October 11th, 2007

At a fair dominated by words it was a presentation that was refreshingly all about the images. In her presentation ‘Visual and Design Trends in Educational Publishing’, Getty Images’ Trend Research Expert Rebecca Swift took the gathered crowd through the hottest new trends in visual communication. Can you guess what they are?

First up is authenticity. Think deliberately unflattering pictures of hot young things as seen on MySpace and Facebook pages (they probably spent hours getting the picture ‘just right’ but that’s beside the point.) In order to present images that appear ‘not faceless, but genuine’, advertisers are increasingly drawing on images from these consumer-generated sites.

The second trend is healthiness—the image of vitality, but also, spirituality. The yoga pose has been ubiquitous in the advertising world in the past few years.

Finally, there is the green phenomenon. According to Swift, ‘the world of the visual has had a green wash on it,’ from the colour-coordinated ‘green themed’ magazine issues to the iconic image of the polar bear on the melting ice cap. Swift predicts that the green issue will only get bigger in the next three to four years. ‘Expect to see more penguins and polar bears in the future,’ Swift warns.

Google may be driving the move in the English-language world towards the day when the text of every book can be searched online, but in Germany booksellers and publishers are taking matters into their own hands.

Yesterday saw the launch at Frankfurt of Libreka!, a new full-text online book search database operated by MVB (Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels). Its goal, according to MVB’s managing director Ronald Schild, is to ensure ‘that every bookseller in Germany, regardless of size, can have a search-inside-the-book facility.’

The service is based on the 1.1 million-titles German Books in Print database, and currently contains the full text for only 8000 titles, based on PDFs supplied by publisher prior to the launch. Schild announced yesterday that the MVB will be adding a further 50,000 titles in due course, scanned at no charge to publishers. As a bonus, Libreka! will be converting all files supplied into Adobe’s e-Book reader format so that the titles can be sold as ebooks.

Why not leave this all to Google? ‘German publishers want to shape the digital market of the future, not leave it to a third party,’ Schild told me. ‘It’s much more economical for the book industry to develop its own facilities.’ The invovlement of booksellers from the service’s inception also ensures their early involvement in the retailing of ebooks.

Phase One of the project is to provide full-text searching, together with sales and marketing resources, but the application of the service doesn’t end there. Next year, MVB plans to develop e-commerce capability to the site, so that books found can be ordered, either in print or digital form. Also, a widget is being created to enable German booksellers to host the whole service on their own websites. This way, Schild believes, a service that is essentially business-to-business will ‘one way or another … come to the end user.’

Well everyone, it looks like those unruly train operators are not going to cooperate and indeed are going to strike on Friday. This means that commuter trains and S-Bahn trains will be affected – what this actually means is anyone’s guess at this point. Trains may run less frequently than scheduled or they may stop running entirely. What’s important for you to know is that the U-bahn, trams, buses and intercity trains will run. Please note: the strike is likely only for Friday. Things will be back to normal for the weekend.

We’re at a pivotal moment in the development of international translation, said Esther Allen, the author of a PEN / IRL report on the issue. She launched the study - To Be Translated or Not To Be - at the Translator’s Centre today and revealed that it is already having an impact on the literary and academic world.

According to Allen, the report has been circulated in embryonic form for some time and the topics it broaches have already been put into dialogue in the US (Allen is the director of the Centre for Lit Translation at Colombia University, New York). Within the last year there have been two translation firsts in the States: the New York Times Book Review devoted an entire issue to writing in translation, and the New Yorker dedicated an issue to fiction in translation. In addition, as a result of being involved in the report, International PEN are founding a literature festival to introduce translated writers into English which will float from country to country. There are also an increasing number of translation centres opening up within American universities.

The report opens with an assessment of the unprecedented scope of the English language (described as an “invasive species”) and, during the well-attended debate, Allen mused on the question of whether linguistic domination is cyclical. French used to be the leading language in the world – the ‘lingua franca’, even – so will English domination play out and eventually be replaced? Allen’s view is that there has never been technology in the world of the kind and penetration that we have today and that we can’t really know what impact that technology will have on the human language. She quoted Claude Levi-Strauss – “difference is decreasing and that is the greatest danger to humanity” – and pointed out that the market for English language books outside of the English-speaking world is now $3bn a year and growing which, she says, gives us a notion of how important the issue is.

A political take on the translation debate was offered by her fellow contributor to the report, the literary critic and translator Simona Skrabec. She commented that the focus of translation discussions usually tends to be on the struggle to be translated into ‘bigger’ languages and to be known outside the boundaries of our own countries. We are not, she said, so interested in what is being translated into our language. As an example she pointed to the policy of the Franco regime in Spain to ban translation of ‘universal’ works into Catalan which, she said, was part of the wider attempt to reduce Catalan to a provincial language.

It’s easy to get sidetracked when you wander the packed halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but this is even more evident in the delightfully distracting aisles of Children’s Publishing in Hall 3.0. A guided tour of a several smaller German-language children’s publishing houses (the bigger ones were far too busy to talk to journalists!) revealed some of its delights. Publishers from Moritz, Bajazzo, Tulipan and Picus offered their perspectives on the current market for children’s illustrated publishing

Quality and quirky

It’s a difficult time to be publishing illustrated children’s books, according to the publishers interviewed, with a glut of ‘mainstream’ and ‘overly sweet’ titles flooding the market. But they still believed that there was an opportunity for publishers to produce quality and quirky titles … as evidenced by their endeavours at the fair! ‘It’s important to sell only the books you care passionately about,’ said Bajazzo’s Ingrid Roesli. ‘Less but better.’

The temptations of Korea and France

It sounds like Korea is the hot country for buying and selling picture books at the moment. Bajazzo and Picus have both had success selling rights into the Korean market, while Moritz’s Weber was eagerly monitoring the Korean illustrating scene for potential acquisitions. ‘Korea is producing really interesting books,’ he said. ‘I think that will be something to look out for.’ Weber was also enthusiastic about the quality of picture books coming out of the French market and suggested that the reason for its success could be traced back to Catholicism. The Catholic religion, he explained, is far more ‘visual’ than the Protestant one. ‘There are far more pictures in Catholic churches.’

Illustrations lost in translation

But it was the tales of the ‘untranslatable illustrations’— pictures that were deemed too risqué for some countries and had to be altered—that proved the most amusing aspect of the tour. America was a popular target. ‘No naked people in illustrations,’ observed Bajazzo’s Roesli. And apparently, no bodily fluids either. She opened the picture book Echte Kerle (Real Men) to a page where a young girl was depicted wetting her nightgown. The excess wee-wee (to coin a popular children’s term) had to be removed for the US edition

As many of you no doubt know, Doris Lessing has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. I just happened to be in the HarperCollins booth at the moment the announcement was made.

Harper publishes much of Lessing’s writing in the US and the UK, including her best known work The Golden Notebook. Champagne appeared and Harper luminaries raised a glass. They included: Jane Friedman (president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide), Michael Morrison (Harper/Morrow president and group publisher), Jonathan Burnham (svp, publisher of Harper), Tim Duggan (executive editor, HarperCollins) and Lessing’s UK editor, Nicholas Pearson (publishing director of Fourth Estate).

It took less then ten minutes before Harper Perennial publisher Carrie Kania announced she’d already set up a conference call with the relevant parties back in the States discuss reprints. Someone was dispatched for find Lessing’s titles to stack on the table for photo ops.

Friedman told the group of journalists that quickly surrounded her that she’d just been in Stockholm before the Book Fair. ‘The last time I was there was when Toni Morrison won the Nobel,’ she said, ‘and I was thinking how nice it would be to come back,’ adding, ‘This is a wonderful surprise.’

Jonathan Burnham summed things up nicely with this ‘official’ comment: ‘HarperCollins is thrilled the Nobel Prize committee has recognized Doris Lessing this year. She is without a doubt one of the most significant writers of our time, both politically and culturally, and has a huge cultural reach.’ Well, we certainly couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Congrats, Doris! And congrats to our friends at HarperCollins.

In a seminar on audiobooks today, Martina Tittel introduced an audience of aspiring and experienced audiobook publishers and booksellers to the ‘booming’ German audiobook industry. Audiobooks are fun, she enthused, and the evidence is there—from Goethe, who once described the written language as a sad surrogate of the spoken one, to Harry Potter. The audiobook versions of the young wizard’s adventures, which feature the voices of numerous actors against a backdrop of atmospheric sound effects, have sold millions of copies around the world. Tittel was disappointed when a show of hands revealed that only a few members of the audience had experienced Harry in audio. ‘You have to hear Harry Potter,’ she insisted.

One of the biggest challenges for audiobook publishers is to get their products in the hands of customers. To this end, publishers need to work more closely with booksellers. Display is everything. In bookshops, Tittel recommended that audiobooks be shelved alongside their printed partners, with sofas and listening devices set up for audio-browsing. She also pointed out the importance of handselling. Customers unaccustomed to the format need to be convinced that audiobooks are fun!

One of the great things about the book fair is the opportunity it creates for collaboration between professionals from around the world, and this was demonstrated in the seminar’s subsequent Q&A session. A representative from the BBC discussed the importance that radio has played in getting people ‘used to the notion of listening’ in the UK, while a guest from Belgium pointed out the success that Germany has had in using the women’s magazine Brigitte to promote audiobooks.

Turkish plans for its Guest of Honour appearance at the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair were revealed at a packed press conference today. The media scrum itself was an indication of the interest and expectations that have been aroused by Turkish participation at Frankfurt, and also the prestige that now accompanies the Guest of Honour programme.

A programme of cultural activities under the slogan ‘Turkey in all its colours’ will commence from next March, taking in the Leipzig Book Fair, and will run all the way up to next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. 

Home of 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s book market has grown enormously in the past decade, from 9,491 books published in 1996 to 32,750 last year. Book production is currently growing at a rate of 25 per cent per year. The number of Turkish publishers has also doubled since 2000 - there are now over 1,700.

Yet to join the European Union, and balanced delicately between East and West and the Moslem and Christian worlds, Turkey’s participation is likely to stimulate debate both inside the country and elsewhere. This is no bad thing, according to Frankfurt director, Juergen Boos:

‘Is it usually the case that long before the appearance at Frankfurt, the question of how a country should present itself in Frankfurt, how its book culture is best reflected, leaves to lively discussion in the Guest of Honour country itself, and to intense examination of its own sense of cultural identity. This, I believe, is an important process that sets many projects in motion … we’re eager to see how Turkey will make use of these opportunities.’

Like many countries, Turkey has a government-funded programme to encourage translation of its literature. Its TEDA project has so far assisted 40 publishing houses in publishing 223 books into 34 languages, according to Ertugrul Günay, Turkish Minister for Culture and Tourism. It’s growing too: in the first six months of 2007, 115 projects received funding.

A new translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has struck a chord with Japanese readers: The five volume edition has sold 300,000 copies since it was published in Sept. 2006. Translator Ikuo Kameyama has suggested that the book is so popular with readers because it depicts the “humble existence” of human beings who find themselves at the mercy of a chaotic world. “This bears similarity to the modern world under globalization. We live in an era when we are wedged between huge tragedies such as terrorist attacks and Internet-based information that we read with a guilty conscience,” he said during a lecture earlier this year (You can read more about the phenomenon here.)

This anecdote was one bright spot in a seminar on the Japanese book market that otherwise offered some sobering statistics. Perhaps the most vexing of all was the news that the total book market in Japan has shrunk by 20 per cent over the last ten years, with research showing the Japanese youth is distracted by technology, and in particular, their mobile phones. Last year, total book sales amounted to $7.8 billion, with an increase of 1.4 per cent due primarily from the translation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince into Japanese (the only translated title in the top 30 books for the year). Sales of ebooks to mobile phones are the fastest growing segment of the market.

In total, 56,613 books were published in Japan last year, of which 4,943 (or 8.6 per cent) were translated. Of those, 1,523 titles were translated from English (606 of which were romance titles published by Harlequin).

Korean titles, especially those tied to popular films or television serials, are also among the most popular translated titles, especially among female book buyers. Conversely, Japanese titles travel well throughout Asia. In Korea, titles translated from the Japanese account for 10 per cent of new books.

Book retailing in Japan has experienced a similar shrinkage to that which has occurred in the US over in the past twenty years. The total number of bookstores in Japan has fallen from 12,000 in 1985 to 6,300 stores in 2006. Nevertheless, unlike in the US and the UK more than 50 per cent of book sales are made by a handful of chain stores and mass marketers, the top six chains account for just 18 per cent of the total market and, Kinokuniya, the largest of all, accounts for just 5.5 per cent of sales. In Japan, which fixes prices on new books, the small retailers can continue to compete for the moment.

One of the most sought after party tickets circulating at this year’s Fair offers entrance to the nightly Solar Nits dinner and after-party, which promises a cornucopia of Catalan cuisine, performance art and music.

I made it to last night’s opening session, which featured a whimsical array finger foods from the “Col-lectiu de Joves Cuiners,” a collective of eleven young chefs from the Girona region. Trays circulated with Prawn Pipeta — shrimp skewered on little plastic tubs filled with shrimp reduction , mushroom stuffed eggs, and then for dessert, a tray of dark Barcelona chocolates — half sprinkled with what looked like gold dust and the other half filled with what Americans call ‘pop rocks.’ “It’s like having a little party in your mouth,” remarked one of my fellow diners absolutely without irony.

While the food impressed, it was quickly trumped by the art, which last night featured a musical composition with piano and motorcycle by Carles Santos and Adam Raga. Dubbed “Ebrofalia Copulativa,” Santos played a grand piano while Raga negotiated a multilevel obstacle course on a dirt bike. Santos played a few bars…Raga revved his engine…a few more bars…vrooooom, vroooom!

Tonight promises a performance by the Viennese group The Vegetable Orchestra that, as you no doubt already guessed, makes instruments only using vegetable. Sounds nutritious!

See the schedule for upcoming shows here.