booklab

…I would be asked,

while still recovering from the ritual book fair cold & cough, and at the same time recapitulating the many many chats and conversations with friends and colleagues, customers and partners in 4 days that feel like, frankly, like a couple of weeks.

Thinking now, in retrospective, of all the self appointed custodians in defense of  “holy culture” and the “holy book”, I must stress: Oh yes, how right they are! Look at my friend Gwyn, a true digerati indeed. What is he doing? Feeding his laptop a bun? Confounding reality and those virtual illusions? Oh my god!

We see, in fact, that the end of reason must be near indeed!

And yet, that future has already a long history, with lots of lost memories…

…remember this antique reading device from Sony? Was it in the good old 20th century? Or even earlier?

I think to remember some distant past.

Or that Rocket e-Book!

The funny thing about these e-readers on display at this year’s Frankfurt book fair, however, was the surprising fact to find them, the old ones as well as the most recent exemples, in a section called

…”Non Books”!

Whoever had decided this categorization was a wise person in fact. Much wiser than most publishing executives, and more knowledgable than all thoase association officials and conference organizers who, as a rule of thumb, tend to miss this crucial point largely: E-Books won’t be just books. They ARE non-books.

Now it is up to us to figure out what they will be really!

Personally, I suppose it is all about reading!

Even if readers don’t always look as we would imagine them.

It is true, that some would prefer that those readers never grow up, really.

This applies to individual readers…

…and even more so to reading communities:

The Islamic Republic of Iran chose to have not only ONE booth, but several, including one in the children section, next to all those Mangas, and one in the Middle East section.

By doing so,  they wanted certainly had the intention to heavily promote their self confidence and their strength - not anticipating at all that, attrackting a load of silent protesters, this would make the protest against each of its stands only much more visible all over the fair!!!

We learn: PR is a tricky thing. This must have also been the lesson taken by the official organizers of China when they opted for displaying not only books from the People’s Republic, but also a selection from Taiwan.

Hower, the ambitious organizers must have picked more books than the censor could read. And some of the books from Taiwan may tackle a sensitive issue which goes officially as the “One China Principle”.

Not being sure what these books contained exactly, the censor decided to place a bright green sticker, in Chinese and English, on every single Taiwan book chosen for the official selection.

This wonderful sticker read: “Any claim denying the One-China Principle in this book will be rejected.”

With a sense of irony, one may see in this action a globalized version of the Google-settlement “opt-out” clause! We could dream up such “opt out” references for many funny opportunities, I suppose!

Anyhow, it was a good fair

with everyone rushing from hall to hall, and most of us professional attendees were catching, as I already mentioned,  the ritual cold while we were making fun of ourselves.

Keep in touch! And: C u in Frankfurt next year!

This has been said, almost a year ago, by my old friend Mike Shatzkin in a remarkable address at last year’s BookExpo America in New York, which include very practical suggestions as to what publishers and booksellers can do.

Here are 2 more quotes:

“It seems intuitively that the explosion of reading on screens — which has happened — will ultimately result in ebook reading on screens, but exactly how is not evident yet.”

“In fact, books will be among the last. That’s not something for us to be proud of as an industry.”

Publishers Weekly writes that the US children classic Dr. Seuss is going digital, thanks to a partnership between Dr. Seuss Enterprises and kidthing, a new content distribution platform. The website kidthing is to go online later this month.

Sometimes, too quick is too late. Publishers Lunch informed us only the day before expiration of the offer about a free download of Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children. The online site closed the freeby as of February 29 - but still adds to an emerging pattern: Putting up free stuff for only some limited period of time.

Also writers are getting interesting in the new digital movements - only to realize that publishers charge for downloadable books usually roughly as much as for printed books, yet don’t have to pay for all the storage, printing and delivery. This brings Kate Pullinger to write in the British Guardian which triggered some debate.

“Writers can learn a lot from the Hollywood strike. We deserve a better deal from digital publishing.”

This is how the piece opens:

“Writers of the world arise! It’s time to throw off the shackles of traditional publishing contracts and face a brand new digital future with a brand new set of priorities. Let’s copy or, should I say, learn from our brothers and sisters in Hollywood: don’t let the industry take our digital rights away! Give us our digital dues! In the shift from print to digital, writers are in danger of losing out big time.” It will be interesting to see if all those fast written thrillers will be put on hold - and both publishers and us readers shivering.

And at the Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig book fair) of next week, there will be an open forum about new digital book communities in germany, with among the speakers Miriam Hofheinz (www.perry-rhodan.net), Janet Sunjic vom Hörspiellabel Lausch-Hörspiele (www.merlausch.de) und Jennifer Nikodem (www.lovelybooks.de).

Last week I had the pleasure to spend a few days in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Zagreb, Croatia, talking to publishers and writers on a trip with book people mostly from germany, to prepare (a) next year’s Leipzig book fair where Croatia is the guest of honour, and (b) next year’s brand new Vienna book fair BuchWien where I have the pleasure and duty to prepare for a Central Europe / Tranlsation / Cultural Diversity program.

Being pretty familiar with Zagreb for a long time, which looks a lot like my native town of Graz, I was struck at first by the massive monuments (I had just forgotten about them, but to be frank, they are very much similar in Graz - apologies

Anyhow, the point is how a bit more than a decade after the wars of secession within collapsing Yugoslavia, Croatia seems ready (and ambitious) to become one more normal ’small’ country and culture, yet it is still struggling to impose that normalty as opposed to the shadows of the past.

A major breakthrew, politically, was when former general Gotovina was seized for trial at the Hague tribunal as of last year, after long behind the scenes negociations - while oddly enough, at the beautiful Dalmatian coast, where Gotovina fans and nationalists are strongest, the tourist industry started to really take off.

I asked a publishers friend of mine about this oddity of political geography, and he shrugged, saying that he just does not know. Along the coast, where, aside from Dubrovnik and Split, little war fare had occured, people voted ‘national’ (just as in those provinces of Slavonia, where indeed Serb had committed the severest war crimes), while in former Krajna,  in ever disputed Istria, and, well, understandably, in urban Zagreb, most non-nationalist votes were cast.

One writer had become famous from Croatia recently, telling about the war in Bosnia, Miljenko Jergovic, but he does not appear in public anymore. Instead, I met Zoran Feric, who has been translated recently, in a beautiful club run by a couple of women (booksa).

We’ve also been introduced to several of the local literary publishers, to Nenad Popovic of Durieux, an old friend indeed - who, walking us to Booksa club, had shown us the villa of former icon Tilla Durieux after whom he had named his publishing company (in the 1990s, when people just had forgotten that she had been with partizan resistance - what an absurd twist and irony in those Tudjman years of Croatia), or Fraktura.

Earlier that day, we had walked into a really great and huge book store, Profil - and almost, being a group of almost 20, driven out all regular customers - with a really substantial foreign language section (I still can’t manage my picture upload button, but promise to show a few photographs of all this soon).

Oh, and we had lunch and dinner with 2 rivalry publishers’ associations, learning from György Dalos, our Hungarian guide to Croation book country, that in Hungary they had successfully founded 8 (!) competing book associations by now (and I admit, such things are among my favourites), so I promise that I will tell you more about all of this soon, and bring pictures for testimony as well.

The Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry as presented at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair was echoed widely in professional conversations and small talk throughout the fair.

The presentation, held at the Press Centre on Wednesday 10 October 2007, brought together the editors in chief of several of the leading book trade magazines.

It was, in a nutshell, a state of the global publishing industry report, and will be updated from now on every year.

Over the past several years, English language books have been given increased shelf space in traditionally non-English reading countries. As this trend continues, publishers are searching for more ways to infiltrate these new markets.

We could organize a first set of expert panels to map thsi 3 bn $ market at BookExpo America in New York in June 2007. Participants include Pascal Zimmer, Libri Germany, Francoise Dubrouille ,International Booksellers Federation, Esther Allen, Columbia University, und Peter Clifton, Ingram International.

You can listen to the panel debate at the Podcast

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!

It’s a book fair. But most people line up - for someone drawing and painting often entire pages, in ink and bright colour!

Getting back from Paris and the Salon du Livre, happy to have survived aisles jammed by endless cohorts of youth lining up for their favorite comic book stars, I still have a smile on my face. Those comic book heros have been held responsible, in my youth, for an expected decline in reading. Yet today, all across Europe, and particularly so in France, comic books are, in every respect, a foundation of the book market and of reading culture.

Titeuf, that boy with his daring blond hair, is considered to have had not such a strong year in 2006, with ‘only’ 570800 of his 11th album sold in a country of 50 million (which put Titeuf still on top of the year’s bestseller ranking once again)… Altogether, the French comic book market is growing steadily now for 12 years, and even in 2006, comic books are, with +0.5 %, one of the rare segments of growth.

However, even the dungeon that is French home grown comic book culture, for years has come under huge pressure from Far Eastern contendants, or to put it more simply: Mangas tend to overtake the French heros now more and more often, thereby triggering, according to Livres Hebdo, the serious threat of a ‘bubble’ of overproduction. In this week’s top 20 bestseller list of ALL books sold in France, “Naruto” (with vol. 20) is number 2, while a 50th anniverary volume of Gaston Lagaffe is only sixth.

While Europe this weekend was celebrating not only Gaston Lagaffe, but also the 50th anniverary of the European Union (what a coincidence indeed), I must remember, still smiling, as I said, that question of an American friend of mine who was wondering not so long ago: ‘Is there a comic book tradition in Europe’, he asked.