book industry

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.

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.

“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…

It’s day three at the fair and time for business breakfast number three. This one is about the Argentinean publishing industry. I don’t want to sound jaded, but I’m growing tired of statistical overviews. I know this is a trade fair and that it’s only right that business comes first, but somehow the objectivity of numbers doesn’t satisfy me. Maybe because I hold some romantic notion that books and literature ought to amount to something more than commerce. I really hope they do. 

Constanza Brunet, Octavio Kulesz and Trini Vergara

I get that culture and commerce are intricately and inextricably linked. Conditions in Argentina are ripe for publishing, the country boasts a literacy rate of 93 percent and books are free of VAT and import duties. As Trini Vergara, director and co-founder of V & R Editoras, says, it’s a good place to be selling “cultural goods”. It’s also a good place to create them. The Argentinean publishing industry has a strong tradition and is self-sufficient – the entire chain of production from paper manufacture, writing, illustration, design, and printing can be taken care of domestically.

After Brazil, Argentina is the second largest producer of books in Latin America. It’s publishing industry produced 22 thousand new titles last year, and prints an average of 70 million copies a year (excluding books published by the government). A normal print run would be 3 to 4 thousand (the standard range in most developed countries) and a best seller would sell about 15 thousand copies. As of now the industry earns about 49 million USD from foreign trade.The top five countries exported to are Mexico, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Spain.

There is, at once, a concentration and diversity in Argentina’s publishing industry. The two largest publishing houses, Planeta (36 percent) and Grup Santilana (24 percent), control 60 percent of the market. Yet, 83 percent of the publishing houses are micro-houses that produce less than 10 titles a year.

The Spanish language book market is currently the fourth largest in the world and in about 15 years it’s expected to become the largest. How come? Well, all indications are that there are likely to be more native Spanish speakers by then than there will be native English speakers. Good for Argentinean publishers, who operate, as Trini puts it, “In a market, within a market, with a future.”

Argentinean publishing’s connection with the Iberian Peninsula can be traced back to the publishing houses that were founded following the Spanish Civil war. The 1940s, 50s and 60s was a golden period, with world renowned authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares coming to the fore. It didn’t hurt, either, that during this time many publishers in Spain faced censorship and were exiled by the authoritarian regime of General Franco. In the 70s the tables turned, Argentina’s has it’s own military dictatorship and several publishers and writers are either silenced or forced to flee.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and the first two years of this century. Severe recession has paved the way for a flood of imported titles from Mexico and Spain. During this time Argentina’s GDP fell by 10 percent, liquidity dried up, and many publishing houses were compelled to downsize or went bankrupt. It was a period of acute economic and political instability in which the number of titles published fell by 23 percent. To top things off, a public uprising overthrew the government in 2002 and series of presidents followed each other in and out of office.

In 2003, however, things began to turn around. Octavio Kulesz of Editorial Teseo, the biggest digital academic publisher in Argentina, marks this as the moment when there was a “re-birth” of publishing in the country. Due to a much calmer social and political climate and a stablisation of foreign exchange rates, which caused an increase in exports and a decrease in imports. “At this point many new publishing houses were founded and traditional ones started expanding again,” says Octavio.

The picture hasn’t been all rosy for the industry in the last five years. A sharp increase in operating and production costs - the cost of paper, for example, is 5 times higher today than in 2001 while book prices haven’t gone up much – and the global economic crisis have hampered growth. Octavio says, “Paradoxically, the crisis represents an opportunity, because the decline in publishing in Spain will create more access to markets for us.” Talk about cashing in on others’ misery! Where Spain has a head start, though, is in the digital arena. Octavio hopes that Argentina’s strong entrepreneurial culture will give rise to a new and dynamic generation of digital publishers who will revitalize the publishing scene.

“It’s the right moment for Argentina to be the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010,” affirms Constanza Brunet, director of Marea Editorial an independent publishing house founded five years ago. She believes that the time is nigh for Argentinean publishers to stretch their reach beyond the Spanish speaking world in a big way. “We’ve faced difficulties because of the scars of a public policy that hasn’t supported translation,” Constanza adds.

The lobbying of the two main industry associations, Camara Argentina del Libro and the Camara Argentina de Publicaciones, have been highly influential in changing this. There are now a few grants that subsidise translation costs. One such programme is SUR, which began this year and will continue for at least another year. Through this programme the government aids foreign publishers who want to publish books by Argentinean publishers. So far 124 books have been supported, each being given 3200 USD as a grant.

Between 2002 and 2008, Argentinean publishers sold foreign language rights to about 700 titles, most of them to French and German publishers. The most popular titles are works by Nobel laureates like Borges and on historical figures like Che Guevara. Trini is quick to assert that the industry has a much broader variety than the image that Argentina enjoys abroad, as a country that only produces exceptional fiction and non-fiction. Expect this to change in the wake of Argentina’s appearance in Frankfurt as Guest of Honour next year.

The impact of the Google Book Settlement, in whatever form it might eventually take, promised to be one of the most controversial panels at this year’s Fair and the participants, especially Prof. Roland Reuss, author of the Heidelberg Appeal, a vehement critique of the Google scanning project, did not disappoint. He denounced as “garbage of hysterical propaganda” the claims by Google that they were enhancing access, maintain that “if you want to finance production, you have to shelter the ones who produce,” not those that consume, and that moreover any student who is completely dependent on the Internet for “must be stupid.”

It didn’t begin quite as heatedly. The panel was moderated by Jens Bammel, Secretary-General of the International Publishers Association, who introduced the event noting how the controversy surrounding the Google Book Settlement (GBS), while enormously significant in itself, also betokens a much larger shift, that of the interdependence of all the players involved, both publishers and their partners. To launch the discussion, he invited Richard Sarnoff to discuss the factors motivating the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) and Author’s Guild lawsuit against Google’s out-of-print scanning project, Google Library, and the proposed settlement. The strategy, Sarnoff indicated, was based on the following calculation. If they lost, they would lose control, not just over Google’s scanning activities but potnetially many other entities who might choose to digitally copy in-copyright books. Even, if they won, it wouldn’t affect digital copies that Google had already given to libraries, many of which are state institutions and under some laws shielded from civil liability for copyright infringement, and it would impede a universally desired goal, viz to increase availability and access to the world’s store of knowledge.

So their conclusion was to settle, in order to achieve two key objectives—choice and control. But is choice and control also what the Borsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (comprising both publishers and retailers) want, inquired Bammel of the Borsenverein’s Christian Sprang? They want opt-in, Sprang explained, rather than opt-out, for out-of-print books. In the original GBS, he estimates that 75% of books listed in the German equivalent of the Books-in-Print database would have been characterized as out-of-print and not commercially available (a problem that has since been corrected by the parties in the GBS). The German publishers are also concerned about monopoly—they would like to see a landscape similar to the physical retail environment with thousands of retailers and publishers, rather than only two or three large players. They do recognize the access deficit that Google seeks to correct and have been moving to try to address that themselves, through Libreka, a German eBook platform that has 120,000 books in print available for search, and 13,000 available for download. Notwithstanding the practical issues, though, he re-emphasized that they were fighting for the principle that copyright be opt-in.

Santiago de la Mora, Google’s representative on the panel, explained that the Partner program is opt-in and that the Library program focuses only on out-of-print so that a great deal of what they’re doing is not at all controversial and meets the Borsenverein’s concerns. Google is “part of the solution,” he offered, and Google in fact “wants more people to get involved,” and not be the only player.

Reuss was largely unmoved. “It has always been possible for scholars to get the information,” he said, “since the 5th century.” He believes that the focus on access is inappropriate, “fetishistic,” and that the true issue with scholarship is to produce, not to access.

(He added that since the Berne Convention on intellectual property explicitly prohibits affirmative registration for copyright, he believes that the Book Rights Registry contemplated by the GBS.)

Access does matter, Sarnoff maintained. There’s been a “market failure” in Sarnoff’s opinion.  An entire tranche of scholarship, almost all out-of-print works created in the entire 20th century were foreclosed from the public. IN response to Reuss’s objection that the GBS will ”cripple the publishing industry” Sarnoff noted that no publisher “is making a dime from out-of-print works.” In fact, the GBS creates revenue, for publishers and authors, where there was none before.

The Borsenverein sees truth on both positions, said Sprang, supporting the demand for accessibility, while feelings that it has to be the rightsholder’s decision. Otherwise the author will fear “if I write a book, Google will take it away from me.” Borsenverein also emphasizes the moral rights dimension—the right of an author to prohibit reproduction for expressive reasons. This is clearly one of the clearest sticking points as it is not a factor in American copyright jurisprudence. Sarnoff recognizes that it is possible that they cannot adequately represent the moral rights of all authors in the world, in this settlement.

A very robust audience discussion ensued—a particularly pertinent question from the audience concerned the problem of competition. Qualifying Sarnoff’s earlier assert that the problem of access to out-of-print works is a market failure, Sprang suggested it was as much a social failure, the refusal by society, by politicians, to make money available to accomplish the scanning activity Google is undertaking.

This clearly was not a panel in which the controversy would be resolved—Ruess’s position is quite categorical on the core question of whether what Google is doing is illegal (adding, for good measure, than an advertising-driven business model is itself “disgusting”), though there were clear signs that in additional to the ongoing discussions in the US on revising the GBS, Google and the various European publishing trade associations intend to engage in future discussions about Google’s book-related projects. So, perhaps in deference to the name of the conference room in which the panel occurred (”Entente”), some measure of detente could be seen, if not outright entente.

The event this morning in the Forum Dialog in Hall 6.1, billed as ‘Chinese Women in Publishing’ and organised by Women in Publishing Germany, was one that I was particularly looking forward to.  As a woman working in UK publishing, and one who supports the UK equivalent organisation, I was keen to find out what was happening out in China and how women are faring in the workplace there.

The event was pretty-well attended to begin with.  Standing-room only at the back.  When the event began I soon realised that I was at an immediate disadvantage.  As an english-speaker who understands only a few words and phrases in German (my failing, no one else’s problem after all) I was soon aware that the event was going to be conducted in German, with no english translation.  It seemed strange to me when the words written on the screen behind the panellists were written in english…  After taking some photos and listening in vain to the first speaker answer some questions in German, I began to pack my things in readiness to leave.  Lucky I didn’t in a way because it soon became clear that the other speaker was going to conduct all her answers in english.  Wonderful!  At least I could understand part of the event.  But then I thought - what about those in the audience who can’t speak English? 

At the time I was confused… Did the organisers expect that everyone there spoke both languages? I had to presume so.  What a shame because I wasn’t the only one having problems.  And they definitely lost some other people who, realising they were missing half the debate, also left.

Since this morning, spurred on by my frustration at not having been able to understand half the event earlier, I have done a little investigation.  I looked back at the catalogue of events to see whether I had misunderstood what had been written.  It clearly said the event was in English and German.  I also looked at today’s edition of ‘Publishing Perspectives’, who helpfully print up a listings guide in their daily bulletin.  Again it stated the event would be in both languages…

So I guess it’s a question of interpretation.  For us lazy English, we automatically assume that if a discussion is going to be conducted in a language foreign to us, then there will automatically be an English translation.  After speaking to some colleagues today, it seems that the ‘norm’ in Germany is that an event can be conducted in both languages and that the majority of the audience will understand both.  Which of course they probably will.  It’s us English who have the problem, not the continentals.  I do, however, raise the question of whether, as an ‘international’ Book Fair, the organisers at Frankfurt next year might consider looking at this particular language barrier?  I, for one, will certainly not fall into that trap again!

 After a while, all of the various “book market” presentations from the various countries start to sound the same . . . I know that’s a jaded, semi-ignorant thing to say, but there are only so many times one can here about the average number of books printed per inhabitant, or the total number of copies sold in a given year before all the numbers blur together into some meaningless mess of abstract geometry. (Was it Estonia that produced 27million books in 1991? Or was that 27 thousand? Or . . . )

I’m not trying to imply this info isn’t useful, and it is great when people hand out brochures afterward with all these stats in black-and-white, but what really sticks out to me are the activities various countries are undertaking to get the info about their books out to other editors and publishers. Like the Lithuanian/Latvian/Estonian 300 Baltic Authors presentation, or all the materials from Fundacion TyPA, or, in the case of the Czech Republic, the Czech Literature Portal (http://www.czechlit.cz), which is loaded with all the information a prospective foreign publisher might want.

The site hosts tons of profiles and excerpts from Czech authors, longer essays on Czech literature (such as this one http://czechlit.cz/main.php?pageid=79 about Czech lit since 1945), author interviews, info on literary periodicals, and, well, information about the Czech book market.

I truly believe that face-to-face meetings are still the best way for publishers to find out about books they should translate, but in the other 300-and-some-odd days in which an international book fair isn’t taking place, sites like these can be extremely useful in promoting a country’s literature and presenting their book scene to the rest of the world.

Now if only all the eBook proponents and new digital media people would hook up with these various foreign agencies . . . Although most of these sites are filled with great content, they tend to be pretty static and traditional. And there are a lot of techies out there who aren’t just interested in the production of e-content, but are looking at ways of using new technologies to engage with readers in exciting ways. I may be typing out of turn here, but it seems like these two groups (foreign literary agencies and new tech people) could benefit from each other . . .

“Something happened yesterday,” says journalist and author Andreas Wirwalski, rather mysteriously. “What happened yesterday Jane?” To his left sits Jane Friedman, former CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, and to his right is Jeffrey Sharp, an independent film producer (of Boys Don’t Cry and Revolutionary Road fame). What happened yesterday was the launch of Open Road Integrated Media, a new enterprise that Jane and Jeffrey will head.

Jane Friedman, Andreas Wirwalski, Jeffrey Sharp

Open Road Media is a content marketing company, financed by Kohlberg Ventures, that is making waves across the fair and appears all set to transform the e-publishing landscape and usher in the era of the integrated media company. “The e-book will be the centre of a multi-platform universe that will include film, video and other forms of digital entertainment,” says Jane.

The cornerstone of Open Road Media’s strategy will be what they call the ‘author branded backlist’. Jane expounds her mantra, “The absolute reality is that the author is the brand. We’re going back to the future, which I just love.” The plan is to market e-books through a proprietary online platform designed to reach consumers where they live, socialize and shop. Open Road Media’s e-books will be backed up by a world of premium audio and video content such as author profiles, behind-the-scenes features and mini-documentaries.

It isn’t just the conception behind the company or that the future of publishing has materialised in a big way that’s exciting. What’s equally impressive is the fact that Open Road Media’s launch titles will include the works of world famous authors like William Styron, Pat Conroy, Joseph Heller, and Dame Iris Murdoch. It won’t just be established writers who will join Open Media’s stable. New titles will be nurtured in their Studio division, as well as in Discovery, a premium self-publishing division. “We will also work with publishers, like Grove Atlantic, who own the rights to books by being their marketing arm,” says Jane.

“At Frankfurt this year it’s become obvious to me that publishers are understanding that digital is happening and that it’s happening fast,” says Jane. Jeffrey, who’s a first-timer at the fair, says that he’s always looked to the page for inspiration when producing films. “I always try to get authors to come to my sets. They’re a great resource and inspiration.” The genesis of his partnership with Jane, which seamlessly integrates the two industries they thrive in, lies in their collaboration on film adaptations when she was still at HarperCollins. “Both our industries, legacy publishing and independent film making, have been hit hard by the recession. So we were drawn to each other with the idea of taking things forward and starting something new,” explains Jeffrey. They both agree that the Berlinale Film Festival and the Frankfurt Book Fair have been crucial to the merging of their industries

Their vision is not to create a hybrid product, such as an interactive e-book, as much as it is a way to create a multimedia world around the e-book. True, Open Road Media will be better positioned to create film adaptations, as they’ll hold the rights to content for all media. But apart from these adaptations and mobile gaming, they’re an integrated media company in the sense that they’re marketing will encompass a variety of digital platforms. It’s a company that is “born digital” and will only print traditional books using print-on-demand technology. Jane says, “The idea that we send out a digital book and it isn’t coming back appeals to me. I’m done with looking at inventory.”

A little thought for the day. There were a few moments of silence last night at the Frankfurter Hof, typically occurring because a book fair regular would exclaim how empty the lobby was, how quiet everything was.

“There is a bit of a hubbub.”

“More of a ‘bub’”

“Just an ‘ub’” really.

[Lapse into glum silence.]

It had to be said there was truth to that overheard exchange, but it must be added, an unnecessary truth. The drop in overall Fair attendance is so miniscule, it can hardly be noticeable—a, say, 2% drop would translate to 490 people in the Frankfurter Hof lobby rather than 500, hardly grounds for mourning low party attendance.

But it is certainly through that the ranks of editors are thinning a wee bit more than 2% even if that loss is disproportionately Anglo-American. Distressing as that is, it ought not stop us from inviting book fair novices along to the parties (be they in the Frankfurter Hof of the Gleis 25 dive bar.) Last night I spotted Google’s Chief Legal Officer, partners in two different iPhone book app vendors, two book and media bloggers from California hanging out at the Frankfurter Hof. Let’s invite more, let’s all agree to find one non-traditional publishing services person not on our usual guest list and invite them along to one of the traditional parties we attend. One of these days, an iPhone app vendor might throw the Bertelsmann bash of the future, so let’s bring them along to ours so that they know do a Book Fair party is done…

Earlier this year I was chatting with a journalist who covers media for a prominent online magazine when the topic of Jane Friedman arose. Did I know what her plans were? No idea. He’d been getting the same response from everyone he asked and was clearly bewildered. But, he said, one word did keep coming up: legacy. No-one would tell him what it meant though. Aha, I thought. The rapid conglomeration of publishing businesses from the 1960’s through the present, combined with the subsequent layoffs necessitated by the relative failure of the mergers to produce the anticipated profits had combined to eviscerate the institutional knowledge of the combined intellectual property. So while these companies did have licenses to vast amounts of quality content, there were very few people left who knew very much about what the damn content was. Jane, however, had a pretty significant repository of information—she was a one-woman institutional memory. So, I suggested, if I had that knowledge myself, one thing I might do is, to use a wee bit of jargon, “arbitrage those asymmetries”—exploit the gap between what I knew of the value of a given backlist book and what that book’s publisher knew.

Fast forward to this early afternoon in the Film & Media Center where Jane is sitting down to a chat with her business partner, the film producer Jeff Sharp. Delighted, I am, to note the format. A conversation between two knowledgable folks is really an ideal format for presenting new business models to a rather disparate audience. The programming folks at the Book Fair are very mindful of this in how they approach authors: the conversation, as opposed to the reading, is the classic format for authors being introduced to the Frankfurt Fair goers, and using it more on the business side of things would be wonderful.

That all said, it’s the content, rather than the format, that has engendered a standing-room crowd. Metaphorically, we know what’s coming, for her new company is called Open Road Integrated Media, and it’s clear Jane wants to hit the open road. But, in the classic brusque locution, show me the money!

In a four page press release, she duly obliges. Consider the following an idiosyncratic cheatsheet for wherever you find yourself this evening when the question of what’s Jane up to arises.

— Arbitrage the Asymmetries! Basically Open Road is going to monetize Jane’s relationships with established authors with significant backlists: Styron, Conroy, Murdoch (Iris, not Rupert), Heller…Crichton is a TK (copyediting speak for “to come”), “joining the Open Road down the road,” says Friedman. What’s the asymmetry? Well, for one, it’s trust. Publishing is a people business, after all, and authors and agents trust her.

— “The Author is the Brand” Open Road’s not shooting to brand itself but is going to offer a platform for all the aforementioned authors’ content in an author-centric platform. So the trust is being reinforced by Open Road’s willingness to make the author front-and-center.

— Rich digital media. A digital media development firm called Code & Theory is developing a proprietary platform that hosts ancillary bells and whistles—profiles, audio, mini-documentaries, and so forth. (Notwithstanding the digital cornucopia, “the eBook is the center of our universe,” Friedman clarified—the video is promotional, not living inside the book.) Both Sharp himself and a third principal Luke Parker Bowles (yes, son of), have a background in film and video and believe that the quality of the Open Road video will be above the average. This appears to be a major dimension of the day-to-day activity of the company as they’re going to have significant in-house production facilities.

— “Co-Marketing.” They’re taking their digital platform and their video production facilities and integrating it with business partners focused on niche content: Kensington’s GBLTQ list and African-American list to start with and also some Grove Atlantic titles (“literary” being the niche: Jim Harrison, Mark Bowden, P.J. O’Rourke announced thus far…) Given the business relationship is described with a rather fuzzy “co-marketing,” this falls for the moment under the rubric of “terms not [yet] disclosed.”

— Frontlist and self-publishing. The division that will handle this dimension is called Studio and run by Gotham Books’ founding publisher Brendan Cahill. Parallel to Studio is Discovery, and Discovery is a “curated” self-publishing wing—both operations benefit from the integrated digital marketing platform, and from print-on-demand (with possible subsequent conventional distribution or licensing). Unclear so far though are the terms of the self-publishing deal and how significant a component of the projected revenue it constitutes. Friedman indicated that Open Road would be absorbing marketing cost: “We plan to service every author in whatever way the author wants.”

Other stuff you should know:

— Their website OpenRoadMedia.com is not going to retail eBooks. It’s a general marketing platform for the Backlist, and the Studio and Discovery frontlist.

— Although this was barely discussed, the movie production aspect of this has to be one of, if not the largest revenue stream; Sharp currently has Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness” in development.

— No advances.

— Profit share, numbers undisclosed.

— 750-1000 titles in Year One is the plan, but Friedman did not indicate the proprtions of that comprised by established author backlist, frontlist Studio, frontlist Discovery, and co-marketing agreements with Kensington and Grove.

—While their profit share terms apparently the current royalty offered by publishers for digital, Friedman is not intersted in competing on price. It doesn’t matter if other publishers match her royalty rate because, she says, she’ll do a better job marketing. “The secret sauce is the marketing platform.”

I’d love to give you a two cent opinion on how this all adds up but one has to be cautious. It is clear that Friedman has a wealth of relationships to monetize, it is clear that Sharp knows how to produce financial successful movies, it is clear that they can make a very robust digital marketing platform happen, and that at both the author and publisher level, that platform will be very useful. If that platform is to make money by generating unit sales of eBooks, sales will have to be pretty enormous, but if the platform is also being licensed on a fee-basis above costs of production for all that amazing video, it could be profitable fairly quickly.