October 17th, 2009

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.

Guest of Honour Presentation 2009: China

Now that the Fair has transformed from a “professionals only” gathering into Cosplay Central, I found some time to swing by the official China stand. To be honest, it was pretty much the same stand that they have every year–just much much bigger. Taking up a wall of Hall 5.0, the stand is pretty impressive, but for me, it was rather difficult to figure anything out. And by “figure out” I mean find information about publishing houses I should be paying attention to to find out about modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Yes, this is a pretty subjective approach, I admit, I admit, but really, I’m not that interested in books about Chinese texiles or the “Three Millennia of Printing in China.” And so I didn’t investigate those offerings all that closely . . .

If you are into that textile stuff, the China booth rocks! It’s flashy, it’s oversized, it is exactly what it’s supposed to be.

But. For the rest of you literary people, what you should check out instead is Paper Republic’s “The Best Chinese Fiction You’ve Never Read,” a manageable-sized brochure featuring information about specific works by six different authors: Jia Pingwa, Han Dong, Li Er, Sheng Keyi, Leung Man-Tao, and Liu Cixin.
Paper Republic (http://www.paper-republic.org) was founded a couple of years ago by a group of native English speakers (most of whom live in mainland China) dedicated to the translation of Chinese literary fic
tion into English, and the website features sample translations, information about Chinese authors (including those who may not exactly be favored by the government) and a blog about Chinese literature and translation.

In October of last year, Paper Republic received a grant from the Arts Council of England to support the promotion of Chinese literature abroad. It is thanks to this grant that both Nicky Harman and Eric Abrahamsen are able to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time, and able to produce “The Best Chinese Fiction You’ve Never Read.”

“We know there are hundreds of fantastic authors out there, many of whom could never hope to get an official invite to an international bookfair-they are no friends of officialdom and work hard to maintain their independence as writers. This catalog is a chance to present them and their work to a wider audience,” said Harman.

In addition to the brochures, long (like 30-page long) samples from these books will be going up on the site over the next few weeks. A pdf version of “The Best Chinese Fiction” is also available online, and hard copies can be found in the Translators Center in Hall 5.0. For more information, please contact Nicky Harman at n.harmanic@googlemail.com.

Bipin Shah and Juergen Boos

It’s tea time and ‘GlobalLocal: New Directions in Publishing’, a book on a publishers round table conference organised by the Frankfurt Book Fair and GBO (German Book Office), New Delhi in February this year, is being launched by fair director Juergen Boos. The conference was convened, says GBO director Akshay Pathak, “To observe the cross-current of global publishers coming to local markets and local publishers going global.”

A short film of the round table conference (the table is actually square) provides an overview to those in the hall about what it’s all about. The limited edition book published by Mapin India, which isn’t for sale, is a transcription of what transpired at the conference. Bipin Shah of Mapin explains that he was more than happy to support the venture, “To make Indian publishing, which has ben earmarked over the years as being difficult to understand, less hard to fathom.” Anyone looking to understand some of the issues surrounding the Indian publishing industry and enter into the debate about the currents and counter-currents of globalization would do well to get their hands on a copy by finding Akshay at the fair or getting in touch with the GBO, New Delhi.

There’s already been a blog post on this event, so I’m going to use this space to do a quick overview of the Indian publishing industry (which I’ve been involved in and following closely for a while) and offer up my opinion on how this cross-current has manifested itself. Here goes.

The Indian market is a complex and rather unorganised market that is in no way homogeneous. In fact several markets exist, structured and differentiated by the language in which books are published. These markets have grown significantly at the top-end (due to an increase in wealth), as well as at the bottom-end (as the newly literate are from the lower classes), where a lack of access to books and knowledge remains a key issue. English, on the other hand, can be cast as an elite language as it’s used more widely by the privileged and in urban areas.

While most large multinational publishers are replicating a common pattern across the world, the localisation of these businesses is also a consistent and unique phenomenon. I don’t mean to give the impression that the spread of big business into India has been overly beneficial. Rather, I’d like to suggest that local publishing houses have found particular ways of not being left behind. Many of them have established themselves in India, and are increasingly looking towards international markets and making their presence felt globally.

India is the 7th largest publisher in the world and the 3rd largest English language publisher. The publishing industry is gaining momentum, on the back of economic progress (the Gross Domestic Product is currently growing at 7.5% per year) and improving literacy rates. In other words it is an unsaturated market. This has prompted a resurgence of multinational publishers such as Hachette, HarperCollins, Random House, Routledge, and Picador, who have faced setbacks in other markets and have recognised the potential for growth in India. This has meant that small Indian publishers have less room to manoeuvre in the English language market. But the multinationals have had little influence so far on the vibrant and multi-faceted regional language publishing scene.

The presence of multinationals has increased the number of Indian English-language titles published abroad. But outside of literary stars like Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh (who live outside India and whose work often has western audiences in mind) it is still rare for an Indian writer to be published abroad. This is especially true for regional language writers whose exceptional work has, for the most part, been seen as less glamorous and marketable within and outside India. As Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan, an independent feminist publishing house, says, “Don’t be fooled by the Indian stand at Frankfurt. It gives no indication of the complexity, wealth and depth of Indian publishing.”

Richard Charkin of Bloomsbury, one of the participants at the high-profile conference, remembers a time in India, not too long ago, when it was cheaper to hire a typist to duplicate a letter than it was to buy carbon paper. Much has changed since then. These are exciting times for regional language publishing, both in terms of form and content. There are now many independent houses – from the commercial middle-brow to the alternative and politically radical – whose lists are not governed solely by market forces and who now have access to cheap and good quality printing.

Mainstream market-oriented publishing offers little scope for an exchange of ideas. But there have been numerous efforts to address a lack of dialogue, across the barriers of language, through translation and co-publishing ventures. The large publishers help the smaller houses with distribution and marketing, and in turn the independents help the larger ones connect at a local level. The collaboration between Zubaan and Penguin India, on a 50-50 profit sharing basis, is a prime example. The Zubaan-Penguin list brings together Zubaan’s long-established commitment to women’s literature and Penguin’s national and international distribution reach, to showcase contemporary women writers from the South Asian region.

In order to better promote works of Indian literature and independent Indian presses, a number of publishers are talking about joining forces to create their own collective stand at next year’s Book Fair. Granted, this is all still in development, but Zubaan Books, DC Books, Blaft, and Kalachuvadu Publications have all agreed in principle to working together to create a large, joint display at FBF 2010.

Let me put this into a bit of perspective and explain to anyone not actually here at the Fair why this is noteworthy. If you wander through halls 5 and 6 (again, for those not here, the FBF is made up of eight large halls filled with throusands of stands) you’ll see huge displays from the “book offices” in Romania, Hungary, Estonia, Denmark, Argentina, Iceland, Macedonia, etc., etc. These national book promotions are incredibly helpful to publishers looking for some information about what’s going on in the book scene in a particular part of the world. There are usually overview guides (e.g., “48 New Writers from Poland,” “New Korean Fiction,” “10 Books from Holland and Flanders”) booklets with data on that country’s book market, lists upon lists upon lists of publishers from that country, and all kinds of other promotional material.

Well, although India was a huge success as Guest of Honor just a few short years ago, the National Book Trust stand is completely empty and covered with a white sheet. Not to salt a wound or anything like that, but the Pakistan stand right around the corner is hoppin’ . . .

So for anyone interested in finding out what’s going on in Indian lit, you have the more difficult task of having to troll the aisles and talk (or try to talk) to all the individual publishers. This possible alternative–a vibrant stand with X number of innovative, indie presses–would be a frickin’ godsend. India is booming in all ways. And it’s a market that a lot of people are interested in. To provide a bigger, more attractive, more active platform for these presses to share their knowledge and info would be spectacular.

Seems like every year the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature (NLPVF) comes to the Frankfurt Book Fair with some very cool new idea or project. Last year it was “Great Translation by the Way” publication that set forth a series of directives for how to improve the situation for translations in the European Union. This year it’s Schwob.nl.

Schwob.nl was unveiled at a special reception at Fleming’s Hotel last night, and hinges on the idea that translations should be a two-way cultural exchange. Oftentimes, when the NLPVF people go to say, Turkey, and implore Turkish publishers to do more Dutch books, the Turkish publishers start asking questions back about how many Turkish writers are actually available in Dutch. And to no one’s surprise, “Well, um, you know, Orhan Pamuk?” doesn’t go over so well.

But beyond the role economics and corporate publishing houses play in this imbalance, there’s also the problem of information. How much information about Turkish authors is available to Dutch readers and publishers? Just guessing here, but probably not a lot. (And probably a hell of a lot more than what’s available to American readers and publishers. Anyway . . .)

So to offer a digital corrective to this problem (I don’t mean that to sound so horrifyingly medicinal), the NLPVF created schwob.nl as a site to bring info about quality literature to the attention of Dutch readers, editors, and publishers through newsletters, features on the site, etc. (And to all you Americans and Brits - I’ll let you in on a little secret: the site is entirely in English, so you can actually take advantage of this as well.)

Right now there’s only one article available on the site (click here to download the pdf: http://www.schwob.nl/about/), but it’s a very interesting piece about Chinese author Shi Tiesheng that’s written by Chinese-to-Dutch translator Mark Leenhouts and touches on some bigger issues about contemporary Chinese literature.

This site is meant to be an open forum for exchanging recommendations, so if there are any “forgotten classics, cult books, or must-reads” from your country that you want to share with Dutch readers the rest of the world, e-mail the info to write@schwob.nl. And be sure to sign up for the Schwob.nl newsletter . . .

“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet…” Andrew Savikas in one of yesterday digital publishing panels quoted William Gibson by way of seeking to outline the asymmetries (there’s that word again!) in how we’re embracing the opportunities for digital publishing. He was talking about non-fiction, in that instance, but it could just as easily apply to some of the recent experiments in digital story-telling such as alternate reality gaming and mobile phone serialization.

As Savikas observed, much of the writing we now take for granted in fact had to be invented. Word-spacing in the 6th century, the hyphen in the 11th century, the colon in the late 14th century. Beyond the development of sentence, of course, the format of story telling is also evolutionary. The novel itself, of course, is of recent vintage, and even in contemporary time, it’s worth noting that there is no category for memoir in German—yes, there are autobiographies, but when The Film Club, David Gilmour’s account of spending a year watching movies with his son as an alternative form of education (his son wanted to drop out of high school), the German publisher S. Fischer Verlag, called it Roman, a novel!

Therefore it is entirely reasonable to have at the Book Fair (on Wednesday) a presentation by Juliane Schulze from the consulting firm Peaceful Fish on alternate-reality gaming An alternate reality game (ARG), is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. For example, the marketing for the movie The Blair Witch Project are effectively ARGs (and some of its makers went on to create the Audi promotional ARG The Art of the Heist), expanding the world of the movie online, adding backstory, and blurring fiction and reality through fliers and a fake documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Schulze noted several key attributes that publishers could be very mindful as they evaluate whether and how to expand the expression of book content to other platforms. First, it allows the publisher to access a fast-growing market. Second, it can accelerate the creation of brand equity because of who deeply ensconced in the material the users/readers are. And it is reach the audience where it is (both digitally and in public space) and how it wants to be reached, organically.

A dramatically less complex approach to digital story-telling, but one that has also seen great success is mobile phone story-telling. The Chinese digital publisher Shanda presented also on Wednesday and the CEO Hou Xiaoquiang had a story to tell. They have more than 800,000 writers uploading content, with at least 4 million readers who pay to read fiction on their mobile phones by installments. Effectively it’s daily serialization, a la DailyLit, except that one pays in increments—the first few chapters are free, and then they pay 2-3 yuan cents per 1000 Chinese characters (about a book page) for each daily installment as they download.

Key to the business is Shanda’s partnership with China’s largest mobile provider China Mobile, which has 600 million customers and effective micropayments billing systems. Although they didn’t disclose total revenues from downloads, Zhang Wei, the most successful of their authors, attended the presentation and indicated he expected to earn 2.5 million yuan ($360,000) this year.

When Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins, was asked at the panel “Will All Books Be e?” what publishers are doing to take advantage of digital media to produce new forms of digital content, she observed that ultimately that, as with many forms of technology, will be determined by the creatives, not the business people. While that is broadly true, both ARGs and mobile phone serializations are new forms of story-telling driven as much by evolving business models—in the latter case pay-per-installment mobile downloads, and in the former the shift from top-down to grassroots marketing approaches—as they are by the creatives. Our businesses are going to need to be as creative as the creatives themselves but for the moment, that creativity is not yet evenly distributed, to be found more in companies like Shanda and those companies developing or using ARGs…

I was wandering around hall 5 this morning, hoping to engage with people and books and forget the sales figures and graphs I’ve grown accustomed to, when I was caught off guard by a little dog holding an even tinier book in its mouth. Dwarsligger®, it said below. The new book concept - with a registered trademark sign in red. Compact, complete and portable. Oh, and patented. To the side there are a couple of mannequins in swimwear and sunglasses lounging on beach towels holding one of these books.

A young Danish designer, Andreas, offers to guide me through the ‘concept’. He pulls out this little book, about the size of my hand, and then a standard paperback novel with the same cover. “They’re identical,” he claims. “We’ve managed to turn this… into this!’ Distrustfully, I pick the little one up to figure out what’s going on. It opens like a notepad and flattens out into a page that looks exactly like the one in the larger paperback format, minus the margins. I’m struck by how simple it is. I wonder who came up with it, and he directs me to an energetic, casually dressed Dutch man.

Despite its cozy charm, the idea of snuggling into bed with a book at the end of a long, tiresome day isn’t always just an intimate escape into the world of the printed word. At least Hugo van Woerden, avid reader and managing director of publishing house Jongbloed BV, doesn’t think so. Hugo thinks about the format of a book a lot. Enough to wonder why this isn’t so. “I was in bed one night with this standard heavy paperback and I found myself having to change position every time I turned the page. There was something not so nice about the way the book felt and I figured something had to be done about it,” says Hugo. Was it the size of a page, the weight of the cover, the binding, or all of them put together? “So I began tearing pages, chopping them around the edges to cut margins, and folding in half.” He demonstrates this animatedly, using the pages torn out of a book that are scattered around his desk. His genius at marketing is hardly surprising. “I learnt a lot commercially while I worked in sales and distribution, negotiating with large supermarkets.” He holds the folded piece in front of you, and Voila! you have the Dwarsligger®.

Hugo van Woerden

In Dutch, a train berth, which is perpendicular to the direction of motion, is called the dwarsligger. Dwars in Dutch means crossways, transverse, or contrary and liggen is to lie. It’s a word often used to describe stubbornly resistant people or troublemakers. Hugo turned the other way from the tradition of bookmaking, and came up with this lovely little book idea that he believes “creates new reading moments.” He stands up, twirls around and pushes the Dwarsligger® into his self-made cellophane pant pocket and exclaims, “You can now read at stations, while walking, and while eating. The Dwarsligger® goes everywhere and all you have to do is pull it out of your back pocket. You can even hold it in just one hand!”

The Dwarsligger® was released in 95% of bookstores in the Netherlands on the 7^th of September, 2009. Jongbloed BV came out with 16 titles, most of which were fiction by famous Dutch authors. There was one Survival Handbook, and another from Christian literature called Psalmen. The concept was received very well by the Dutch. In two weeks of their release, a second print-run was already on its way. In five weeks, they’ve had seven reprints. Each Dwarsligger® is 12 cm x 8 cm and has nearly double the number of pages compared to the original paperbacks. The trick to the book design lies in the fact that there is no tension between pages. Small bunches are bound together and the cover page is separate altogether, bound to the book only on one end. The paper is extremely thin to maintain the slim sleek look. Automatically I ask Hugo if this makes the book more fragile. He laughs, and says that they’ve been using this paper to print Bibles for the last decade, and that these can be passed down through generations without damage. Being one of the two largest publishers of Christian literature in the Netherlands, the publishing of Psalmen begins to make sense. In fact, it’s Hugo’s favourite Dwarsligger®.

Hugo, a familiar face at the Frankfurt bookfair since 1992, has brought the Dwarsligger® here for the first time. Already, 200 publishers have expressed their interest in the product. The American publishing houses seemed particularly keen, and Hugo suspects that the first English language Dwarsligger® should be out in no more than two months. To add to the creative marketing, Jongbloed BV has also designed Ikea-looking Z-shaped rods to display its new invention. He’s also quick to point out that the environmental impact of production is significantly reduced with the Dwarsligger®, since it’s six times smaller than a ‘normal’ book and it’s printed on FSC-certified paper.

Everything said about the little book so far seems to be just another sales pitch. Bol.com, the largest online store in the Netherlands says “Everyone will want to have this.” Leon Verschoor, from Selexyz-bookstore Scheltema, one of the largest chains in the Netherlands, takes it one step further, “A revolution in the book trade. Now everything can be smaller. I can totally see this happening: small stores, little cars bringing stock from the warehouses.” Perhaps the Dwarsligger® is a step towards the nano-fication of the world, an alternative to the digitizing of content. It’s greener, smaller, more convenient, and also more exclusive. Like everything else in our consumer driven societies would like to be.

The Dwarsligger® may not allow you to bury your nose in its pages and smell that lovely book smell every once in a while. But hey, who’d have thought it possible to carry Tolstoy’s War and Peace in your back pocket?