book industry

Google Book Search is three years old now and, with the cancellation of Microsoft’s Live Search Book (with such an illiterate name it had to be doomed), it’s again the only free-online-full-text-searchable show in town.

Under its partner programme, whereby publishers upload their titles onto Google’s servers and stipulate how it can viewed online, Google now has over a million titles from 20,000 publishers in the programme.

Talking in Hall 8 with Chris Palma, Google’s strategic partner development manager, I learned that Google is now offering an additional tool of striking potential for both booksellers and publishers.

In a service not unlike Amazon’s ‘Search Inside the Book’, booksellers can now offer their online customers the ability to look inside books before they buy. As soon as a customer finds a particular book on a booksellers’ website, the full-text version of it is loaded from the Google Book Search database.

‘With a decent internet connection, it’s almost instantaneous,’ explained Palma.

The limits on how much of the book can be viewed are the same as those stipulated by the publisher for Google Book Search, starting from 20 per cent of the book.

Properly implemented, this new tool could give even the smallest online bookseller the opportunity to replicate the browsing that goes on in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. As most consumers are lucky to get more than a jacket image and a blurb from the average online bookseller (with the exception of Amazon), this represents a major advance.

Palma also told me that, generally speaking, Google’s statistics how that the more browsable book content you offer to the online consumer, the more chance there is of a sale. Of course, it may be self-defeating if you offer almost the whole book free. My fellow blogger Ed Nawotka tells me he recently had the chance to read 90 per cent of a book and then realised he had no need to purchase it.

What Google needs to develop now is a grumpy avatar to pop up after the consumer has read about half the book and say ‘This isn’t a library, mate - either buy it or close your browser!’

Palma has recently been to India to start the process of getting the Indian publishing industry on board. There are many wonderful things about the Indian book industry, but orderliness is not one of them. There is no Indian Books in Print, ISBN and barcodes are not universally used, and there is no reliable information on what is published and by whom.

It may be Google’s lasting legacy if it can organise the Indian book industry!

Contrary to some reports I’ve read that the there was less “buzz” at this year’s FBF, I’ve come away with aquite different impression: Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to has been very busy. A large contingent of execs have even remained in Frankfurt an extra day or two to continue taking meetings, well beyond their traditional Saturday exodus (hoping to avoid the public, one presumes).

Among those still working hard this Saturday morning was Colin Finlay, director of strategic development for UK photo agency Photoshot (Hall 8).

He was more than enthusiastic about FBF 08: “This is the best show we’ve ever had,” he said. “The first morning alone we had three high level new customers – something that hasn’t happened before.”

Photoshot, which provides stock photography for books, magazines and the Web, has been doing steady Fair trade with publishers from all the major European countries. “We’re also particularly happy with our contacts with customers from publishers in the New Europe and Russia,” he said.

And despite the general gloomy outlook for the economy, he perceives no slowdown. “Publishers have budgets and are buying.”

He also provided an impressive dollar amount of revenue generated here at the FBF, but asked I don’t disclose it.

Finlay’s only complaint about this year’s show: The continuing security checks going into Hall 8.

“It made sense after 9/11, but it’s not really necessary now,” he said, “It’s not even all that secure – just someone going through your bag. They should do it probably with airport style X-ray machines or not at all.”

Okay, using that as the title of this blog post may seem a bit, well, ambitious. But it was the rather grand title of the panel I had the privilege of moderating this morning at the Translator’s Centre.

The subject at hand was to get an update on a trio of projects busy translating books into Arabic: Two from the United Arab Emirates –“Kalima” based in Abu Dhabi and “Tarjem” based in Dubai – and the National Center for Translation in Cairo, Egypt. Each ambitious in their own way. Mr. Mark Linz, Director of the American University Press of Cairo, offered the POV of a publisher translating from the Arabic into other languages.

Of the panelists, Ali al Shaali of the Tarjem project, articulated the mission of translation best when he described it as a bridge, one that “takes you into the writer’s mind, into their dreams”.

Of the three projects, Tarjem is the most ambitious: it strives to translate a book a day. Started in May 2007 and thus far has contracts with 25 or 26 publishers. Some of the titles that have already been translated by the project include Jack Welch’s “Straight from the Gut,” “China Inc.” Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Freakanomics.” Al Shaali later made the point that such speedy translation was possible, at least in part, because business titles didn’t require as “delicate” a translation as, say, fiction might.

Kalima is planning to produce 100 titles per year, though it has had a slow start thus far. Its first list of 100 titles was announced last year and only a handful has made it to print, including Alan Greenspan’s “The Age of Reason” and Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore.” Program director Dr. Ali Bin Tamim – a scholar of Naguib Mahfouz and a professor of literature at Al Ain, who took over leadership of the program this month, emphasized that they don’t want to rush, but want to do things right. “

Linz concurred, adding that he agreed the best way to create cross-cultural understanding was through books, “literature especially.” Coming into the panel with nearly two decades of experience, LInz was the most experienced of the group. Asked to comment on the other three projects, he suggested that they might be too ambitious.

“It’s difficult enough books in your own language, let alone in a translation,” he said. “You have to create an audience first,” he said. Linz did point out that there are books out there that can find a large audience in translated editions – like Alaa Al Aswany’s “The Yacoubian Building” which has sold more than a million copies across 20 languages – but that is the exception, rather than the rule.

The fragmentary distribution system throughout the Gulf States remains the greatest challenge to publishers reaching a wide readership. Hani Tolba, marketing director of The National Translation Center of Cairo, said that the organization is soon opening its own bookstore, which will provide a direct sales outlet for the 1250 titles (from 27 different languages) they have published after nearly ten years of work. At present, books are distributed primarily through mail order and book fairs, though the NTC will be launching a new Web site next month.

The goal is to bring the total number of titles in print to 2000 within a few years, in part with the assistance of Kalima, with whom the organization plans to collaborate.

Of course, sitting as moderator for a panel means that sometimes you miss things as you try to referee– so, tell me if you were you there, and let me hear what you thought? Who among these panelists do you think is most likely to achieve their goals? What is missing? What do you like best about their plans? What book would you most recommend for them to publish and why?

India may produce 70 to 80,000 new titles each year, but Urvashi Butalia, director of Zubaan press, is less than impressed. “That is nothing per capita for a country with a billion or more people.”

 The Indian book market continues to grow at 10 to 30 per cent each year, publishing hundreds of writers in 22 official language. This compares with, say, 20 years ago – the first time when India was a Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair – and could only produce 22 writers.

The German Book Office New Delhi sponsored a Teatime session with publishers aimed at helping Fairgoers make sense of what appears at first to be a chaotic market.

 A few salient facts:

“The multiple languages fragment the market, but also increase it”, explained Butalia. “English publishers are starting to translate into Indian languages, but there is also much translation among the Indian languages.”

70 per cent of the book market is in Indian languages, 30 per cent in English, which is the single largest.

Distribution of books remains a problem - but large industrial corporations have started bookstore chains. Tata is opening 150 bookshops. Others include Reliance and Pantaloon. Smaller chains, such as Crossword and the Oxford Bookstore and Landmark have expansion plans.

A typical paperback costs 200-300 rupees (4 – 6 US-Dollars); hardbacks are 600-700 rupees (12-14 US-Dollars) – though some bestsellers are available for half as much

Print runs have exploded from 1,000 copies to an average of 5-10,000.

A representative from Penguin India said that his business is growing at a rate of 25 per cent per year and that there is “great interest in children’s books, especially those that are didactic or educational”. Other hot topics include business, current affairs, and self-improvement.

That doesn’t mean fiction doesn’t also sell. The current bestselling book in the country is the novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life” by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa), which has moved 500,000 copies so far.  (His previous novel, “One Night @ the Call Center”, was also a runaway hit).

The rights scene is still developing and the number of agents working in the country has risen to three. “But last year they were representing maybe ten authors”, said Butalia. “Now they have 50.”

A question from the audience about rights conflicts with the US and UK markets elicited a mixed response. One person suggested there was no conflict; while another said that books sometimes bleed into India from the UK or US, in part because selling directly into the market can sometimes earn a publisher more money from sales than they might get from rights.

Piracy remains one of the biggest problems in the country. “If you stop at a traffic light in Mumbai or Delhi people will try and sell you the recent bestsellers published quite horribly,” said the representative from Penguin India.

The market is also “clogged up” with cheap remainders, which one person in the audience suggested were being dumped on the country.

Though chaotic, the Indian book market need not be so intimidating. For further information, pick up a copy of the handy “Directory of the CII Publishing Cell” produced for the FBF and available at the Indian Collective Stand in Hall 6.0.  

In its 60th year, the Frankfurt Book Fair is continuing to adapt to a changing industry and structurally is well-placed to develop further, according to the Fair Director Juergen Boos.

Speaking today to members of the international press, Boos described the fair as a kaleidoscope that looked different depending on which part of the book business it was viewed through. It was also continuously evolving:

‘Frankfurt has to change every year because what is interesting to the industry changes every year,’ he said, singling out such emerging opportunities as electronic paper, content for mobile phones and merchandising as areas that will influence fairs of the future. This year alone, some 30 per cent of exhibitors were exhibiting some form of digital content, he noted, ‘You now have a lot more rights to sell.’

While it was too early to assess the impact of the current global financial crisis on the fair, Boos said the fair was still growing each year in spite of the rise in internet communication, clearly indicating that face-to-face meetings were still necessary to establish trust between potential business partners.

Boos also addressed questions on the controversies surrounding both this year’s Guest of Honour Turkey, and next year’s - China. He described the recently announced boycott of the fair by some Turkish writers who oppose the current Turkish Government as a ‘big mistake’, given that the fair would have given them a much larger platform upon which to air their grievances.

‘There is no censorship in Frankfurt, and pubishers can bring whatever authors they want to the fair’, he said, pointing out the the pre-fair Symposium and the International Centre in Hall 5.0 were both venues for discussing controversial issues related to the Guests of Honour. He noted that Turkey’s Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk had been critical of the Turkish Government in his speech at the opening ceremony for this year’s fair but had later sat next to Turkish President Abdullah Gül, who had conceded that more human rights reforms were necessary.

‘I wouldn’t have expected such progress to happen so quickly, but it did’, said a pleased Boos.

Frankfurt’s two overseas joint ventures, the Cape Town and Abu Dhabi International Book Fairs, also came up for discussion.

‘We still have a challenge with Cape Town’, he noted, ‘It needs to become a platform for independent African publishers and for that to happen we need subsidised travel to get African publishers and authors to Cape Town.’

The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair has no such funding issues, but there were structural challenges for the Arab book market such as a lack of an Arabic Books in Print database.

Boos, who recently signed up for another five years as the fair’s Director, would still like to open a book fair in Asia, provided the right partner could be found. It was part of the fair’s role to ’support publishing everywhere around the world,’ he said.

In contrast to Russia, both the Korean government and the Romanian government have recently launched large projects to better promote their writers abroad.

The Korea Literature Translation Institute (6.0 E 937) recently published some wonderful, quite elegant materials to help foreign publishers get a better sense of the Korean literary scene. Just in time for the fair, they published the first issue of a list: Books from Korea, a new quarterly magazine with essays, articles, samples, reviews, and interviews of Korean writers and books. It’s a nice glossy magazine filled with interesting content, like a piece called “The Postmodern City and Its Discontents.”

As if that weren’t enough, they also published the first volume of “New Writing from Korea,” a 374-page collection of excerpts from twenty-five contemporary Korean authors. It’s about half-prose, half-poetry, and is one of the densest, heaviest books I’ve ever tried to lug around in my bag. And possibly the first comprehensive introduction to Korean literature that I’ve encountered.

Over in Romania, they announced the launch of Contemporary Romanian Writers, a new website providing bio and bibliographic information along with book descriptions and excerpts for a host of Romanian writers. From a quick scan, it’s a very well designed site, and one that will be incredibly useful to any publisher interested in Romanian lit.

Obviously a number of other countries are producing beautiful brochures and other materials to promote their authors, but these two really stand out as impressive, ambitious projects.

At the urging of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the German Book Office in Moscow, Russian representatives put on a special “Look at Russia” seminar earlier today. Vladimir Grigoriev, the deputy head of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication, gave a short presentation filled with statistics about the Russian publishing scene, including:

* Approx. 110,000 titles are published each year, from 100 different publishers;

* 80 per cent of these publishers are based in Moscow (Grigoriev said that he’d rather see the scene spread out throughout the country);

* More than 80 per cent of the titles published each year are from Russian authors;

* Translation is a growing field, with approx. 6,000 English works translated into Russia each year, 1,000 from Germany and France, 300+ from Spanish–all numbers that exceed the number of translations published in the U.S. each year;

* Over the next couple of years, Grigoriev believes one or two chains will come to dominate the bookselling market. At the moment there isn’t any one company with a presence throughout Russia.

Always interesting to get these facts, and to compare them with other countries, but I wish he (or another presenter) would’ve talked about some contemporary writers, particular publishing houses, etc. Unlike a number of other countries (Netherlands, Estonia, France, Germany, and many more), Russia does not have a “book office” or any other organization designed to promote Russia literature abroad, which is one reason that only a few contemporary writers are being translated.

Surprisingly (to me at least), the question and answer session got a bit tense when someone questioned the motive of the Russian booth, claiming that instead of sending Russia authors to represent the culture, they only sent the government . . . Grigoriev dodged the question gracefully, claiming that the private publishing scene has only existed for seventeen years, so publishers were still learning how to promote authors abroad. He did follow this up by pointing out that the only state-run publishers are the ones that produce medical books, the official encylopedia, and textbooks . . . You know, fact-based publications. Hmm.

22nd International Rights Directors Meeting. Left to right: Morgan Entrekin, Diane Spivey, Hans-Jürgen Balmes, Janice Potter, Margaret Halton and Jordi Nadal.

Agents and rights managers made a beeline Tuesday afternoon for the 22nd International Rights Directors Meeting, an essential professional development event held each year on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

After several years focusing on particular rights markets, this year’s meeting was themed ‘Getting to Yes: The Successful Rights Negotiation and Deal.’ No matter how experienced you are at selling rights, having seasoned professionals share their tips with you is an opportunity not to be missed.

Janice Potter of Simon & Schuster USA started off the event by reviewing some of the recent development sin the rights contract, which is of course, the document that enables the entire publishing process to occur. One piece of advice stayed with me in particular: ‘don’t buy more rights that you can exploit’: a simple dictum that would solve many squabbles if more people followed it. Other issues that probably didn’t have to be considered even a decade ago included digital concerns such as how much content should an author be allowed to use on their website, and how to handle ebook rights and print-on-demand (POD).

‘A basic misunderstanding of the notion of POD is that it is a right, rather than a method of manufacture. POD is simply a means to reproduce your book’, Potter observed.

Potter was followed by Margaret Halton, rights director at Pan Macmillan UK, who dispensed some excellent advice on best-practice for rights managers, include what to include in a pitch, and how to come to a book fair properly prepared.

‘I cannot stress enough the need to maintain a cool head [in negotiations]‘, she said in summary. ‘Don’t let the excitement of the moment make your forget to clarify the finer points of the deal.’

Excellent and thoughtful contributions followed from Hans-Jürgen Balmes (S Fischer Verlag, Germany) and Jordi Nadal (Plataforma Editorial, Spain), who provided a European perspective to selling and buying rights into and out of English.

Grove/Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin was the last speaker, and spoke of the requirements when selling to English language publishers. He listed 13 suggestions, the most earnestly put being:

• Be extremely selective about which books you pitch
• Make as much material as possible available in English (including about the author)
• Arm yourself with endorsements from authors, publishers and booksellers who have read the book
• Make sure you help the English-language publisher as much as possible once the book has been sold.

Publishers who attend the 2009 Abu Dhabi international Book Fair (ADIBF) and enter into a rights agreement – either to translate to or from Arabic – will be able to take advantage of a $1,000 subsidy. The money needs to be used to pay for rights or royalties; $250 is payable on agreement, while the remaining $750 will be withheld until a finished copy of the book is delivered to the organization.

The scheme is the latest edition to the ADBIF, which now enters its third year in partnership with the FBF. Earlier today, at a “Tea Time” presentation, director Jumaa Al Qubaisi, explained that the ADIBF was “Trying to create a circle of culture, which includes the book fair and KALIMA, the translation project, Sheik Zaid Book Awards. the distribution system is very critical and important. We’re working on a project to open libraries around the UAE and reach out to remote areas to promote culture and reading,” adding, “People will say it is very difficult to accomplish what you want to there, but we reply that we’ve done ten years of work in two years.”

Among other new initiatives at next year’s Fair is an expanded slate of author events. Among those already confirmed are Swedish mystery writer Henning Mankell and Amitav Ghosh.

Seth Russo, Middle East sales director for Scholastic, attended to the ADIBF for the first time in 2007 and came away impressed.

“It’s perhaps the most beautiful book fair you’ll ever see,””he said, making particular reference to its location in a new state-of-the-art conference center.

Statistically speaking, it makes sense for a publisher to take an interest in the region: “The population of the Middle East is 275 million and is fast growing, the birthrate is twice the average of the developed world and 63 per cent are under the age of 29. There 750 schools in the region with the concentration in the UAE, over 450K students enrolled. ministries of education”, he said.

Claudia Kaiser, general manager of KITAB, said that the biggest challenge for KITAB and the ADIBF is not so much logistic – such as helping to establish a distribution system for books, something that is sorely needed in the region, as it is cultural.

“There just isn’t a culture of reading in Middle East”, she said. “That’s what we’re working hard to change.”

This past spring I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in a Editors’ Week in Buenos Aires. It was an amazing experience, solidifying my lifelong interest in Argentine literature, and giving me a once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit the place where many of my favorite books are set. I also met a lot great people, and found out about a lot great authors. So personally, I’m very excited to see what Argentina does when it’s the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010, which, in a way, the events taking place this year are building up to.

Fundacion TyPA (the same organization that sponsors the editorial trips) are putting on two key events this week, both entitled “Argentinean Publishing Inside-Out.” The first took place this afternoon, featuring European publishers talking about Argentinean books. And on Friday, the counterpart panel takes place with Argentinean publishers talking about the contemporary scene.

Geoff Mulligan, Dominique Bourgois, and Michi Strausfeld, were there today to talk about Argentinean translations they’d published. Geoff emphasized the need to find a great translator (editing a bad translation consumes more time than any of us have), while Dominique had a fantastic quote about how “publishing is a network of writers and a network of friends”.

She said that in relation to a question about how to find Argentinean authors, a question that allowed Gabriela Adamo from TyPA to present their new (first?) catalog of “30 Great Authors from Argentina.” This booklet - actually, it’s a set of 30 envelope-sized cards with info about each author in Spanish and English collected into a cardboard slipcover - is incredibly appealing and very informative. Rather than highlight the Cortazars and Borges and Macedonios of Argentine lit, none of the 30 authors included have been translated into English. Some of the authors are very young, some more established, all very interesting. You can pick up a copy of this catalog at Hall 5.1 E 955.