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!

Preparing for Frankfurt? Find a detailed analysis of the Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry in a close up analysis

In German here

In English with focus on trade publishing here > go to October 2009 newsletter

In English with a focus on professional / science / education and on globalizatioon here :

A survey portraying the top 50 publishing groups worldwide, with a revenue based ranking, trends and developments for the past 3 years - and lots of insights to be drawn from those data.

Following up on the very successful and fruitful debates at last year’s „On Translation“ conference at the Vienna book fair Buch Wien, we prepare for a next move with the “On Translation” conference and “Diversity Report” 2009 and want to encourage your participation and involvement.

Presentations and debates will focus on reliable information sources and professional tools for analyzing and better understanding translation markets, and on the relevance of publishing to cultural diversity.
A new “Author’s and Publisher’s Exchange” will link between the general debate and the requirements of publishing professionals.

The goal is to have, with the conference, a professional platform for organizations and for publishing professionals interested in translation and cultural diversity, while the report is meant to provide data and insight as a starting point for a well informed debate.

When? November 13, 2009
Where? Buch Wien 09 Messe Wien
Full details, registration and preliminary program: here

More about Buch Wien 09: here

As for the “Diversity Report 2009” please find a detailed preview here.

Please circulate the information about both the conference and the upcoming report and/or link to www.wischenbart.com/translation from your website, blog or twitter!

See you in Wien in November

With the debate on the Google Settlement and its likely meaning for various groups (and countries) turning into a strange confrontation of hidden interests and pure ideology in some places, notably in Europe, I want to invite anybody interested in the matter to check out this site and the possibilities for a meaningful and differenciated debate:

The Public Index

Is China ready for the next move in allowing publishers to just mind about their own business? It seems so.

The official China news agency Xinhua reports refering to China Daily: “About six or seven press and publishing giants with annual revenues of more than 10 billion yuan (1.46 billion U.S. dollars) will be set up to compete globally in three to five years,” said Fan Weiping, director of the publishing industry development department affiliated to the GAPP.”

The China General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) which is both running the publishing industry and censorship, released guidelines earlier this week saying that “market-oriented news organizations and publishers have been given a deadline of one to two years to make the transition to full-fledged commercial players”, according to Xinhua.

These developments perfectly fit into a long term strategy of bringing China’s publishing industry in line with its global peers, as we reported here earlier.

The largest group, “Higher Education Press” already has a solid place in our ranking of the world’s top publishing conglomerates, and HEP has great ambitions to evelop into a global player, on par with the major players of the West.

Only last year, Liaoning Press was the first publishing company allowed to go public on the Shanghai stock exhange.

Other publishing ventures started to open offices abroad, like China Youth International Press did in London in 2008.

And Chinese online gaming companies like Shanda – listed at the Nasdaq – expanded into publishing by setting up its own “literature” division specializing in the booming online publishing business for young adult readers. (We will present Shanda’s vision in a panel at BookExpo America in just a month in New York.)

Background

Reuters quotes the recent GAPP documents as saying that the

“policy “opinion” from the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) stresses that China’s Communist Party censors will continue controlling what appears in books and other publications.

But the document issued in the People’s Daily signals the government wants publishers — until now run more like the bureaucracies to which most are attached — to become more commercial through share offers, mergers, takeovers and controlled private investment.

“Encourage and support capital from society, especially from major state-owned businesses, to take part in the share-system restructuring of publishing and media businesses,” the GAPP announcement states.

“Encourage and support non-state-owned capital in various formed entering permitted (publishing) areas,” it adds.

Further Reuters reporting goes:

“The regulations signal private investment is going to play a bigger role,” said Zhang Shouli, who runs a Beijing-based distribution company for children’s books. He and other private operators have been lobbying for a firmer role.

“But these rules are still vague, so we’ll have to wait and see what the specific regulations allow.”

Having the pleasure and the privilege to travel with this group of US non fiction editors to see a number of German publishers in Munich and Frankfurt

Editors from the US on the S. Fischer Frankfurt roof top

- C.H. Beck, C. Hanser, Campus, Suhrkamp, S. Fischer, Random House  - the most interesting insight was at how many levels these markets have drifted apart:

• Selling a good monograph to 12.000 readers (a normal target for German scholarly publishers) is just a dream on the US side;
• Having philosophy or sociology titles finding readers outside of universities (and a shelf in a normal book store) again is unseen in the US;
• Using print-on-demand is a very normal routine to produce books in the US, while their German homologues just start to discover this perspective;
• EBooks accounting for 100.000 $ of sales in 2008 is better than average in the US; however such sales not even started in Europe;
• Trying to jump start a book digitisation and eBook platform run by an association is hardly conceivable in the US, but a fact in Germany.

I will tell a few more details after a good night of sleep (or two). And, perhaps even more importantly, will introduce a few of those checking those new ways out.

More pix here

The Chinese internet platform Danwei reports, quoting an article in China Youth Daily, that the Chinese government is set to abandon direct control over most publishing companies by the end of 2010.

The goal is to allow “for profit” media companies to get rid of direct state control, to end state restrictions on the allocation of ISBN, and to encourage the forming of “six or seven internationally-recognized press and media companies that are domestic leaders with assets and sales each over 10 billion yuan.” (Original quote in Chinese)

After experimenting already with IPOs of state controled publishing groups since 2008, and with more or less independent “creative agencies” acting as defacto publishing companies, or at least, as - partly very successful - imprints, this next move could be decisive in pushing China’s publishing industry internationally from being only a big buyer of copyrights into a real player in the global cultural industries.

See also our privious posts here and here and here

While it is frightening to see in this very moment how the new Mandarin hotel next to Rem Kohlhas’ CCTV tower is burning, I was checking all kinds of sources on news with regard to China’s publishing landscape.

Friends told me that the crisis so far did not have any knock out impact on the industry, but at the same time, I hear a lot of lines about “restructuring” - or reconsidering all to bold and expansive strategies in publishing companies.

We learn for instance that Liaoning Press which was the first publishing company allowed to go public at the Shanghai Stock exchange in 2008 has been re-branded as North United Publishing and Media (Group) Co., Ltd. More significantly, most of the major Shanghai based publishing groups have been encouraged to become more of  ‘companies’ instead of state run cultural agents, and yet another publisher - Reader Publishing Group in Gansu Province -  is also preparing to go public.

The annual Beijing domestic book fair held in January says in releases that business concluded with 2.5 bn RMB worth of deals (ca. 200 m up as compared to 2008).

Also, translations which had shown tremendous growth to an estimated 10,000 titles sold into China for translation per year, seem to remain solid. In a workshop sponsored by the British Council, it was announced that China will be the guest of honor at the London Book fair in 2012 (after being in that role in Frankfurt later this year).

Forcasts e.g. in China Daily have it that books about macro economics as well as the now exactly 30 years of China’s opening may be among the top issues in the year’s new releases.

In fact in  the top bestseller segment, the controversial “Currency Wars” (货币战争) by Song Hongbing  is back as #1 in non fiction. And 30 years of the special economic zone in Shenzhen have been turned into a novel called “Destiny” (命运 ) by Lu Tianming.

Much more interestingly in terms of international reach is the clear trend that more and more regularly, books from Chinese authors are given prominent recognition abroad. In a piece in the New Yorker, the broadening reciprocal exchange of books and ideas via translations in both direction has been recently discussed - and compared to the lack of such an exchange with the Arab world.

Pankaj Mishra reviewed the English translation of the in its Chinese edition hugely successful novel “Brothers” by Yu Hua  in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. But also the very dark The Vagrants: A Novel, a captivating new book on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, by short story writer Li Liyun, got instantly attention and appraisal in the Times as the English translation was released by Random House.

In the most recent Chinese bestseller lists provided by China Publishing Today, a new novel, long listed at last year’s Man AsiaLiterary Award, Murong Xuecun, hit the charts, “Dance the Red Dust” (原谅我红尘颠倒), while his earlier book “Leave Me Alone, Chengdu” was given a German translation at Zweitausendeins.

So one can be cautiously optimistic that the flow of books and ideas between China and us starts to broaden from the odd trickle that it once was into a quite robust - and exciting - stream.

The next step ahead however would need to involve more sophisticated and also two sided working relationships between publishers and editors from the West with their counterparts in Chinese publishing houses - which used to be for so long just this: state controlled government agencies.

Publishers Weekly (PW), once acclaimed as “the Bible” on US publishing, fires 4 members of its staff, including editor-in-chief Sara Nelson.

PW is owned by Reed Business Information, the professional magazine division of Reed Elsevier which was for sale throughout most of 2008 and, finding obviously no buyer, was subject to restructuring plans even before the current financial downturn had hit.

Sara Nelson, formerly a highly acclaimed reporter for the early days media start up insight.com, had been hired by PW in 2005 to renew the magazine. She made her reputation at PW quickly as an outspoken  voice on the industry and thereby helped to sharpen the profile of the old lady that PW has been for a long time.

The magazine’s move obviously triggers many questions on the publication’s strategy ahead.

Tracking news about how the crisis affects publishing over the past two months produces some strange findings. Almost instantly, starting as of  November 2008, we saw predictions about how the crisis would hit the industry. Then in December - and now again, with the year’s end reporting - we are told that notably in the US, UK and France, XMas 08 was pretty dark in various segments of the book trade. In Germany, it was not so bleak, but all of the rest of 2008 was not terrific in the first place.

Between these notes, we also heard quickly reports about imminent job cuts (notably in the US, with Simon &  Schuster, Macmillan), restructuring measures and (at Houghton Mifflin) an instant freeze in the acquisition of new titles.

But frankly, these are all pretty dumb, unspecific measures and reactions. What does this mean for a publishing company to stop buying new titles? (And Houghton had build its Himalaya of debt well before the crisis was on the horizon!)

But most amazing is how little we hear about the deeper - structural - trouble in the industry.  Only in France, in Livres Hebdo and in Le Monde, I found some pieces addressing the huge rise of advances over the past years, or more detailed observations about distribution and consolidation.

I didn’t find any well informed reflections about the overproduction (the flood of titles); or the internationalization of the trade, of trends and of author brands; or the probably new dynamics (and competition) between imprints of large conglomerates and independents with regard to the crisis.

Most of all, I would expect that this crisis will trigger digital change, because if you can dramatically reduce the cost of production, storage, distribution and also marketing by doing it all in an integrated digital environment, it is not all too difficult to predict that at least some actors - from within the industry, or some new entrants - will go down that path.

Well, I will do my best in the weeks and months to track information and thoughts along those lines and discuss it on this site.