56th Frankfurt Book Fair Opens

Frankfurt Book Fair 2004 is the global publishing industry's biggest gathering that opened doors on Wednesday to end October 10.  The world´s biggest book fair begins following a ceremonial opening by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Tuesday.

This year´s Fair is focusing on the Arab world amid worries that the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and war on terrorism have warped Western perceptions of Arab culture - something that participants say makes building bridges even more important.   Writers working in Arabic have been singled out as this year´s "guests of honour". Among the topics that 200 Arab writers and cultural representatives will wrestle with at Frankfurt´s sprawling fairgrounds: prospects for democracy and human rights in a region dominated by authoritarian rule, and relations with the West.

The Arab world´s lone Nobel laureate for literature, 92-year-old Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, won´t be making the trip, organizers said. "This book fair is very important for editors and publishers," al-Ghitani said. "I hope for many agreements between Arabs and Europeans to translate our books, and I also hope for more discussion to hear our voices. We must build a bridge".  More than 200 Arab writers, artists and intellectuals are expected in the German finance capital, including the Syrian poet Adonis, considered one of the founders of modern Arab verse, and Algerian writer Assia Djebar, winner of the fair’s prestigious peace prize in 2000.

According to the organiser, it is estimated that close to 300,000 people may be attending this event.  The number of exhibitors at the event, which opened today and runs through Oct. 10, increased 1 percent to about 6,700 this year. The fair this year has exhibitors from 110 countries this year presenting more than 350,000 books and related products. The U.K. and U.S. are the second- and third-largest exhibitors at the show respectively after Germany.

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Googlers in the Fair

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin host a press conference to demonstrate the technology at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an important showcase if the Internet search engine is to recruit the heavyweights of the book publishing industry.  The objective is to recruit publishers and have them send their books to Google.  Google will then scan them and make excerpts available on the Web. Users will be able to search book copy in a way similar to how they now search Web sites.

Books already have been submitted by more than a dozen publishers, including Penguin, Wiley, Hyperion, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge, Chicago, Oxford, Princeton and Scholastic, the AP reports, adding that for now only English-language books will be indexed, with other languages added later. They hope to sell books, but that's not the main thing.

The service, called Google Print, will be incorporated into Google search queries. From launch, users will see book excerpts alongside ordinary Google Web page search results. The book excerpts will carry a link to buy the book from a choice of online book retailers.   As a side benefit, it may help publishers sell books online - though that is something that is widely done already.

But Google Print has the potential to even the playing field, and more so than Amazon.com, whose main business is selling books, not providing information. If books, even in excerpted form, become widely available on the Internet, that may dramatically improve the quality of information available in the medium as well as the quantity. It will also shift the weight of information away from what is happening this instant, and it will allow access even to texts that were written before the world was invented in 1996.

Google has already dramatically improved the Web by allowing for the search and cataloguing of information in a way that makes some kind of sense. It may not be the best sense possible, but it's not bad. If Google or others make libraries available - bringing the old information into the information age - that's an earthquake and a cause for cheer.

Visit Google Print site for more information.

 

South Korean next year´s VIP

South Korea has been selected as the guest of honor for next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair 2005, various promotional events as groundwork for the activity is scheduled to be presented through this year’s fair.  Since its first participation in the event back in 1961, South Korea has been supporting local publishers through the book fair, with the clear goal of promoting its cultural heritages and identities. From 1998, it has run a separate booth at the fair, which will be far upgraded both in quantity and quality this year.

This year, a total of 2,080 books provided by 13 local publishers will be exhibited at the Korean booth, in which various special exhibitions will be held throughout the fair to share with the world the 1,300 year-history of the Korean publishing industry.

 

Jon and Paris is hot at the fair

New York publishers and agents with books to sell have begun to work the meeting rooms at the Frankfurter Hof, the five-star hotel that serves as the unofficial nexus of all things bookish.

It was at the hotel, on an uncharacteristically beautiful day, that Robert Gottlieb, once of William Morris and now founder of Trident media, Grove Atlantic bad boy true believer publisher Morgan Entrekin and representatives of just about every major house and agency - from Farrar, Straus & Giroux and ICM - meet for lunch or tea or drinks to sell their wares.

And on the first day, the news is mixed. Gottlieb reports that he has sold rights all over the world to Jon Stewart´s "America (The Book)," which has already sold over 1 million copies stateside.

While he´s still waiting to close some deals, he says that all of the major European publishers have ponied up — many in the high six figures — probably because they´re so against the Bush administration, which Stewart skewers in his book. Likewise, Gottlieb reports major sales, particularly in Japan and France for Paris Hilton´s "Confessions of an Heiress." If only the books hadn´t been embargoed, he says, he would have had manuscripts to show and sell earlier.

Another big book on the block to European publishers this week is Mark Winegardner´s "The Godfather Returns," a Godfather sequel that Winegardner won a publishers´ "bake-off"  - and $300,000 - to write for Random House last year. While the manuscript is heavily embargoed (Random House will publish in November), it is said to cover the period in the Corleones´ life between the movies "Godfather 1" and "Godfather 2."   On Tuesday afternoon, representatives from French and Japanese houses made substantial five-figure bids on a property that already has been sold throughout much of Europe and Asia. The only holdout: Germany, where publishers seem to be "afraid of sequels," says one source.

On the other side, consider a book like Arnon Grunberg´s "The Jewish Messiah" - a solid bestseller in the Netherlands, with 42,000 copies sold. The sixth book from Grunberg, a New York based 34 year old, is an edgy - not to say subversive - story of the grandson of a Nazi on a mission to learn more about the suffering of the Jews. Yiddish lessons and adult circumcision are involved. The book, which the Dutch compare to Salman Rushdie´s "The Satanic Verses," has not yet been sold in the U.S.

 

50 Bulgarian Publishers Join Fair

Over 500 titles from 50 publishing houses will present Bulgarian publishing industry on the fair. The event will wrap up with Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy receiving the German book trade's peace prize.  Esterhazy is the 2003 Literature Nobel Prize winner.

 

Random House at the Fair

Random House, which reported an increase in sales and operating profit in the first half of 2004, will promote Joseph Jackson at the fair as he presents "The Jacksons" a book about his family including pop star Michael Jackson, on Sunday. Canadian author Joy Fielding will read from her novel "Lost" on Thursday.