October 18th, 2009

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–