October 13th, 2009

I often feel as if I have parallel professional lives: 360 days of the years there is the regular world, and 5 days of the year there is Frankfurt. So Frankfurt 2009 begins, effectively, the day after Frankfurt 2008!

There is, to be sure, a “plus ca change” quality to Frankfurt. After all, it began in part to try to create a sense of cultural continuity after the cataclysm of World War Two. My first Frankfurt was 2001, four weeks after 9/11, an edgyness very much in evidence, long lines in front of Hall 8.0 for checking bags, a moment of silence on the one month anniversary, 11 October. (On my flight to Frankfurt, the plane was so empty the passengers were outnumbered by the flight attendants.)

Yet, upon successive trips, I’ve learned to memorize booth locations, escalator shortcuts, S-bahn schedules, all unchanging form year to year, and derived comfort from it, comfort which gives you the freedom to do what is most important, which is to connect with your international partners-in-crime. Frankfurt is the perfect suit—you can focus on the meeting because you don’t have to worry about how you look.

Yet, as I mentioned above, Frankfurt in its modern incarnation grew out of the ashes of World War Two, has withstood the airplane hijackings of 1970’s and the terrorism of the 9/11 era, had witnessed the corporate consolidation of the publishing industry, and is now toiling with the radical changes in all media engendered by technological change, and throughout it all Frankfurt has not sought to deny these realities but instead has incorporated them into itself—Ehrengast controversies and all! So in 2001 there were bomb-sniffing dogs and in 2009 there is the Tools of Change Frankfurt preview conference. Frankfurt has represented continuity amidst change and its genius, to me, is that it does not pretend that change is not happening.

So while I am still here, in the regular world, I’m poised on its edge, ready to make the switch, and anticipating that giddy thrill of re-entering Frankfurt. I’m looking forward, both to the familiarity and to the new, strange yet critical ideas Frankfurt will present in this coming week.

It’s nearly that time of year again. Take a deep breath. As many as you can I keep telling myself, because you might just be a little short on air for the next five days. One day before Frankfurt Book Fair ‘09 begins the halls are abuzz with activity and anticipation. Small independent publishers are bustling about trying to get their stands to look just right; while the ‘big boys’ supervise their hired teams doing the setting up. Towards the evening most of the stands are sorted out and the frantic pace slows down. There’s a little window of time for old friends to catch up and new ones to be made, before the show begins in earnest.   

What I really want to know on the eve of this years’ fair is how the attendees, old-hands and first-timers alike, expect the fair to go? Business as usual? Has the global recession dampened spirits and tightened purse strings? Is digital content on the verge of upstaging the printed word or does that moment lie in an uncertain future? Nobody really knows. I certainly don’t.

“The market for e-books, at least in Italy, is small for the time being. Readers still prefer paper, but when this changes it’s going to change fast,” says Guido Lagomarsino, a literary agent who runs Servici Editoriali, Milan along with partner Anna Spadolini. Anna acknowledges that the change has come, as they have already negotiated foreign rights contracts that clearly specify rights vis-à-vis digital formats. How are these rights defined territorially because unlike a physical book it’s far harder to control the spread of digital data, I wonder aloud. Servici Editoriali doesn’t have to deal with such issues, because Italian isn’t widespread outside Italy. But for an English or a Spanish language title there’s definitely some head-scratching to be done.

Guido Lagomarsino of Servici Editoriali, Milan

Guido has made his way to Frankfurt for the Book Fair every year for the last 36 years. He can recall a time when the entire fair was on two levels in Hall 4. He’s used to change, both in the short term and the long. Doesn’t mean he’s for it though. Guido believes that the growth of digital content will lead to a loss in the diversity of publishing, as smaller imprints can’t afford to keep up with the ability of big houses to invest in new formats. Anna is quick to disagree. She sees things more optimistically, “Different business models can be adopted for selling content. Publishers don’t have to make technological innovations. With lower production costs for digital formats, it might even be easier to bring out more titles.”

Much of the din surrounding digitisation is still speculation. The technological tipping point for e-books, like the Ipod was for the mp3 and the music industry, hasn’t arrived yet. If there is a device you would put your money on take on this mantle it would probably be Amazon’s Kindle, which is set to be released in over 100 countries shortly. In China - the Guest of Honour at this years’ fair - the future has, beyond any doubt, arrived. The turnover of the traditional publishing industry in the Middle Kingdom has already been surpassed by the digital publishing industry in 2008.

Is the recession still on or is it over? Has it affected the publishing industry in a big way? Gael Lynch, from the independent British publishing house Frances Lincoln, echoes Book Fair director Juergen Boos’ view that books are largely recession proof. “Rights sales didn’t slump at the Bologna Fair and I don’t expect them to here,” she says. “But it has been hard work just to stand still. Retail chains in the UK have been badly affected. We’ve been lucky because we have a diverse range of books and don’t rely only on high-street stores.”

What’s in store for the who is who of the publishing world gathered in Frankfurt? We’ll just have to wait and see how the next 5 days pan out. As for me, tomorrow couldn’t come sooner.

The first ever Tools of Change Frankfurt conference took place all day today, bringing together representatives from a number of different parts of the book industry to discuss opportunities for the future of the publishing industry.

Seeing as that my flight arrived at 7am this morning, I didn’t exactly make it to the opening sessions . . . and wasn’t entirely cogent during the panel that I participated on.

That said, the presentations I attended were pretty inspiring, especially the one from Michael Tamblyn’s “Your Reading Life, Always With You,” which employed a very “reader-centric” approach to contemplating the future of e-books.

Tamblyn–the VP of content, sales, and merchandising at Shortcovers.com, an e-book retailer launched by Canada’s Indigo Books & Music, Inc.–gave a very engaging and humorous presentation littered with real-life situations and the impact these situations should have on the future of e-books.

His basic goal was to demonstrate the readers would be willing to pay $14+ for an e-book–if there are enough useful features included. This might seem like a small point, but publishers have been collectively freaking out about the now-almost-standard $9.99 price point that Amazon.com has helped institute and that readers have cottoned on to. Remember the #9.99boycott of a few months back? This is supply meets demand meets value expectations stuff, and at the moment, what you get when you buy an e-book is only worth $9.99 to the vast majority of e-book users.

But Tamblyn things that can change. He pointed out a myriad of features that would entice readers to fork over a few extra bucks for an improve level of e-functionality.

For example, “longevity of the book” was an obvious starting point. A traditional book can be passed down from mother to son, generation after generation, until the book falls apart or goes missing. Tamblyn’s argument was the readers would pay an addition $.25 for an e-book with this feature.

Other potential e-book features Tamblyn thought readers would be willing to cough up a few cents for, included:

* “shared library,” the digital equivalent of what happens when two people move in together and start sharing books;

* “multiple platforms,” which would allow a customer to purchase the e-book, print book, and audio-book versions of a title for one low price;

* “loaning ability,” so that you can share your favorite books with someone and cultivate word-of-mouth; and

* “the social aspect of reading,” through which it would be possible to share information about what you’re reading or have read via all the various book-related social networks such as Good Reads and LibraryThing.

Tamblyn briefly touched on the technical side–claiming that all of the features discussed could be implemented almost immediately–but what he’s most concerned with is giving readers what they actually want. And getting other publishers to buy into this vision.

Personally, as a print book publisher and reader, I was actually swayed quite a bit by his presentation. With each example I could imagine how this would occur in my life and how I’d be much more tempted to invest in an e-reader if x + y + z were possible. It was also striking how well his ideas fit in with those found in Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print.

This need for publishers to be “reader-centric” when expanding their digital initiatives was a theme that ran throughout the Tools of Change panels, including the panel Richard Nash of Cursor moderated on the “Deconglomerated Publisher & the End of the Supply Chain,” (which is also the one I participated on) and Kassia Kroszer’s presentation on “Starting from Scratch” in building a digital publishing company.

Never having been to a TOC conference, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but the turnout was fantastic and the level of discussion extremely sophisticated. Great first year, and hopefully this will become a staple of the Frankfurt Book Fair for years to come.

Madeline McIntosh takes some questions about Amazon at the RDM

Digital content was the order of the afternoon at the completely packed-out Rights Directors Meeting.  I was particularly interested in this session as it’s an area that i really need to explore more.  It’s time to move on but it’s a question of how and i, for one, needed some hot tips!

David Roth-Ey from Harper Collins UK was first up.  He is someone i’ve admired but never seen in action before, so i was all ears…  A quick look back to where we were a few years back showed us a mobile phone the size of a small suitcase.  I look round the room and was relieved to see i wasn’t the only one old enough to remember them that big!  So will the number of ebooks sold as a result of ereaders arriving on the market compensate for the number of printed books lost in the traditional market?  That’s the big question!  And what does the future hold for us and for the ‘book’ as we know it?  Lots of top tips from the man who knows, like check first which digital rights you actually have? And you don’t necessarily have to be first out of the blocks in this race, but you do need to be keeping up with what’s happening!  Also, what’s the right price for an ebook?  No one seems to have the answer to this one yet.  Piracy and DRM is currently a hot topic and the danger is very real - so again it was interesting to hear David’s views on how not to fall into some common traps.

The word ’strategy’ kept coming up at this meeting.  Basically i think what they were trying to say was ‘You need to work out what you want and how you are going to do it before you start doing anything!’  It sounds like common sense but it’s amazing how many people don’t do this.  Other words that hit me were ‘ownership’ and ‘interaction’…   It’s all about keeping hold of what’s rightfully yours, so we all need to make sure our rights and contracts are set up correctly, with all the boxes ticked!

More interesting advice too from Duncan Campbell from Wiley-Blackwell UK - this time from an academic perspective.  Digitisation has come a long way but it seems academic publishing was ahead of its time and was setting the scene a long time before the rest of the book trade.  Keys words like ‘exclusivity’, ‘embargoes’ and ‘approval’ are at the heart of licensing content now, something that a few years ago would not have appeared in contracts.  It shows you can never be too careful and it’s the way forward if we all want to protect ourselves..

During the Q&A that followed, where the panellists had difficulty answering some of the questions (not because they didn’t know their stuff but because they were very specific), it occured to me that this is part of the problem we all have.  There are so many unanswered questions right now.  We are all on a journey of discovery to some extent and in some cases there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers!

So on to the Kindle…. and, with the launch of Kindle International due any day, what better person to let us know what’s happening than Madeline McIntosh from Amazon.  It’s all very exciting for me.  As someone who doesn’t own an ereader but who is sorely tempted to put one on my Christmas ‘wish’ list, this couldn’t be better timing.  350,000 books are available to buy in the US, so the choice seems endless.  But it seems the ultimate goal is to make all books available to all people - so the hard work starts now!

And finally Tom Turvey from Google USA.  A quick run-down for those of us not so much in the know - Google ‘Partners’ and Google ‘Edtion’, and what they mean.  He then told us that there are currently 1.8 billion internet users worlwide - that’s quite a figure when you think of how many people there are out there to target.  At the end no questions were allowed about the Google settlement - we were advised that we needed to go the event on Friday to hear the current position!  I suspect this might be a popular discussion, so book your place now i’d say..

The first thing to say right off is that this is my first Frankfurt Book Fair.  I’ve worked in publishing for over 20 years but as someone who works in publicity - touring primarily with authors on publication - i’ve never had any call to be here before.  It’s all very new to me, if not a little daunting, merely because of the sheer scale of it all!

There were definite themes to all the presentations this morning at the opening press conference: China as Guest of Honour (should they be invited?), freedom of press, digitisation and paid for content, the future of the physical printed book and the role of publishers.  There has been a certain amount of controversy surrounding China’s invitation this year and it seems this issue is not going to go away this week.  Attendees were keen to hear what the Fair’s stand was in terms of censorship, freedom of speech, the right to be heard etc.  Director of the Fair, Juergen Boos, was at pains to point out that whatever your view, you can’t ‘ignore’ China and i think this is the key issue here.  China is an absolutely key market and we, as publishers in the West, cannot AFFORD to ignore this.

I thought it was also interesting to hear Professor Honnefelder’s view of where we are right now.  2009 is a year of change in many respects but maybe most importantly, he said, it appears people’s motivation to read is changing.  It seems almost a third of all Germans says they couldn’t get by without the internet but only 18% say the same about the book.  That sounds like a worrying trend to me and one that needs to be addressed right away.

More food for thought from Jesus Badenes who asked about the role of Europe nowadays and the future for publishers.  He called on the publishing industry to show teamwork at a time when we are faced with new technologies all vying for the consumer’s attention.  

So lots to look forward to at this year’s fair.  Attendance at the LitAg up 2% according to latest official stats and there is a definite buzz building already today.  Plenty of questions from the press after the conference.  I even got a taste of being one of the paparazzi when trying to get close to take photos afterwards - it was definitely a case of using your elbows as camera crews pushed their way forward!  No time for being British and polite here…