Richard Nash

Richard Nash is an independent publishing consultant and entrepreneur, presently developing a start-up portfolio of social publishing communities and imprints. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. Books he edited and published landed on various bestseller lists and in 2006, Publishers Weekly picked him as one of the ten editors to watch for in the coming decade.

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.

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.

“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…

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.

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.

O’Reilly Media, the golden child of computer book publishing (golden, in no small part because of how much more than just publishing they truly are), co-organized a one-day prequel shindig yesterday, the “value proposition” of which was implicitly articulated by O’Reilly VP, Andrew Savikas, in his closing keynote. In describing the remarkable geographical diversity of the appeal of iPhone app versions of their “Missing Manual” series, he observed that those data would be worth keeping in mind as the audience “engaged in the Book Fair itself in the coming days”—true for that data for sure, but also very much the pitch of the organizers and one which, to their credit, they very much lived up to.

For while the traditional Tuesday flurry of agent and editor and rights director pitch meetings proceeded apace in the lobbies and nooks and crannies of the Hofs Frankfurter and Hessischer, Tools of Change Frankfurt added, for this year at least, the Radisson Blu to the roster of reasons to fly out Sunday (though both your correspondent  and fellow Messe blogger Chad Post still chose to fly out Monday night and brave Tuesday’s activities on an hour of sleep.)

I spare you all the exhaustive report on panel after panel in this post, but expect nuggets of information and perspective from the panels and talks scattered throughout my posts in the coming days. But in the Tools of Change Frankfurt spirit of offering takeaways to keep in the back of your mind in the days to come, keep an eye out for these two themes likely to recur over the course of the Fair:

Partnerships. A great deal of what publishers need to do, digital and otherwise, is going to require finding more shoulder to put to the grindstone than any publisher has to hand.  Whether it is Granta partnering with the events newsletter Flavorpill to promote a user-generated content series of short films inspired by one of their books, or O’Reilly partnering on delivering three hundred iPhone apps in nine month with the assistance of Lexcycle (now owned by Amazon), the purveyors of the Stanza reading app, publishers who want to move fast, or want to move smart (going to where someone has already got the audience together), are looking for shoulders to add to the grindstone.

Flattening. Hierarchies are out. Communication can’t be done in a one-way, broadcast fashion any more. Openness, candor is critical. This applies to marketing interaction; this applies to ebook software vendors offering APIs and doing so in the least restrictive fashion possible; this applies to the sourcing of the published content itself, although, for  the moment, the “crowdsourcing” of content is restricted largely to professional publishing.

Keep an eye out for those themes—no actual prizes for finding them, beyond your own personal satisfaction!

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

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

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

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

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