October 12th, 2007

After a long day at the Fair, take a rest and come to enjoy the Catalan Culture at the Sónar Nits parties at the Bockenheimer Depot. We went Wednesday night and it was great.

With a ‘designed environment,’ the best music acts and DJs in town, visual arts and selected food, it’s the perfect way to recover from your exhausting day.

Your Buchmesse badge is valid to get in. Just show it at the main entrance.

For further information, visit the Catalan Culture Stand (Hall 5.1 D901) or check the daily program at www.sonar.es.

The details:

Sonar Nits
Bockenheimer Depot
Carlo-Schmid-Platz 1
Bockenheimer Warte
Frankfurt

Friday and Saturday from 09.30 pm to 02.30 am. (Limited capacity)

About 60% of the rights bought by German publishers are for English-language books. When it comes to selling rights, however, the picture is very different: only 7% of rights sales made by German companies are to English-language publishers. These two contrasting statistics set up an interesting discussion on the health of German literature internationally in the International Centre (Hall 5.0 D901) today.

The high-profile German Book Prize was established to help matters. According to Claudia Kaiser, who runs the international department of the Frankfurt Book Fair, it is certainly having a positive effect. All of last year’s shortlisted books had now been sold to English-language markets and the prize is now guaranteeing that a book will be translated, she said. The German Book Office was also helping to spread the word about German writers.

Another initiative designed to promote German literature is the Litrix website, set up with assistance from the Goethe Institute. The Institute’s Jutta Limbach claimed that 30 rights deals could be directly credited to this online resource, 25% of which were for children’s books, an area in which she thought Germany could excel internationally.

While some rights were being sold, there was still a job to do with promoting the translations that were published, claimed Rebecca Morrison, editor of New Books in German, a twice-yearly review print and online magazine. Typical sales were between 2000 and 6000 copies - moderately healthy.

However, ‘Germany is becoming sexier,’ Morrison asserted, ‘a spy thriller doesn’t have to take place in Venice or Rome any more.’ That said, Morrison claimed subsidies for translations were absolutely essential: ‘our work would be impossible if the Goethe Institute didn’t support translations.’

Internationally-successful German-language authors cited in the session included:

• Herta Muller
• Elke Schmitter
• Migrant writer Ilya Trojanow
• Juli Zeh
• Berlin writer Katja Lange-Muller
• Christoph Hein
• Austria’s Arno Geiger
• Erich Kastner
• Otfried Preussler
• Gunter Grass

“I know this book won’t be a bestseller, but if it touches just one person then it will have been worth it,’ said Giancarlo Trepans, at the Forum Dialog this afternoon to launch the ‘Writer’s Under Attack’ publishing programme by the two-year-old Italian publishing house Neftasia Editore.

Trepans is the author of the novel ‘How Long Since,’ one of the first titles published in the series. The novel depicts an encounter between a priest – one who has devoted his life to saving exploited children in places like Sierra Leone and Chechnya – and a journalist who wishes to record the stories.

Neftasia publisher Stefania Campanelli said the series will focus on publishing the works of writers who have been persecuted, censored or exiled. One book will be published in the series each month and a total of 15 titles is already planned. Campanelli is seeking a partner to publish and distribute the books in English.

Musa Mutaev, a Chechen writer who lives in exile in Norway, presented a short reading from his new collection of short stories ‘The Green Sun,’ also among the first titles to be launched. Also among the first four title are ‘I Am Guilty,’ a collection of essays by the Bangladeshi writer Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury and an anti-mafia tract by Italian journalists Emiliano Morrone and Francesco Saverio Alessio entitled The Disappearing Society.

Dr. Johano Strasser, president of PEN Germany, remarked that the ‘Writers Under Attack’ series is likely help raise awareness of the persecution of writers beyond the obvious countries – China, Cuba, Iran, Eritrea and Myanmar. ‘This, in itself, makes the project a worthy thing to do,’ said Strasser.

Neftasia is already helping to instigate change: The publisher has convinced its hometown of has to join the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) which offers a safe have to writers in exile.

As event venues in the Halls go, the Comics Centre is arguably the most fun. It’s got inflatable balls to sit on, a free popcorn machine and a noticeable drop in the average age and dress code of the participants. Scott McCloud, professional cartoonist, comics scholar and author of a number of acclaimed books on the genre fitted right in this afternoon as he gave an appropriately high octane presentation on new trends in American comics. Whisking the audience along with him on a whistlestop, illustrated (all of a sudden, Powerpoint seemed to have a point for once) tour of the comics scene, he managed to get from ancient Egyptian scrolls to the latest in web comics in under an hour, and even took in his life history along the way.

According to McCloud, there are five key choices in comics creation: moment, frame, image, word and flow. Each offers an example of the ways in which comics are changing and developing. Moment is the timing and pace of a comic and, influenced by Japanese comics, the traditional American comic is slowing down. Think of the change from the traditional 24-page superhero comic to the 2-300 page graphic novels hitting the shelves now. With frame, the traditional US route has been to show the whole picture then zoom right in and be a slave to the close-up to make the strip as exciting and dynamic as possible. The European tendency is to pull back the camera to show more, to wander about a bit, and this is starting to get picked up in the US too. One of the biggest changes in the US is over the use of words, the subjects covered by comics. There’s been a worldwide shift in perspective towards the notion that comics can be ambitious in content while remaining simple in style – think Art Spiegelman and Maus. The choice of image styles is expanding with the web but the choice which has seen – or could potentially see - the greatest influence from new technology is the very form itself of the comic.

McCloud argues that ‘comics DNA’ consists of something to see in the panels and something to imagine between them. However, form in this sense - guiding the eye within and between panels – could now change completely once the comic is freed from the limitations of print publishing. Pre-print comics – tales told through pictures, such as pre-Colombian artworks, ancient Egyptian scrolls, the Bayeux tapestry – related a story using a single broken reading line. This changed with print comics and the need to move down a page as well as across it and to turn pages. Could the web provide a return to that single narrative line? McCloud thinks it is a very real possibility, if comics creators can start to think of the screen not as a page but as a window. It then becomes an extended canvas on which panels can be made huge as they are not dependent on the size of surrounding panels, or a story can be told in any direction. McCloud admits that sees himself on the R+D wing of the comics world and that while the web is already being used to replicate print comics in online form, his more radical vision may take a few years to materialise.

What’s the place of the commercial publishers in an online world where services like Wikipedia are delivering free content? The battle - real or perceived - between the open content movement and commercial publishing was the topic of an session today hosted by the International Publishers Association (IPA).

Introducing the session, IPA president Ana Maria Cabanellas (pictured) put forward her view that publishers were in the content business rather than the print business, and that ‘we have to treat the internet as just another opportunity.’

So, what does ‘free’ actually mean? Mathias Schindler of the Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit organisation that runs Wikipedia - said Wikipedia’s content was ‘free’ in the sense that users had the freedom to copy, modify and distribute it , even for commercial reasons. This was a subtly different definition of ‘free’ to that used in the phrase ‘free beer,’ he said.

‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,’ said Bernd Kreissig of Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien, quoting Robert A Heinlein’s famous phrase (now reduced in our online age to the somewhat bland acronym TANSTAAFL). Nothing is free to produce, he noted, and in a funding model where the user isn’t paying for the content, there’s more risk that the end content will be unreliable or incomplete. ‘There’s no reliability without liability,’ he asserted rather neatly. Still, Kreissig wasn’t saying there was no place for free content, rather that free and paid content needed to co-exist rather as volunteer and professional fire-fighting service co-existed in his native Germany. Volunteers had a vital role, but no-one would argue that a professional service wasn’t needed.

Dr Jan Hylen, a consultant on Open Education Resources for the OECD, described the growth of the open content movement in universities, where lecture notes, sound and video recordings and other materials were increasingly being offered online. He defined Open Education Resources as ‘digitised material offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.’ There was a global movement to create this material, he said, and while it was not cost-free, universities saw it as a way of promoting their research, reputations, and leveraging the tax-payers money they received.

Should commercial publishers be worried? Not so, said Hylen. Such material was a supplement to, not a replacement for, textbooks. He referred the meeting to the OECD document Giving Knowledge for Free for more information.

The meeting was also treated to a colourful talk from the Executive Director of the South African Publishers Association, Dudley Schroeder. A former teacher, Schroeder made a powerful plea for the kind of high quality textbooks and teachers resources which had proven essential in reducing inequities in the South African educational system, and increasing inexperienced teachers’ capacity to teach. Such textbooks, which ensure ‘that real learning takes place,’ could only be produced by a competitive, professional publishing sector, he argued.

If you missed the Q&A session on Wednesday afternoon that Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace and myself conducted with senior executives from Holtzbrinck, Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins on the global quest for digital sales, our friends at the Frankfurt Book Fair Podcast have now posted the full hour-long session online. It takes a few minutes to download, but it’s well worth the listen.

Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s giving authors a whole new lease of life. Promotional videos made for streaming on the internet are an increasingly popular and cost-effective way of promoting books, especially fiction. This week, the winners of a German book video competition - Der Buch Trailer Award 2007 - sponsored by Bertelsmann’s Der Club were announced. Contestants had to submit ideas in order to win the opportunity to make a video with a 3000-euro budget. You can view the impressive winners here.

One of the more civilised parties at Frankfurt is the Gourmand International party, held in the calming, wood-panelled rooms of the Casino Villa Bonn, a short stroll from the fairgrounds through quiet, tree-lined streets. Cookbook publishers, rights managers, chefs (including Catalan Dr Miguel Sánchez Romera, who is also a part-time brain surgeon!), book fair chiefs and authors mingled congenially under the supervision of our generous host, Edouard Cointreau, the driving force behind the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.

‘The presence of so many important people in the book trade shows that cookbooks are now established as one of the important sectors of the book business.’ Cointreau told the assembled guests. ‘It certainly was not the case when we started these World Cookbook Awards at the Frankfurt Book Fair. From 1995 to 2002, the production of cookbooks doubled in many western countries, and doubled again from 2002 to 2007, except in some countries like Germany. The increase has even been quicker in Asia in the past seven years.’

Cointreau noted some recent trends, including the increasing influence of new media, the internet and blogs on cookbook publishing (some recent cookbooks have been based on blogs), the dominance of TV chefs, and the improvements in production standards:

‘The digital revolution has made the production of cookbooks which require high quality photography much easier and cheaper,’ he observed.

Entries to the 2008 World Cookbook Awards close in a month. Cointreau said the location of the awards ceremony - to be held outside of Europe - will be announced shortly. Previous winners can be viewed at the Gourmand stand (Hall 4.1 Q165).

Piracy and the government’s monopoly in educational publishing were identified as two key challenges to the Turkish publishing industry in a breakfast briefing this morning. Next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair Guest of Honour was put under the microscope by the managing director of Oxford University Press in Turkey.

Emrah Ozpirincci began with some horrifying statistics: almost 40 per cent of the Turkish publishing market is lost to piracy. ‘It is the biggest problem, and it almost kills the book publishing industry in Turkey,’ he said. And while the Intellectual Property Law in Turkey has recently been amended in an attempt to improve the situation, the crooks continue to run free. ‘We have had zero successful prosecutions over the past 5 or 6 years,’ said Ozpirincci.

Piracy is a particularly big problem in the public sector. The Turkish government, which produces its own coursework material, currently bans the use of supplementary teaching materials in schools. As a result, teachers are turning to photocopying to access additional texts. This is a serious issue, not just for Turkish publishers, but also for international publishers wanting to invest in the Turkish market. ‘What can we do to help fight piracy in Turkey?’ one audience member wanted to know. The outlook from Ozpirincci was bleak. ‘I don’t know. I’ve learned to live with this fact.’

The government monopoly of publishing, particularly in the educational sector, was also highlighted. Again the statistics were telling. In the 1980s the Turkish government’s publishing programme accounted for 75 per cent of the publishing industry, and although this has decreased over the past few decades, it is still a serious problem. As Ozpirincci put it: ‘The state acts as the leading rival of the publishing industry.’ But it is not only the publishers that are being affected. An estimated 4,000 bookshops have closed down in recent years as a result of the free distribution of textbooks by the Turkish government.

With so many challenges to discuss, there was little time for a response from the Turkish government representative at the briefing. Ahmet Ari, general director of Libraries and Publications of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, agreed that there was a need for change. ‘We very much support the self-organisation of the private sector in publishing,’ he said, pointing out that the government’s share in the publishing market has decreased by 20 per cent over the past few years.

Ari added that he hoped to ‘organise more such meetings’ in the future. As next year’s Guest of Honour, I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities.

You can usually tell if a literary agent has had a good day at the Fair by their insistence or reluctance to buy a round (or two or three) of drinks at the spontaneous parties that form at the Frankfurter Hof at the end of the night.

One agent who is being especially generous at this year’s fair is Ann Rittenberg, but doing it at the opposite end of the clock. Rittenberg, whose best known client is the American mystery writer Denis Lehane, hosted a breakfast and invited Lehane’s numerous publishers (his books have been translated into 22 languages) to celebrate her client’s success. “It was good fun to meet everyone,” said Lisa Gallagher, svp and publisher of William Morrow, Lehane’s US publisher.

Of course, being a skilled agent, Rittenberg had an ulterior motive: She wanted announce that Lehane’s latest novel “The Given Day” was finished and ready for delivery to international publishing community.

In 2001, Lehane broke into the mainstream and had a huge bestseller with the crime saga Mystic River. His more recent books – Shutter Island and Coronado — have been less popular, but the early word from Morrow is that this new novel, entitled The Given Day, may be able to deliver a similar sized audience to his earlier hit. ‘I’ve only just started it,’ admitted Gallagher, “but so far, it’s absolutely amazing.” (No date is set for publication).

Publishers are also known, on occasion, to buy a round of drinks. One of the most generous we know is David Poindexter, publisher of the San Francisco boutique house MacAdam/Cage, and whose distinctive shock of white hair makes him easy to pick out of a crowd.

While MacAdam/Cage has developed a reputation for grooming literary novelists into stars (think of Amanda Eyre Ward or Audrey Niffenegger), lately the press has also been publishing foreign translations by the handful. Take a look at their new catalog, and you’ll find a half dozen translated works. So, it only makes sense that Poindexter has been fishing for some choice titles at this Fair. Yesterday, he tells me he hooked a book blockbuster potential: Der Rote by Bernhard Kegel, a genre thriller just published in Germany, that features a giant squid that terrorizes a seaside town. It may sound a bit Jaws reconceived, but Poindexter promises that it delivers on its high-concept premise and can work in America. “It will remind people of early Michael Crichton,” he said.