booklab

Over dinner - or, if you prefer, during the past hour or so - I lost roughly 10 percent of my literary capital.

Initially, I had 5000 $, provided by Riesenmaschine, a Berlin based fancy blog, to bet on the outcome of what is still probably the strangest annual event in literature in the German speaking sphere, the Ingeborg Bachmann Reading and Award: One and a half dozen of mostly young writers (young= 1 to 3 books published, on average) read an unpublished chapter before a jury of literary critics (and these critics have also nominated the authors - so they also compete, sort of) and an interested audience in arena like setting. The reading authors are - sometimes pretty harshly - reviewed live, in front of the audience and TV cameras (yes, the entire event is broadcast live by a public culture channel in Austria and Germany), and at the end, one is declared the year’s Ingeborg Bachmann winner, and a few more get additional awards and recognition - or, if they crash, they can nosedive their career.

The event is the most hated literary encounter for over 2 decades now, and still alive, and everybody who wants to be somebody in literature, goes there, ready to get badly hurt, or, like in a lotery, become the unlikely winner against all the odds.

This year’s novelty is that you can bet on the winner online, in some stock market mimikry scheme: You get 5000 virtual bucks, can invest and divest and have fun at not really any real risk.

The betting scheme is provided by Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, or ZIA, basically an agency full of nerdy, funny, yet very professional Berlin based text workers (from PR texts to - yes, you bet - Bachmann award winning literature, as their Kathrin Passig won last year’s award with prose just perfectly targeted at that jury so that everyone was startled, both by the text and by the cold blood of its author who deliberately calculated her shots - at the jury, the audience, the entire set up).

The ZIA - which mocks, of course, CIA - also earlier proved its strong understanding of the internet, by organizing virtual audiences to the effect of lobbying successfully for their favourite participant for the ‘Audience Award’ for three years in a row!

Well, and this year, as all awards had been taken home already in the past by ZIA, they opted for calibrating the entire thing with their virtual Bachmann stock exchange.

Ever curious, I took my 5000 ZIA $ and will try my luck / skill / insight, or whatever - and keep you posted till the end which is scheduled for July 1st. Stay with us and see if I win.

We proudly announce the birth of our new baby - the Livres Hebdo Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry, or the first reliable list of all publishing groups from around the globe with revenues of over 200 million Euros or 250 million dollars.

For almost 10 months, we were researched, tracked down data and people helping us, kept checking and cross checking numbers and sources, in order to produce a list of the top 45 groups, plus many of their major sub-divisions and sometimes even regional break down figures, plus an ample documentation on who is doing what exactly.

 And guess what, we did not find only books.  Almost the contrary is true, as the top 5 include only 1 and a half traditional ‘trade publishers’, with Pearson’s Penguin division (Pearson being #2), and with Bertelsmann (#5).

 The world’s biggest houses are Reed Elsevier, Pearson, Thomson, Bertelsmann and Wolters Kluwer.

Take also note that the top 45 groups account for a turnover of ca. 52 billion Euros - with almost half of it from non-Anglo-Saxon corporations. This compares to the number of 80 billion dollars (or 60 billion Euros) for all of global publishing, according to last year’s estimate by the International Publishers Association IPA. Or, our 45 ranked publishers account for a really hefty chunk of our industry.

The definition of ‘publishing’ as used on the ranking includes book publishing (trade, STM, education, etc.), book clubs, other closely related activities (e.g. retail or distribution), relevant database publishing (e.g. professional information) and journals. It excludes however newspaper and consumer magazine publishing.

I suppose these numbers, and what’s in them at a closer look, will trigger some debate, even more so as over the next weeks, the ranking will be co-piublished, aside from the French Livres Hebdo, by Publishers Weekly (US), Buchreport (Germany), Svensk Bokhandel (Sweden) and Publishing Today (PR China).

Roughly a week ago, at this year’s BookExpo America, I ran into a smiling Rüdiger Salat, the person in charge of all things bookish at Holtzbrinck. He was beaming as he had just returned from the Google booth  where, together with Richard Charkin, the CEO of Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan publisher, they had grabbed two of Google’s laptop computers that were sitting there, unguarded, and returned them only when a nice Google employee asked if those were theirs - doing so in an analogy to what Google does, according to him, to publishers by scanning copyrighted books from libraries.

When Charkin bragged about the story in his blog, expectedly, he triggered quite a controversial debate, spanning from ethical questions (like: Should CEO’s act like High School grads) to the fine print of copyright law and the general discussion on Google’s digitization of books from libraries and their understanding of how to handle Intellectual Property Rights of out of print books, an exchange that even made it into the NYT.

Being not a lawyer, I have the feeling that Lawrnece Lessig’s analyses of the ’stealing’ issue is probably a pretty straight forward comment on the legal side of it.

Personally, I am more interested in the ‘interactive’ or ‘performative’ perspective of the somewhat surprising occurence: I think it is great to move that stubborn and redundand IPR/Google/publishers debate as far away from the lobbyist / lawyer / corporate communication routine where it got stuck.

Go for it from a user’s perspective: The next time you (or your kids) get sued for illegally ‘grabbing’ some stuff from the Internet, call it e.g. an experimental, yet recognized industry practice. Or think of the unholy controversy on open access and scientific publishing: It is probably just too simple to think that all academic exchanges can be fitted either into the costly scientific publisher’s baskets, or set up their open archives, yet with no money for the authors.

I guess what Charkin so convincingly demonstrated, is just this: We need more experiments in the rights sphere, and less legal cases. So I am just gratefully and curiously looking forward to his upcoming test runs indeed!

At BookExpo America, I could set up and launch a debate on the “Internationalisation of English reading“, or a funny 3 bn $ market niche that so far got little attention by book folks aside from the few online and wholsalers who are actively increasing their revenues from it.

Anyone exploring a major book store in Europe can see how the ‘foreign language’ section (as they used to call it when ‘foreign’ was still considered to draw a clear line of separation between ‘us’ and some ‘other’) has expanded over the past few years. Yet hardly anyone has so far tried to make sense out of it, in terms of business, culture, or personal convenience for readers like you and me.

Many funny things occur in that niche:

1. It doesn’t exist in the first place, at least if you look at the general trade statistics. Yet, as Pascal Zimmer of Libri could show at our debate,  if you consider the sales of any major wholesaler, and dig up data from within their warehouses, you see how tremendously the niche is growing. You can, of course, also just look at many readers (I am a good example myself) to realize that reading the ‘original’ has become pretty popular in no time.

2. For some reading markets, like Scandinavia or the Netherlands, this even turned into a substantial problem, at least as far as translations are concerned, e.g. from English into Swedish or Dutch, as Lasse Winkler from the Swedish book trade magazine Svensk Bokhandel told us, as the imports aggressively compete with those translations.

3. In major corporations, this competition between several language versions unavoidably became part of a sales strategy, as explained by Richard Kitson of Hachette / Hodder Headline UK, as his company routinely adds to the domestic sales of UK fiction bestsellers over 100.000 (!) more exported copies across Europe alone, and guess what, of course these export markets are the same into which translation rights for the same title have been sold.

I put some material at my website, with more on this exciting and likely also controversial subject to come.