemish author with echos of Kafka, Beckett, and Pinter. (I’m keeping this book secret for the moment . . . If you want to find out who the next hot Flemish author will be, you’ll have to read my regular blog Three Percent.) That I can learn about Bragi Olafsson’s latest novel. That I can meet a Polish editor who’s really excited about some of our translations.

Juergen Boos is absolutely right: Frankfurt is a platform. A place where everyone can come together to meet, friend each other (like in the old-school, non-Facebook sense), exchange info, do business. I’m sure this happens in other industries as well, but there’s something about a gather of tens of thousands of literary folk that makes this Fair hum with some sort of cultural import. We will all shape the future of publishing and part of that future is being designed over the course of this week.

We talked a lot about eBooks. Maybe too much - like Erin Cox said in her Publishing Perspectives editorial we don’t want to lose focus on our real business: “creating content for the reader, not content for the technology.” We talked about rights deals that did and didn’t get done. We talked about the “monkey sex” book and the graphic novel Michael Jackson “wrote.” We talked about Zombies. (We did a lot of talking about Zombies.) But most of all, we talked.

I’ve heard lots of people mention how the Frankfurt Book Fair is like a family reunion. (Caveat: they’re talking about one of those pot-o-gold rare fun family reunions.) And it sort of is. It’s hard (for me) to not get a bit emotional about the end of the fair. These are my people; this is what I love. So forgive my over-the-top sentimentality, but I’m going to miss this, and will be waiting patiently for next year, when I can come back, reconnect, tell new stories, have more drinks, and find more books. See you next year–

Most of the media hype surrounding China’s presence as Guest of Honour at this year’s fair has dealt with grand and expansive subjects like the freedom of expression and human rights. These are undoubtedly important. But what about the average person in China, people doing everyday things, going about their lives? How do they deal with being hemmed in by the politics and tradition of their nation? If you’re thinking along the same lines, it’ll be worth your while to head over to an exhibition at the Comics Centre in Hall 3.0 entitled ‘Beijing - Ten Faces of One City.’

The exhibition showcases enlarged comic illustrations by ten ‘manhua’ (the Chinese word for Manga, which literally translates to ‘funny pictures’) artists. Some of the works on display are straight-up rebellious while others are thoughtful reflections. All of them provide unusual and visually stunning impressions of Bejiing and insights into the dynamic private lives of its residents. These stylistically diverse impressions of China’s capital city touch upon themes ranging from the transformation of the old-city, through environmental problems, to the difficulties of growing up in China today. My personal favourite was a spread from Song Yang’s ‘The People of Peking’ that depicts, with exquisite intricate illustrations, a homeless person and a pavement cobbler who doubles-up as a bicycle repair man.

Manhua has taken China by storm in the last few years. Approximately 3 million titles are sold every month. This is hardly a coincidence, as the introduction to the exhibition points out - Mandarin is a highly visual and symbolic language. Manhua isn’t just derived from the Japanese Manga; China has its own comic tradition that can be traced back to the 1880s. At the time, black and white booklets, known as ‘Lianhuanhua’, told stories through pictures that were accompanied by explanatory captions and sold at low prices by street vendors. These stories were later used to instruct Chinese people on how they ought to think and behave. The Chinese comics scene has come a long way from this religious and political propaganda, with modern manhua artists’ interest in representing how people actually live and think.

The exhibition opened on Wednesday with a presentation – featuring Dr. Jochaim Kaps, managing director of Tokyopop Germany, and journalist Francoise Hauser – that introduced China’s comics scene, described how the exhibition came about and explained what the works on display are trying to say about China. A book with the same title as the exhibition –  bringing together the work of artists Ji An, Liang Yi, Liu Wei, Song Yang, Nie Jun and Cheng Cheng, among others – was recently released on the German market by Tokyopop. The publishing house plans to follow up with more manhua titles, which are sure to go down well with the legion of Manga enthusiasts in the country.

The exhibiton is on until the end of the fair. So if you brave the overwhelming crowd that’s sure to be gathered in Hall 3.0, you might just see a different China from the one promoted by the official delegation and derided by the press.

On all levels—the content creation/origination itself, the burgeoning opportunities for digital platforms, and the tools that can be used to make licensing transactions more efficient—digital is transforming rights and licensing. The US-based Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) not only has a horizontal one-stop-shop website of its own but is now licensing a software module that can be fully integrated into book and magazine publishing websites, enabling publishers to automate the licensing process on a highly granular level—pages, articles, chapters, video, podcasts, pictures, blog posts, anything with a unique identifier can be processed by their software. They demonstrated it at the Book Fair on Wednesday, showing how The Economist magazine uses their software and brilliantly incorporates it in the “Share This” button—click and you’re offered the option to email a link, to add it to any social media and social bookmarking tool, and to license it.

Still in beta is Bookriff—it was not presented in the Book Fair programming, but the company principal Mark Scott was meeting with publishers to establish partnerships and I stopped by to talk to him. Effectively Bookriff allows publishers to upload chunks of content, most likely chapters and short stories, to a database. A users can then search the site for interesting chunks and create her own anthology which can then be submitted automatically to a print on demand facility. So it is a make-your-own-book service, perfect for travel books where you only need to buy those chapters you want for your itinerary, permitting the creation of custom readers for academic coursework, allowing non-profits to create premium products. (Publishers set their own licensing fees…)

While the CCC automation process is designed to improve the user experience for licensing small chunk so content, thereby incrementally improving that revenue stream due to speed and convenience and instant gratification; and Bookriff creates a revenue stream that simply never existed before, licensing for film and television offers the possibility of large lump single transaction—potentially enormously valuable, though the value has been known for a long time. Dark Horse Comics has always been at the forefront of of the publishing industry’s efforts to expand multimedia licensing. In a very candid and entertaining panel at the Comics-Zentrum, he and three comics artists—Eric Powell, Brett Weldele, and Robert Venditti discussed the win-win of book-to-film licensing. Many of the point raised in the conversation will be self-evident to the publishing folk reading this, so I won’t belabor them here, but what did feel noteworthy was that movie studios find comics particularly appealing because they supply more of the material needed to create a film—the comic cell structure matches the story-boarding film creators like to use and at least one production design aesthetic is already available for consideration.

With the music industry doing all it can to shift to a 360 degree revenue model in the face of collapsing consumer demand for their tradition revenue stream, it is clear that media companies are looking to find ways to more fully exploit the value of their intellectual property and by maximally exploiting all the forgoing, book publishers can make a start on expanding their revenue streams beyond the print book.

Randy Wilhelm

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this morning’s session in the Congress Centre but, as a mother of two, I was open-minded and hoping to hear how new innovative products and approaches might help teachers and learning in the classroom.  I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

The two-hour session was divided into four, with four different speakers presenting their own, very different, business models.

First up was Sebastian Gutmann, Managing Director of a company called Kids for Kids which is only 3 years old and based in Germany.  This is a multi-media, educational publishing house which specialises in teaching English as a second language to children.  Their product entitled ‘Discover English with Ben & Bella’ looked like it’s great fun to use.  Aimed at pre-school kids and their parents, everything is sound-based.

One fact we know is that children respond much better if they learn through play and by using methods that are enjoyable.  This product uses 3D technology to encourage the kids to really engage and to learn without really realising they are doing so.  For example, one of things kids can do is learn a song and dance routine whilst watching the DVD.

What they don’t realise is that by following the instructions, they are absorbing lots of new and interesting words, at the same time as learning how to articulate them correctly.  Kids for Kids have, by producing a box-set, provided parents and teachers with a one-stop shop.  The box-set includes story books, DVDs, CDs, activity books, a PC game, flash cards, and a guide books for parents, with picture dictionaries highlighting words in different colours.

As we all know with kids, the key to learning anything new is repetition and with kids you need to repeat a word 3 times for it to stick.  So all the DVDs and books tie-in together and you get exactly the same on the DVD as in the book.  An interactive game is also included to evaluate how the kids are doing as you go along.

Next to present was Randy Wilhelm, CEO and co-founder of a firm called netTrekker in the US.  The company was founded in 1999 and it specialises in internet development.  A leader in the delivery of digital K-12 educational content, it serves over 10 million students, teachers and schools worldwide.  It was the first to market with a standards-based educational search tool which delivers the rich educational value of the internet to every child in a safe, teacher-approved, relevant, easy-to-use format.

Their real goal is to get kids more excited about the things they are learning and to help teachers find the right tools to help individual students.  Education needs to be personal of course as no two students are the same.  netTrekker, which is subscription-based, is currently partnering with other third party companies to deliver the complete solution, for example with a company called Brainpop which gives video-based explanations and helps kids learn individual words in an entertaining way.

It also provides keyword searches, and everything they offer has a readability rating.  It also has the option to search and has an impressive list of different languages too.  The company’s motto is ‘Go do something good for kids’ which I liked - anything that helps children to learn has got to be a good thing.

Sudhir Singh Dungarpur, President and CEO of Q2A Media in India, followed.  This presentation demonstrated how teachers can use interactive whiteboard technology, using student response systems, for formative assessment to improve classroom instruction and student learning outcomes.

The company is a ‘one of it’s kind’ learning-based content provider, in both print and digital media, focusing on the children’s market (pre-school through to 16 years old).  It is the largest packager in the school and library segment and a key player in the primary and secondary school text book market in the US and Europe.  It has also developed its own interactive classroom product for elementary maths and science.  In order that we could understand how the product worked, we were taken through a typical lesson.

The clever thing about this business model is that, by asking students questions as you go along, it has the ability to assess how the students are reacting.  In other words it can check that they have understood the topic and can see where the gaps are.  And maybe the most important point to make here is that it’s adapted to the curriculum of each country.

In a Q&A session that followed, the presenter was asked how easy it is for teachers to understand the product?  It seems that it takes only around 30 minutes to get your head around it but the crucial thing, as with all new products, is to feel comfortable with it.  Many people have a fear of technology but once you are familiar with it, it’s easy to use.

Livescribe

Lastly, we came to Holly De Leon who is the Vice President for Sales of Livescribe Inc in the US.  For me this was the most exciting presentation of them all and was, although the smallest, in a way the most innovative.  The bottom line is that Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen simply revolutionizes the act of writing.  It gives learners all the portability, flexibility and ease of use of a pen with the functionality and power of a computer.  In other words, it records everything you hear and write, and makes taking notes and listening at the same time much easier.  A modern way of multi-tasking if you like.

We’ve all sat in the back of the room, trying to take notes at the same time as trying to work out what on earth the guy at the front is saying!

This device means that life in the classroom is going to get a whole lot easier.  Basically there is a computer in the top of the pen.  It captures everything that you are writing, but also captures the audio at the same time as well.  Both processes are then synchronized together using an infrared camera which takes 70 pictures per second. And, it seems, you can even have terrible writing and it doesn’t care.

You can choose to buy the product with one of two different memory capacities - either 2GB (which gives you over 200 hours of recording time and costs $169) or 4 GB (which gives you 400 hours and costs $199).  With a 3D recording headset, you can get really good audio - even in a big lecture hall.  In order to make it work, you need special Livescribe dot paper which comes in different forms and different sized notebooks.  The charge plugs into your USB port and you can then download all the information onto the computer.  The wonderful thing is that the pen can capture the whole of a teacher’s lesson, so if the student hasn’t fully understood it, the student can replay it as many times as they need later on.  You can share your work with others as you can easily email it to your fellow students or colleagues.  Alternatively, a teacher can email it to any absent students.

I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that the company works with a lot of special needs kids, as this device I’m sure could help a lot of children with learning difficulties, including dyslexia. The desktop software is free and we were told that in the near future over 5,000 aps are going to be available as well.  An amazing product that, in my opinion, deserves to be a massive hit around the world.