Frankfurt Mondrian

Sun rises on Deutschmark city

Less of an archive photo since I took this from my hotel bedroom this morning (2011).  Still, quite pretty.

Originally posted October 14, 2011

Program - Frankfurt Academic Conference

 Last week the Frankfurt bookfair held an online (obvs) conference looking at some of the trends in academic publishing.  Here is the link:

https://www.frankfurtacademic.com/program

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 41): Frankfurt Sessions, Libraries and Offsite Storage, State of Publishing from New Republic + More

Publisher's Weekly round-up of some of the early educational sessions at Frankfurt last week including mine on responsive web design. (PW)

Uncertainty is one big obstacle holding publishers back from outsourcing their distribution, observes CEO Gareth Cuddy of ePubDirect. “As the marketplace shifts, margins are squeezed on print, and industry reports showing e-book prices for bestsellers continue to average between $2.99 and $7.99, publishers are cautious about entering the e-book market. But distribution services such as ePubDirect not only share the digital publishing expertise but also allow publishers to access new markets, grow sales internationally and ultimately sell more books.”

And publishers do have a much stronger appetite to sell content directly to consumers nowadays, says executive director of publishing services Walter Walker of code-Mantra, attributing it “to either the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision on e-book price-fixing or simply the astonishing level of activities in the e-book retail business. But the XML-first mandate is one that many publishers find intimidating, and our goal is to use highly efficient plug-ins and templates at the prepress stage without disrupting the traditional Word-to-InDesign authoring environment.”

From the ALPSP blog an excellent set of notes from my session (thanks!)

It's complicated. Apple iOS has 6 different size/resolution combinations. HTC has 12. Even within these platforms there is significant deviation. And it is getting more complicated with the introduction of Microsoft and Asus tablets.
Cairn's advice on how to do RWD right starts with understanding your users and how they access and use your content. Prioritise your content based on the above, then build a site architecture that answers to these priorities. Design a site that provides content for users across device-types and contexts, with grids and typography and images that adapt.
What is responsive web design? It is where you maintain one website that services all devices and screen sizes. It provides complete support for all web pages and features, regardless of the device or screen size. And it enables you to implement changes across all devices.

And this one from the Frankfurt Bookfair blog:

As Bruce Lee said, “when you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle.” So should be your online strategy…or so Michael Cairns, COO, Online Division at Publishing Technology, says.

In the “Pixel Imperfect: Serving an Online Audience with Responsive Content” presentation at CONTEC Frankfurt today, Cairns and Michael Kowalski, Founder, Contentment, discussed the need for publishers (both book and magazine) to create mobile-enabled content for the rising mobile reader. As one of those readers who is reading increasingly on my phone and less on my computer, tablet, or ereader, I appreciated that someone was trying to figure out something to fix all of those books, sites, and magazines I so love so I can read them on the go and not fumble through poorly-converted web-focused content.

From Eoin Purcell on the fair itself: (Blog)

If I was to put my finger on one key root cause though, I think that what’s going on is that publishers have, as an industry, come to terms with the fact that they are in the midst of a great disruption, one that they cannot individually predict the long term outcome of (and Michael Bhaskar spoke eloquently on this on Wednesday). There is general acceptance too that while individual companies retain huge power over their own destinies, the technology giants who have moved heavily into the content and media space, the rise of self-publishing and the general shift of digital distribution means that publishers are no longer the only forces in publishing and that increasingly they accept that they are not even the preeminent force in publishing.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, as people return from summer vacation perhaps they are finding their libraries significantly changed. This is not a new story:

Talk of digital revolutions and bookless libraries notwithstanding, academic libraries around the country are feeling the squeeze as legacy collections outgrow shelves, and shelves give way to learning commons and shared study areas. Those twin pressure points—too many print books plus new demands on library real estate—have spurred academic libraries to try a set of state and regional experiments to free up library space to suit modern learning styles and still make sure that somebody, somewhere, hangs onto books that make up part of the intellectual record, even if those books haven't circulated in years.

For such experiments to succeed, librarians say, they should build off existing relationships among libraries, and they should draw on solid data—on persuasive and detailed analyses of what's in a collection and how it's used and whether those books are available somewhere else. The streamlining of collections has to be handled in a way that doesn't enrage faculty members who still cherish access to physical books. Many disciplines, especially the sciences, favor electronic resources, but print still holds powerful appeal for a lot of scholars

(No mention of NY public library)

Books Don’t Want to Be Free How publishing escaped the cruel fate of other culture industries from the New Republic.

Step back and look at books in a wider context, though, and the picture changes. If you’re in the business of selling journalism, moving images, or music, you have seen your work stripped of value by the digital revolution. Translate anything into ones and zeroes, and it gets easier to steal and harder to sell at a sustainable price. Yet people remain willing to fork over a decent sum for books, whether in print or in electronic form. “I can buy songs for 99 cents, I can read most newspapers for free, I can rent a $100 million movie tonight for $2.99,” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle content, told me in January. “Paying $9.99 for a best-selling book—paying $10 for bits?—is in many respects a very strong accomplishment for the business.” At the individual level, everyone in the trade—whether executive, editor, agent, author, or bookseller—faces threats to his or her livelihood: self-publishing, mergers and “efficiencies,” and, yes, the suspicious motives of Amazon executives. But the book itself is hanging on and even thriving.

From Twitter
Frankfurt Session on "What is a publisher" (#pubnow)
Book market gains new momentum http://dw.de/p/19w2r
Frankfurt Contec twitter feed (#contec13)

Frankfurt: Selections from the Show Dailies

Highlights from the show Dailies:

PW Show Daily October 10th:

Interview with James Daunt of Waterstones (Page 12)

So is Daunt’s new boss happy with the way things are going? The Managing Director in whose steady hands so much rests points out that Alexander Mamut, a long-time customer of Daunt Books, lives in Moscow and isn’t here that much, but yes, he’s pleased. Was it a big decision to step back from the chain he founded and had so lovingly created to take on the nightmare that was Waterstones? He turns slightly mischievous. “Waterstones was about to disappear and I don’t think that was going to be great for the British book trade. I’m not sure how Daunt Books was going to survive in that environment. Random House doesn’t run a warehouse to supply the likes of Daunts; it’s to supply Waterstones. Where would we have been a year on from there being no Waterstones? I don’t know.” A thought bubble seems to hang over Daunt’s head. “Waterstones not being there was going to be extremely damaging to our ecosystem. A world of supermarkets and online would have been a pretty bleak one. Independents would have found it very hard to carry on. The writing was on the wall for a very long time. Somebody had to do something.”

Doug Wright on the Future of Content Delivery (Page 34):

Professional networks are increasingly being used to provide services that give real value to the community and improve engagement, alongside content delivery. Examples of this credentialed, peer-to-peer approach include the Researcher Exchange from GSE Research. It has the facility for members to comment on journal content via the open peer-review model or to ask questions of their peers ;and it enables corporations to find expert consultants, and authors to find collaborators, via a sophisticated author search whereby a user can pinpoint experts within a particular field within a particular organisation

Cory Doctorow urges publishers to support ideas such as the Humble eBook Bundle (Page 38)

Yet, one of the biggest surprises to me in curating the HumbleEbook Bundle has been some publishers’ unwillingness to experiment with just one or two DRM-free titles in a new kind of promotion that carries a proven track record of success in a related field.I understand the industry is concerned that the perceived value of an ebook is a matter of credit and psychology, and that no one among the Big Six American houses wants the “fair price” for an ebook to drop. But I also don’t think they can do much about this: there are, by orders of magnitude, more amateur and independent ebooks entering the marketplace than the Big Six produce, and many of them are at low price points. At the same time, the Humble Indie Bundles have a record of enticing people to pay more, on average, than they would pay for the unbundled items. Sure, some people pay nothing. But why not experiment? Isn’t the idea of a successful business to make as much profit as possible; not as much profit as possible from each separate customer

PW Show Daily October 11th:

Michael Bhaskar: Working Together - Digitally (Page 8)

Here’s the rub. Digital is difficult and expensive. Simply to compete with all the other digital media producers out there means constantly raising the bar. We are in a kind of functionality and design arms race, where coming out with what wowed people last week bores them the next. You have to constantly push the envelope and you have to do this in a blizzard of competition in an environment of colossal risk, where abject failure is worryingly common. You are dealing with high upfront costs, at best uncertain demand, unstable, usually low pricing necessitating a high volume of sales and much control ceded to giant technology corporations. Yes, it’s like books–only more so.

Nikko Pfund - A Billion Dollar Process (Page 10):

PW:
Speaking of OSO, you’ve now expanded it into University PressScholarship Online (UPSO), and inked deals with publishers, including major presses such as California and Chicago. What is it like to be sharing your platform with publishers who are technically competitors?
NP:
It has been far more natural and uncomplicated than we’d dared hope. It helps that t he university press world is one of mutual support and commonality of purpose. Ultimately, I think the benefits to the scholarly and the university press community–in terms of access, learning, collaborating with other mission-driven not-for-profits, and tackling some challenges together as a community–far outweigh any competitive advantages that may be derived from our platform. So I don’t fret about the competitive aspect of UPSO at all. Technology is important, but university presses have strong personalities

Making Copyright Work in a Digital Age (Page 22)

The aim of the LCC is that through interoperability, the use of existing open standards (such as the International Standard Text Identifier and the International Standard Name Identifier , and commonality in the area of rights management, to produce a cross-media framework for a standards-based communications infra-structure that will enable businesses and individuals to man-age and communicate their rights more effectively online. The idea is for an automated rights clearance system in which content from all sectors is tagged and can be identified with a single click. The system would then allow users to request permission for specific uses and access the appropriate licences.

Open Access or Open Season (Page 46)

The burning question for publishers is how this greater open access might be achieved without causing the collapse of the publishing industry. One of the options considered by the Finch committee was the mandatory across-the-board introduction of the Green Delayed Access model after a six-month embargo, regardless of the discipline served by the journal or its estimated half-life. The Publishers Association and the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers together commissioned a piece of work to try to ascertain what the likely effect of this would be on academic journals subscriptions (available at www.publishingresearch.net); its headline findings are displayed in the graphs.

PW Show Daily October 12:

Prepare for the Subscription Economy (Page 28)

We talk about data a lot in publishing: “Data is the New Oil” was the mantra of the BICNew Trends Summer Seminar in London. But when print publishers talk about data, theyare talking about product data: metadata. And metadata is crucial to the supply chain. But what we have missed is that when t he rest of the world talks about data, they are talking about “big data”: personal data, customer data, usage data, transactional data etc. They are talking about using data to reach and be relevant to individuals. We need to wake up to this; and when we do we are going to wake up to an unholy mess in our back offices. We already find it difficult enough to use data well at re-seller level (not customer or use level) let alone monetizing on a use basis (unless it is via an aggregator saving us the pain of ever getting to grips with new transactional business models). And it is this that makes Zuora (used by Pearson, by the way) so fascinating to me. They have understood that the internet has changed the whole context and therefore the fundamental basis of commercial transactions.

Publishing Perspectives:

E-Books Offer Silver Lining for Australians:

And all this despite the Fifty Shades of Grey dividend: the three books in the trilogy have sold 2 million copies this year, or over 5% of all sales. Without E. L. James’ enlivening of Australian marital life, volume sales would have been down by over 15%.
Two tough years back-to-back has created casualties. Last month, one of Australia’s hitherto most dynamic trade publishers, Murdoch Books, finally gave up the fight and has been bought by the largest local publisher, Allen & Unwin, with a large number of jobs lost. Specialist R&R Publications has gone into liquidation, and Melbourne University Publishing posted a $2.1 million loss. Sales forces and lists are being trimmed, while one of Australia’s two remaining book printers, OPUS Group (which missed out on printing Fifty Shades), is also downsizing after posting large losses. Adding to the gloom, major educational bookseller Education Works has gone into liquidation following an unsuccessful brush with venture capitalism.

IPA’s Global Ranking of Publishing Markets—US, China on Top

B&N in Frankfurt: We Come in Peace

Why no B&N branding? Because their team was there representing an entirely new company, Nook Media, armed with $300 million from Microsoft and another $305 million committed over the next several years.
“Microsoft?” you say, “I thought they were dead, doomed to second-tier status by Apple.” Yes, well, as we noted last week, users of Microsoft devices are the most active buyers of book content on mobile devices, so it would make sense that they would invest in the book business (after, it must be noted, killing off their own book digitization project several years ago).

Not for Nothing - PW and Publishing Perspectives make it purposefully difficult to collect, cite and link to this content. Well done!

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 42): Frankfurt, CS Forester, Martin Amis + More

Exclaiming this is the time for start-ups the Frankfurt Book Fair concluded on Sunday with traffic slightly up and a continued expansion to more diverse attendees and exhibitors:

With many exhibitors and visitors, not only from the book industry, but also other related industries such as film, games, and information and communications technology, the Frankfurt Book Fair demonstrated that the sphere of interaction for members of the publishing industry has become significantly larger. Many new areas of specialisation – from digital publishing services and computer games production, to legal and financial consultants for crossmedial products – could be found at the Book Fair, spread between the different halls, professional areas and regional sections. In all, 7,384 exhibitors from 106 countries were present, and the more than 3,200 events attracted 280,194 visitors.

“This is now the time for start-ups, and the book industry is in a positive mood for renewal,” says Juergen Boos, Director of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Besides the electronic reading gadgets, visitors to the Book Fair witnessed a lively experimentation with new ideas, with new forms of storytelling and with multimedia formats. “An enormous diversity of ideas arises from the combination of enterprising spirit and technological opportunity. The international book and publishing industry has become a lot more multi-facetted.”

This year, the Frankfurt Book Fair also recorded a slight increase in the number of visitors, with about one per cent more people coming to Frankfurt in 2011 than in 2010. The interest in international training and networking events grew perceptibly, such as those offered in collaboration with the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, under the umbrella of the new conference brand, the Frankfurt Academy. Here, the emphasis was on event-formats such as the all-media StoryDrive Conference and the Tools of Change Conference.

“The more globalised the books business becomes, the greater is everyone’s need to meet in person at least once a year – and that, of course, in Frankfurt. Conversations about people and books are indispensable,” says Professor Gottfried Honnefelder, President of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, and he adds: “Those involved in the market are optimistic. We’re not only talking about the e-book business, we’re already taking action. The face of the Frankfurt Book Fair is one of self-assurance. The framework exists; now each publisher and each bookseller needs to find the right path for itself.”

CS Forester has a new novel coming out (Observer):

The novel, which is complete and polished from start to finish, was accepted for publication in 1935 by his publisher, Michael Joseph, now part of Penguin. However, Forester and his publisher delayed its release, deciding that it would not be sensible to publish it between two Hornblower books. Forester then moved house and when his publisher was sold, The Pursued somehow disappeared.

Forester clearly felt its loss. Decades later in his autobiography he wrote: "The lost novel was really lost. It is just possible that a typescript still exists, forgotten and gathering dust in a rarely used storeroom in Boston or Bloomsbury."

He was right. It surfaced at Christie's in 2002, when Lawrence Brewer, a lifelong Forester aficionado, was astonished to find that the auctioneer was selling it as a "job lot" of 11 Forester-related items. "It was a pathetic little auction," said Brewer. "There was no … great publicity. Something should have been made of it."

Excited by the chance to own words by Forester that no one had read, Brewer bought the typescript with Colin Blogg, a fellow founder-member of the CS Forester Society, for just £1,500. "Goodness me!" Brewer exclaimed in pure Foresterese. "I found it. I was sky-high."

Martin Amis was interviewed at the Hay Festival in Mexico and didn't hold back on a variety of subjects. Here beginning is comments on empire's decline (Telegraph):

MA Yes, it’s satirical, but it is about what happens to countries when they’re in decline. We’re now seeing America beginning to cope with decline, and I don’t think they’re going to be anything like as reasonable about that decline as England was.

England went from being ruler of a quarter of the globe to a second-rate country in the course of the Second World War. They talk about the Second World War. They say “the big three”: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Churchill wasn’t one of the big three. Stalin and Roosevelt could hardly bring themselves to stop giggling when Churchill said, “I think we should do this”, because we’d ceased to matter by then.

And somehow we got through it.

JG Ballard, the writer who was interned in China by the Japanese, returned to England at the age of 12, 13, and he said it looked as though England had lost the war. It was blackouts, rationing, everything sordid and dirty and depressed, and what we were doing was coping with this tremendous demotion from being a great power to being a minor power.

But we somehow got through, and I think we were very greatly helped by the ideology known as political correctness, relativism, levelism, because that was fiercely anti-imperialist. So as we were coping with decline – and it takes decades to do it – we had the ideology that was telling us that empires are s---, you don’t want an empire, you should be ashamed for having had one.

In the NY Times a review of some of the past movie adaptations of LeCarre's novels (NYTimes):

In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.

What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.

Stieg Larsson books are being adapted for the comics (Telegraph):

In a statement ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, the publisher behind Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman said its Vertigo imprint would work with Larsson's estate and Hedlund Literary Agency to adapt the books.

"Each book by Larsson will be presented in two graphic novel volumes that will be available in both print and digital formats," it said, starting withThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2012.

DC Entertainment co-publisher Dan DiDio said "the intricate characters and stories Larsson created in the Millennium Trilogy are a perfect match for the graphic novel format."

The diaries of a Holocaust survivor generated some interest this week and will be published in 2012 (Observer):

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia. 

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

Frankfurt Book Fair Round Up Day Two.

Author Roger Rapoport writing for the McClatchy-Tribune News Service takes us on a best picks tour of the fair (Link)

Two years ago my pick for the most overlooked title at Frankfurt was "Nobody Owns the Moon," a Viking/Penguin Australia picture book by Tohby Riddle. This year I have a new nominee, a title that should be required reading in every school in the land. Can we have a round of applause for Larry Gerber's "CITED! Identifying Credible Information" (Rosen Publishing Group)? This brief title makes it clear that "much of the information on the Internet is someone's opinion" that can't be tested or proved. It shows young people how to do accurate and trustworthy research and avoid being suckered by "phony facts." Parents, go get this book for your kids.

And bizzarely:

Certainly one the most ambitious travel guides of the year is "The Holocaust Sites of Europe: An Historical Guide" by Martin Winstone (I.B. Taurus/Palgrave Macmillan). Even if you have no plans to visit any of these destinations, this is a superb armchair travel book for students of the Third Reich. An exhaustive look at the Holocaust camp by camp, this work documents little-known Nazi killing groups like Maly Trostenets in Belarus. At this former Karl Marx Collective, Hitler's troops executed at least 200,000 prisoners.

Euronews Video:  Pressing issues at the Frankfurt Book Fair (YouTube)


Deutsche Welle reminds us how the Frankfurt Book fair evolved (DW)

Frankfurt's fair is the largest in the world, but it also looks back on a proud tradition: Manuscripts have been traded at fairs in Frankfurt since the late Middle Ages. After Johannes Gutenberg invented the letterpress in the neighboring town of Mainz in the 15th century, he came to Frankfurt to sell his products. Even then, printers and book traders made their way from across Europe to Frankfurt, and a special "Book Barge" from Cologne helped ferry visitors from Flanders to the event.

This pan-European book trade, the center of which was Frankfurt, was possible due to Latin's role as the lingua franca of the time. But the Reformation changed that, heralding a new era of book publishing in national languages. The Reformation also brought the Kaiser as an advocate of Catholic interests into play, and as a free imperial city, Frankfurt quickly became a focal point of attention. Whoever wanted to trade in books was forced to comply with draconian censorship regulations. This pushed Frankfurt aside, making way for a new center of European book trading to flourish in Protestant Leipzig. Frankfurt's book fairs closed in the 18th century.

Rachel Deahl in PW looks at the deal action (PW):

Amid a frenzied round of deal-making before the fair, Leyla Belle Drake, at Salomonsson, is selling a debut trilogy by Alexander Soderberg called The Andalucian Friend. The agency was going to hold off on selling the series until London, but, after the scouts picked up on it, rushed a translation—in a week they got the first 100 pages of the book translated into English to have at Frankfurt. The trilogy was pre-empted in Sweden in what Drake called a “huge” deal, and a significant auction has also closed in Italy and Germany. A number of offers are in from other countries, but the agency is planning to hold off on a U.S. sale at the fair and, instead, to shop the rights in the States in November. A U.K. auction, the agency said, may or may not close in Germany. The trilogy is set in Sweden and the author used to be a screenwriter. The central character in the trilogy is a female nurse and Drake said the first book, which is written, is “very cinematic”and features “explosive action.”Book one in the trilogy will be published in Sweden in May.

Sound familiar?

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 41): Frankfurt 2011, Indian Authors, Digital Rights,

Frankfurt has always been my favorite of the trade shows I've visited.  There's such a variety of people, customers and potential business partners that its unlike any other book show.

It is a gloomy day today and rain is forecast for tomorrow but the threat of industrial action may be less imminent since the government has become directly involved in getting the parties to negotiate. 

A delegation from India is presenting a collection of indigenous Indian works for translation as reported by India's Daily News and Analysis:

In a first showcase of Indian indigenous writing, a literary panorama featuring works by over 30 language writers will be on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair in a pilot exhibition for readers and publishers from Europe, the US and other countries.

The literary panorama, initiated by the union culture ministry under the 'ILA: Indian Literature Abroad' project, will be held Oct 12-16.

The project aims to carry the diversity of contemporary regional Indian literature from the grassroots to the world through source translation, which involves creation of original work directly to foreign languages in an attempt to remove dependence on English translation, a top ILA official said.

Initially, the focus of translation is on six UNESCO languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

“The project requires patience and nurturing. It is (in the) long term. We want to understand the kind of Indian language books the international market likes and the market dynamics. We are looking at source language translations - like from Tamil to French," writer Namita Gokhale, the member secretary of Indian Literature Abroad project, told IANS.

"Translating a regional literary work first into English and then into a foreign language results in loss of textual matter,” she said.

“Different cultures appreciate different kind of literature,” she added.

Gokhale heads the delegation carrying the Indian literary showcase to Frankfurt Tuesday.

A discussion, 'Romancing the Languages: Indian Literature's Journeys' will debate on the future of Indian regional language writing and its global positioning Oct 13.

The Bookseller doesn't expect the slow global economy to impact the US business at Frankfurt (Bookseller):

Meanwhile, organisers are expecting 7,500 exhibitors at the fair, as the halls reach capacity. FBF spokesperson Katja Boehne said there will be 761 exhibitors from the UK and 604 from the US, with between 280,000 to 290,000 visitors set to come through the doors—of which around 150,000 will be trade visitors. She said: "We will see at this book fair what publishers have made of the digital options. There will be lots of enhanced e-books and multimedia projects, some of which we don't have a name for. There will be a large dollop of creativity and new ideas."

Boehne added that the numbers of exhibitors and visitors was "more or less" the same as last year, as the fair has "come to the end of capacity; there is no space left for extra exhibitors".

In Publishers' Weekly Rachel Deahl suggests this years Frankfurt will be about digital rights just like last year and the year before and she concludes, (PW):

And then there’s the growing concern and confusion over e-books and the open market. Under the reigning territorial model, the open market right allows publishers to sell English-language books in European countries outside the U.K. Whether the open market can, or should, be preserved in the digital world is a recurring question. A recent court ruling, outside the book world, may also be a topic of conversation in Frankfurt. In Football Association Premier League Ltd. et al. v. QC Leisure et al., an E.U. court just ruled that a British pub owner was not legally allowed to use a decoder to air Greek soccer games in her bar; without the decoder she would have had to pay a licensing fee to Sky Sport. The ruling had to do with the fact that Sky Sport had negotiated an exclusive licensing fee with the Premier League to air its games in the U.K., and, although the decoders are legal, they cannot be used to show the games to a group. Attorney C.E. Petit, who blogs about publishing and the law at Scrivener’s Error, picked up on the case and noted that the judgment might have implications in the book world. Since Europe is now under a more unified copyright law, with the establishment of the E.U., there could be a case about multiple English-language editions being sold in Europe. In other words, there could now be legal ground for stamping out the open market in publishing.

A not well known Irish author Flann O'Brien gets and appreciation from More Intelligent Life:

Despite the pseudonym, everyone in Dublin’s incestuous literary circles knew him. When he started openly mocking the civil service and expressing political opinions—a serious transgression for an employee of the state—he was invited to retire at age 42, in 1953. His pension, together with the slender income from his writing, might have let him succeed as a novelist. But O’Nolan was better at self-sabotage than self-promotion, and he died at 54 of cancer and alcoholism. He still left behind five novels, three of uneven quality and two, “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman”, that are among the greatest accomplishments in English-language fiction.

He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”

From the twitter this week:

The adventures of Tintin – and CGI http://gu.com/p/32etq/tw

Armour to stand down as Reed finance chief - FT.com - Mediahttp://on.ft.com/nHFHnJ

Stars Will Read Amazon Unit's New Audio Book Series:http://nyti.ms/nWdh4E

Parallel Universe: Will Libraries and Publishers Learn to Share?

Following is my presentation (10/5/10) at the 32nd Supply Chain Interests meeting at the Frankfurt Book fair. Below is the full text of my speech but on slideshare you can view each slide with the corresponding text.

Parallel Universe: Will Libraries and Publishers Learn to Share? from Michael Cairns

MediaWeek (Vol 3, 42a): Frankfurt 2010 from the Show Dailies

There were dueling show dailies at the FBF this year and between the three of them they may have been able to pull together a decent single issue each day. Both The Bookseller and Publishing Perspectives had pdf versions of their show dailies and their content isn't yet (or maybe never) separately available on their sites. Publishers Weekly/ BookBrunch also had a show daily but I had no luck finding the show daily content I was looking for on their websites. If it was there it was buried. (As an aside, I was bemused that PW had a lead story on day two about the $100mm HMH fund for learning that I mentioned a month ago). (And I do realize the images look like they were taken out a prison window). Day One The Bookseller Daily- Day 1

Tour de Force (Pg 21) Events have helped the music industry cope with digitization. But, Anna Coatman asks, can author tours ever become a viable revenue stream for books? Going Native (Pg 23) The generation that has grown up with digital represents a challenge for academic publishers. E(uro) Files (Pg 8) Price maintainance, some EU laws and high VAT rates mean digital still hasn't caught fire in some European markets. Publishing Perspectives: Money For Nothing, And Your Pics For Free - Gwyn Headley on how Ebooks are finally embracing color images, but how much should you pay for them? (Pg 11) Day Two: The Bookseller Day 2 New Model Army (Pg 13) Perhaps today's biggest publishing challenge is how to repurpose and monetise digital content. Publishing Perspectives Day 2: Hunting for E-books Around the Globe: American bookseller Barnes & Noble’s Patricia Arancibia is in search of the best the world has to offer. (Pg 15) Day Three: The Bookseller Day 3 Up to 3mm searches per day for pirated eBooks. (Pg 4) Publishing Perspectives Day 3: Why Publishers Need Agile Content (Pg 10) Clearing the Air about Copyright: Users need education, rights-holders need to get paid. (Pg 11) The American Gentleman: At first publisher Roger Straus was reticent to come to Germany for a book fair, but once he did, the legendary publisher made friends, struck deals, and left a lasting legacy. (Pg 12) Scheherazade in the App Store: Can Digital Free Arabic Publishers. (Pg 15) The Future of Rights: Digital publishing raises countless rights issues, but work towards a universal international framework for clearances is beginning. (Pg 16) Moscow at Night: Is there such a thing as Russian noir and could it be the next big thing? (Pg 19) All in all Publishing Perspectives seemed to have a more expansive and interesting selection of stories than either The Bookseller or Publisher's Weekly. (IMHO of course). Here are all PW's Frankfurt posts.

Repost: Frankfurt Presentation: Publishing in a Digital Age

Repost Friday and this post originally appeared on October 20th, 2008. Since I am addressing this same meeting on Tuesday I thought I would re-visit the last presentation.


This week I presented at the 30th International Supply Chain Specialists Meeting at the Frankfurt Bookfair. The presentation is available on Slideshare

Frankfurt Bookfair Supply Chain Meeting: Publishing in a Digital Age from Michael Cairns

If you click on the notes tab below the slideviewer you will be able to read my verbal comments attributed to each page. Without these comments the presentation is likely to be next to meaningless. (For some reason, you will need to click back from page two to page one to see the notes for page one - looks like a small bug to me).

Also, the presentation was videotaped (here). My video is the second one. The A/V guy starts in on page three for some reason.

It is about a 24 minute presentation. Some seemed to enjoy it and a number of people came up to me at the end although, I wondered why no one asked me who 'Kenneth' was. The other presentations that day were interesting and I will note the link to the editeur site when they are all up.

Parallel Universe: Change in Libraries For Publishers

As I mentioned last week I am speaking at the Supply Chain meeting at the Frankfurt bookfair next week. Here is the second part of my draft presentation. (Part one from last week).

The academic library has been forced to re-evaluate their activities for a variety of reasons. If we reference the changes made generally to accommodate a migration from paper to electronic materials, then the impact on monographs is really an anticipated progression of their change programs.

One important change initiative I would characterize as one of “efficiency”. As the thinking goes: “Are we as librarians delivering the appropriate services in the most efficient manner?” Whereas detailed cost analysis have always been possible, economic realities now enable solutions that previously may have been unrealistic for practical or political reasons. The life time costs of maintaining a monograph collection were always known to be expensive but limited alternatives to the open stack paradigm made real analysis irrelevant. With the rapid escalation in digitization programs and a collective approach to resource sharing, libraries now have viable options with respect to down sizing their monograph collections. This now defined expense coupled with the very real costs of real estate and development projects for new buildings has many university administrators salivating over all that “under-utilized” space.

Research conducted by Paul Courant and Mathew Nelson (The Idea of Order) explicitly documents the costs of maintaining a print monograph collection. The opportunity for publishers may rely on turning this analysis of the ‘life time cost’ of holding book into a sales opportunity for eBooks. The authors also calculate that a typical academic library could be spending about $1mm just to maintain their legacy print collection. In an environment where monograph usage is declining this large annual expense begins to look like an onerous and misguided use of funds. What response will publishers get if you ask libraries to – in effect – add to this annual expense by buying more print?

As I noted earlier, the case for a wholesale reevaluation of the idea of books in the library has gained credibility. As strange as it is to say, the physical book collection may not be needed. It may be both economical and efficient to remove them. Constance Malpas from OCLC goes a bit further when she comments that “books have already left the building” – with over 70mm volumes having been removed from local collections and placed in off-site storage. Some important universities have determined that they can operate with little or no diminution of service while reducing their on-site collections. (30% of Columbia’s, 40% of Berkeley’s, 50% of UCLC’s and more than 50% of Harvard’s).

Simply moving books off site, doesn’t represent a total solution. As the authors Courant and Nelson note, electronic storage in addition to or combination with physical collections is most optimal because access to an electronic version of a book aids in selection of the title. If a user is able to look at the toc or index or search the electronic version in advance of requesting the physical book then they are more likely to request from off site storage the books they really need. Large digitization programs such as Hathi Trust and others are beginning to support this type of “mixed platform” hybrid.

The Hathi Trust is one of several digital repositories. At Hathi, their mass-digitized collection is sufficient to replace at least 30% of most academic print book collections. Hathi grows daily and there are other repositories adding titles in a similar manner. All have a different collection profile and different partnerships but at some point these repositories will collaborate and weave together their collections so that the overlap or replacement potential across academic library collections will near 100%.

So what are we seeing here? Initially, I spoke about the cost savings from more efficient use of physical space and transitioned into discussion about shared repositories of content. These activities are closely related and will be progressively augmented and expanded with further network level services. In short, more sophistication will ensue concerning access, applications and services focused on monograph content that historically was disbursed in the extreme volume by volume and library by library.

Strategically, what might these initiatives mean for publishers? Libraries are not saying categorically they don’t want print but they are aggressively placing print content offsite. In some instances new books purchased are going straight to off site storage. In accessing these assets, the library also wants a digital copy that they can place in the catalog for search and discovery. The shared approach to collection management while currently reflective primarily of their retrospective print collections will become the paradigm for future purchases – both print and eBooks. Going forward publishers will be expected to accommodate this. While representing a challenge for both libraries and publishers there may be opportunities in working toward a new business model. Recall, that the combination of the ILL statistics and the Hathi stats on title overlap suggests – strongly – that supply and demand is significantly out of balance. Addressing this is just one opportunity.

This discussion would not be complete without also bringing in the migration to eBooks and eContent. It may be in the transition to an eBook environment where publishers and libraries will clash and it would be a significant mistake for book publishers to assume libraries are ignorant of the issues and complexities of eBook and eContent business models.

In fact, libraries may have a more experienced view of the eContent business models than do many book publishers. Libraries participated in the migration of information databases, print serials and journals to online databases and most importantly facilitated the radical improvements in the provision of serials content. Some see similar and perhaps greater opportunities as monograph make this transition.

But publishers see eBooks in libraries as problematic. There may be more acceptance of eBooks in the academic setting but thus far much less so in the public library segment. A recent report published by Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) suggested that libraries seek to organize a national buying pool to source and negotiate eBook deals. We’ll see how far they get with that.

(Part three to come).

Parallel Universe

I am speaking in two weeks at the annual supply chain meeting at the Frankfurt bookfair. The following is a draft of the first part of my presentation.

There’s a lot going on in the library world of books, serials and eContent. Just like every business connected to the publishing industry today, libraries are experiencing change and dealing with complexity to an extent that most publishers neither understand nor appreciate. As the relationship between book publishers and libraries changes – and it is - both sides would be well advised to understand more about the circumstances and experiences of the other.

We always associate books with libraries yet, books have not been the pillars that support the library mission for many decades. Based on some of the data I will share with you, some might even argue that books are not a success story in the library environment. Perhaps an odd observation but actual data and experience suggests that as a group they are expensive to manage, under-utilized, hard to navigate and of declining importance to scholarship. There is also the element of ‘lost opportunity’ in that decisions to purchase specific books are rarely optimized with demand and so books that will have supported a need or demand are not purchased and books that were purchased more often than not sit on shelves rarely used.

I believe our collective challenge will be to not replicate the limited publisher/library model of decades past but to build a better model. We need to think differently about the monograph.

Despite remaining critically important to many communities, the public library in the US is under constant threat. If not from actual dwindling revenue sources which have universally caused layoffs, closings and reduced services, then from the passive aggressive stance of publishers who propose not to make electronic versions of their books available to library patrons.

This bleak outlook obscures the fact that academic libraries and some larger public libraries are embarked on a radical redesign and reevaluation of their activities which will impact all libraries in the short term. Many of these changes are almost completely hidden to publishers. That is not to say that the same couldn't be said of the library community about the circumstances and strategic questions facing book publishing companies as they make their transition from print to electronic.

Regrettably, at a critical juncture in the transformation of the relationship between publishing and libraries neither side seems to know or appreciate enough about the circumstances of other. This should be troubling to all those – like me - who believe libraries and publishers should share a desire to expand knowledge and community around books.

I see an unavoidable situation developing where sharp disagreement over the provision of eContent will fracture the historically uneasy alliance between book publishers and libraries as more content migrates to electronic form and consumers make electronic delivery their format of choice.

My comments take the library perspective and I would like to examine three areas. Firstly, an overview of where libraries are today. Secondly, a look at some of the most important strategic library initiatives under way and thirdly, some thoughts on the way forward for libraries and publishers.

The primary focus of this presentation will be on the academic library environment; however, let me make some brief notes about the situation with public libraries in the US. I do this because I will include public libraries in my concluding comments. The purpose and mission of public versus academic libraries are similar but the execution of their goals is often quite different.

Many of us are familiar with the steady stream of headlines regarding closures and layoffs. In the US and in some cases Europe, public libraries are facing the immediate threat of reduced funding as well as the more strategic question about their role in the fabric of their community. Hard economic times are the precise reason why public library use in the US is trending up.

Academic libraries are not immune to macro economic changes either; although seem to have more flexibility to devise new methods of dealing with some of the economic challenges they face.

For example, can you envision an academic library remodeling its space that results in the permanent removal of all its books? That sounds absurd – even crazy - yet during a recent renovation Ohio State removed all their books from the library and placed them in off site storage. Service for students and faculty was impacted only minimally and once the space was remodeled not all the books returned. Books in the Ohio State library now look more like display items than accessible resources. NYU removed 30% of their collection during a similar renovation. A library at the University of Texas recently gained a lot of attention as a new library without any “books”.

There are more and more examples and what it strongly suggests is that academic library’s physical monograph collections may be more likely to be found today in a warehouse than on a library shelf.

More to follow from my presentation next week.