Frankfurt Fair Dealer, October 12, Day 1

Frankfurt Fair DEALER Wednesday 12 October 2011 1

12 OCTOBER 2011

For round-the-clock Frankfurt Book Fair coverage go to www.publishersweekly.com and www.bookbrunch.co.uk

B arbara Schwepcke of Haus Publishing is launching a not-for-

profi t enterprise to bring the voices of the Arab revolutions to western readers.

Swallow Editions is a new fi ction list founded and edited by Rafi k Schami, a contender for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Th e Dark Side of Love, who was forced to fl ee Syria in the 1970s after criticising Hafez Assad. Schami will acquire novels from submissions sent to him. Th ey will be “free of oil, tedium and dictatorship”.

Works already published, even in Arabic, are not eligible for consideration. Manuscripts selected will be edited by Schami, translated into English and published by Swallow

M oving text from the page to the screen would be remembered

as “a minor moment” in the history of books, said ebook pioneer Bob Stein, kicking off the 2011 Frankfurt O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, writes Andrew Albanese. And the marriage of publishing and computing was only now about to yield its off spring - the “networked” book. Stein was followed in the morning session by marketer Mitch Joel, who also stressed the value of social networks and urged publishers to re-think how they reached consumers.

Th e Conference once again set a bold tone for the publishing industry’s largest annual gathering, with the morning keynote speakers challenging publishers to re-think the very nature of books in the digital age. Stein compared current ebooks to water coming to a boil - digital books were “about to start to steam”.

In the future, ebooks would be in browsers, Stein noted, adding that apps “reproduce the sad things of the print world”. Online, he maintained, books should be open, and become “social spaces where readers can congregate”. A publisher’s core competency should be building communities.

“As the value of content approaches zero,” Stein said, “people will pay for context and community.” He urged publishers to imagine a world where author readings could take place within books, and textbooks that came with hours of free tutoring.

Joel argued that the issue

facing publishing was not “paper or plastic”, but where books fell among the choices consumers made. “What are we going to do to connect readers with our authors?” he asked.

Like Stein, Joel said harnessing the power of social networks was key. He urged publishers to “break the mass media mindset”. Cultivating “direct relationships” was critical for publishers,

ToC sets bold tone for the Fair“because if you don’t, your authors will, and retailers will.”

“Th e worst thing you can do,” Joel concluded, “is fold your arms and say people will still buy books the way we tell them to.” ■

Swallow to bring missives from the Arab spring

Continued on page 3 ➝

BML Bowker is to undertake a major study of

international ebook use. See p3 for full story

Rafi k Schami

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great story are the determining criteria for publication. Neither nationality nor religion is taken into consideration. Th e fi rst title, Sarmada by Syrian-born Fadi Azzam, will be published next week, and the plan is to publish two books a year, “the voices of the revolution that everyone wants to hear”.

Said Schami: “Th e swallow has been my favourite bird for many reasons: since childhood her elegant fl ight pattern fascinated me as well as the fact that she is at home nowhere and everywhere. Th e swallow commutes between North and South and keeps locked in her heart the beauty of the place she has left behind, creating a longing, which makes her return one of these days. Th at’s how literature should be, that’s how I imagine the most beautiful of Arabic literature to be.” Too few Arab authors were available in the west, for commercial as well as political reasons, he continued. “Swallow Editions wants to discover these authors on behalf of readers from all over the world and to make them available without agent or censorship.”

Haus is on stand C917, Hall 8. ■

Editions across the English-speaking world. Foreign rights will be sold on a title-by-title basis; in the Middle East, they will be licensed to the University of Cairo Press. All proceeds from sales and licences will benefi t the authors and translators.

Schami – who will be on the Haus stand on Th ursday at 5pm – will be assisted by an editorial board of experts on Arabic and English literature, and supported by a Board of Trustees – including Daniel Hahn, Kate Griffi n, Caroline McCormick, Peter Clark and Omar al-Qattan, the Lebanese-born British fi lm director who is head of the Qattan Foundation. Th e editor, advisors and trustees will volunteer their work so the maximum reward goes to the authors and the translators, who will receive the recommended rate of £87 per thousand words. Authors will not receive an advance, but royalties will be “generous”.

Swallow’s aim is to build a bridge to connect Arab writers with readers in other continents. Th e literary quality, the creative power of the texts and the ability of the authors to tell a

Arab spring continued

Bowker, via BML Bowker in the UK, is to launch a major study that will assess and track device adoption, attitudes, and purchasing habits of ebook consumers around the world. Beginning in January and repeating annually, it will enable comparisons between ebook markets, arming the publishing industry with a comprehensive range of qualitative and quantitative data.

“Being able to track the growth rates of ebooks on a global level as countries make the shift to digital books is signifi cant,” said Kelly Gallagher, Bower’s VP of Publishing Services. “This landmark effort will provide the international publishing industry with key metrics in understanding digital opportunities as they emerge.”

The project will map the current state of ebook use and acceptance around the world, creating a benchmark from which to track trends. The research will target representative samples from the UK and US, Germany, France, Spain, India, Australia, Brazil, South Korea and Japan. Consumers from these countries will be surveyed on their purchases of digital content versus traditional formats in multiple settings and contexts. The study will also explore the use and ownership of devices.

The ebook monitor will be supported by key international publishing industry participants – including A T Kearney, BISG, Pearson, and Tata - who will have a unique opportunity to collaborate on the creation of the survey instrument and provide expertise in the interpretation of the results.

“We are delighted that the key organizations we identifi ed to work with us on this project are on board, representing as they do different perspectives on the industry and offering a wealth of experience that will help provide valuable context for this study,” said Jo Henry, MD of BML Bowker.

Bowker and BML will release an executive summary and white paper of fi ndings in March 2012, with detailed analysis revealed annually at key international and digital book conferences. ■

BML Bowker to monitor current state of the global ebook market

Nan Graham at Scribner has put down a sum rumoured to be in the high six-fi gure range for a debut novel called The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman. Transworld’s Jane Lawson made headlines last month, acquiring the book in a nine-way auction orchestrated by Susan Armstrong at Conville & Walsh. There is “a huge buzz” around the book, which has now sold in eight other countries, including Germany, France, Russia and Brazil. Stedman, a former lawyer, was born in Australia and now lives in London and works as an international consultant on business writing.

Oceans causes pre-Frankfurt swell

To contact Frankfurt Fair Dealer at the Fair with your news, visit us on the Publishers Weekly stand Hall 8.0 R925Frankfurt reporting by Nicholas Clee and Liz Thomson for BookBrunch and Andrew Albanese and Rachel Deahl for Publishers Weekly

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Frankfurt Fair Dealer issue printed by Henrich Druck + Medien GmbH,Schwanheimer Straße 110, 60528 Frankfurt am Main

Continued from page 1

Kelly Gallagher

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4 Frankfurt Fair DEALER Wednesday 12 October 2011



has features of a number of real ones. HarperCollins has a novel that fi rst found success as a self-published ebook: Catch Your Death by Mark Edwards and Louise Voss is about a woman’s uncovering of the sinister events that led to the death of a young doctor. HC is also taking to the Fair Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility, the best-selling novelist’s update of Jane Austen’s fi rst mature novel. Michael Palin has written his second novel (following Hemingway’s Chair), Th e Truth (Orion).

Jennie Erdal’s novel Th e Missing Shade of Blue (Little, Brown) is also likely to gain attention: Erdal is the author of Ghosting, a memoir of her time working with Naim Attallah at Quartet Books. Pan is bringing Th e Killing, David Hewson’s novelisation of the acclaimed Danish TV crime series, as well as AM Blake’s conspiracy thriller Th e Lost Library, sold to publishers in seven overseas territories.

In non-fi ction, Up Pohnpei (Profi le) sounds fun: it is journalist Steve Watson’s account of how he and a friend organised an international football team on a remote Pacifi c island. Sara Maitland, author of the acclaimed Th e Book of Silence, returns with an

How Fairy-Tale Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientifi c Truth in which the author of Atomic and Th e Quantum Th eory takes on “the wilder speculations” of Hawking et al to whom he provides “a much-needed antidote”. Constable & Robinson has UK/Commonwealth rights.

To fi ction, and Arthur C Clarke Award-winner Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City, is creating excitement at Blake Friedman. Mulholland’s John Schoenfelder snapped up US rights in two novels – the fi rst is Th e Shining Girls, a high-concept thriller about a time travelling serial killer. Oliver Munson has turned down several attempts to pre-empt by UK publishers and an auction is ongoing. Rowohlt has pre-empted in Germany.

Th ere’s a new novel from John Lanchester, Capital, set on Pepys Road in London, where the characters include Roger Yount, who picks up million-pound bonuses, and Zbigniew, the Polish decorator who must indulge the whims of the super-rich. AP Watt has sold to Faber (UK), Ecco (US) and to Holland’s Prometheus. And Ed Victor has the latest from Man Booker-winner John Banville, Ancient Light (Penguin UK, Knopf US).

Whatever the result of the Man Booker Prize on 18 October, there is likely to be further interest in Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate) and Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail), both shortlisted and both with several international deals already in place. Suzanne Joinson’s debut A Lady Cyclists Guide to Kashgar, coming from Bloomsbury next year, has also been a hit on the international rights market, and that may well attract further deals.

Sam Th ompson is another new author with enthusiastic support from his publisher. His collection of stories, Communion Town (Fourth Estate), is set in an unnamed, fi ctional city that

Briefcase: FFD inspects some of the goodies to be unpacked in Frankfurt

Continued on page 6 ➝

B R I E F S

The Ghostman, by 22-year-old Reed College grad Roger Hobbs, has been snapped up by Knopf’s Gary Fisketjon on just 50 pages. Nat Sobel, in Frankfurt with more of the book, is talking Hobbs up as “one of the most talented writers [our agency] has ever taken on”. Two-book, six-fi gure deals have closed in Germany and Italy; a UK sale is imminent.

Philip Marsden has left HarperCollins after 22 years to join Granta, where Philip Gwyn Jones has acquired Rising Ground: The Meanings of the English Landscape, which derives from an essay published in Granta 102. It will explore how the English have found changing meanings in their landscape, engaging with fi gures as diverse as Bede, John Dee, Andy Goldsworthy and Antony Gormley. WEL were acquired from Gillon Aitken and Andrew Kidd at Aitken Alexander.

Terry Karten at Harper US and Arzu Tahsin at Weidenfeld UK have signed Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist, the story of a solitary man at the turn of the 20th century in the Pacifi c Northwest who takes in two pregnant teenage girls. Harper signed the book through Bill Clegg at William Morris Endeavor, and Tahsin bought UK/Commonwealth rights at auction. Italian rights have gone to Luigi Brioschi at Guanda. Publication is provisionally scheduled for 2013.

Carlton is marking its twentieth birthday with a free app for iPhone or iPad that demonstrates the world of Augmented Reality: “Use your device camera to scan Carlton’s twentieth-anniversary logo and watch as 3D Dinosaurs walk through walls, crossing from their virtual world into the real world.”

From the British

Two icons of rock will make a good deal of the running over the next few days. Ed Victor has the story of a survivor – Pete Townshend, celebrated power behind Th e Who. He tells the inside story of his iconic band, from its art school roots through Tommy plus decades of guitar-smashing tours, in Who He? HarperCollins has UK and US rights, and there’s been some foreign rights action in Germany, Norway, Finland and Brazil – with much more to come.

HarperCollins UK and US have also snapped up Mitch Winehouse’s memoir of his daughter Amy. My Daughter, “heartfelt and revelatory”, was already under discussion before her untimely death this summer, reports agent Maggie Hanbury. Th e book will chronicle her childhood and precocious talent, her rise to fame and all that went with it, and her battle with drink and drugs.

Grace Coddington, who featured in Th e September Issue, has a memoir: Grace: A Life in Fashion, from the start of her career in swinging London via Paris and on to New York, where she is the long-serving Creative Director of Vogue. AP Watt is selling, and deals have been closed with Chatto in the UK and Random House in the US.

Edmund de Waal, whose memoir Th e Hare with Amber Eyes has been a critical and commercial success, is at work on a new book. Th e White Book – A Journey Th rough Porcelain will tell the story of the porcelain trade and the history of man’s obsession with porcelain over the past thousand years, as well as his own story as a potter. UK rights have been bought by Chatto, US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Canadian by Random House. Felicity Bryan is the agent.

Controversy nestles in the briefcase of Peter Tallack/Science Factory with Jim Baggott’s Farewell to Reality:

Pete Townsend Photo by Ross Halfi n

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Tom Rachman’s Th e Imperfectionists. Trotting out a number of big memoirs, HC will also be selling Prague Winter by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Houghton Miffl in Harcourt will have Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, in which the Pulitzer-winner recounts his family’s experience rebuilding an ancestral home in Lebanon.

Among the big books from FSG is Paul LeFarge’s new novel, Luminous Airplanes, which follows a computer programmer from upstate New York to San Francisco. Holt has BBC producer David Snodin’s Iago, which puts more than a twist on Shakespeare’s play. SMP is selling Augusten Burroughs’s Th is Is How, a guide to surviving life’s worst tragedies from the author of the best-selling memoir Running with Scissors.

Penguin US will be talking up Owen Laukkenen’s Th e Professionals (Putnam), the debut novel from a British MFA graduate and former professional poker player about four friends who, unable to fi nd jobs after graduating from college, become professional kidnappers. Another major title is the currently untitled memoir from Stephanie Madoff Mack (Blue Rider Press), in which the widow of Mark Madoff and daughter-in-law of Bernie gives her take on “both the public crisis and her own deeply personal tragedy.”

Among Random House’s big titles is Debbie Macomber’s Starting Now (Ballantine), the latest entry in the Blossom Street series. From Janet Evanovich is Explosive Eighteen (Bantam), the newest title in the best-selling series about bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen off ers up details on the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden in Manhunt (Crown). One of the big titles from Simon & Schuster will be Dick Cheney’s memoir In My Time (Th reshold), in which the former Vice President “provides a frank and brutally honest look at his life.” Another big book on the S&S list is A J Jacobs’s Drop Dead Healthy, in which the best-selling author of Th e Year of Living Biblically chronicles his attempt to “become the healthiest man in the world.” ■

Morris Endeavor has Dartmouth grad and former US Marine Phil Klay’s debut, Redeployment and Other Stories. Among Jean V Naggar Agency’s hot titles is Phillip Margolin’s Capitol Murder (HarperCollins), the latest thriller from the best-selling author featuring Pacifi c Northwest attorney

Brad Miller and East Coast private detective Dana Cutler. Jane Rotrosen will be talking up Iris Johansen’s Bonnie (St Martin’s Press), the fi nal in the author’s Eve/Quinn/Bonnie trilogy. With a number of best-selling Kindle authors on its hotlist, Trident is pushing Chris Culver, the author of the self-published hit Th e Abbey, about a former homicide detective named Ash Rashid who, planning on retiring, is pulled back to the job when his niece turns up dead.

Writers House will be touting the latest from Barbara Delinsky, Sweet Salt Air (St Martin’s Press), about two women and a secret pregnancy that could up-end their lives. From Megan Abbott comes Dare Me (Little, Brown), which follows two friends in a destructive relationship. Among the Wylie Agency’s big books is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Th e Small Redemptions of Lagos. Th e book is forthcoming from Knopf and is a love story set in Nigeria and London in the 1990s.

One of the hot titles from HBGUS’ Little, Brown imprint is the new one from Emma Donoghue, Astray. Th e story collection, from the author of the best-seller Room, “spans centuries and continents” and features “fascinating characters that roam across the page.” Another big fi ction selection is William Paul Young’s currently untitled new novel (FaithWords), a follow-up to the author’s best-selling Th e Shack.

A major novel on HarperCollins’s foreign rights list is Karl Taro Greenfi eld’s Triburbia (Harper), a work set in TriBeCa that the house is comparing to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and

One of the big books Foundry will be pushing is the new one from West of Here author Jonathan Evison, Th e Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (Algonquin), about a former stay-at-home dad who, after taking the title course, fi nds he’s woefully unprepared to work with a bitter 19-year-old with advanced muscular dystrophy. One of the hot books on Gernert Company’s list is Chris Pavone’s Th e Expats (Crown), a debut thriller from a former editor—he worked at Doubleday, Crown, and elsewhere. Th e book goes back and forth between London and Luxembourg as it follows the wife of a man who, after he takes a job in Europe, falsely assumes she’ll be able to leave behind her top-secret life in the CIA. Sanford J Greenburger has the latest from Brad Th or, Full Black (Atria), which continues the author’s Scot Harvath series (he’s a former Navy SEAL who’s now in the Secret Service).

On the fi ction side, Inkwell Management is shopping David Vann’s Dirt (HarperCollins), about a mother-son relationship that’s too close for comfort. Vann is the best-selling author of Caribou Island. One of the major titles from Janklow & Nesbit is Sarah Manguso’s Th e Guardians (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a new memoir from the author of the lauded 2008 Two Kinds of Decay, about the suicide of the author’s close friend who threw himself in front of an oncoming subway car after escaping from a New York mental hospital.

Some of the hot titles on Sterling Lord Literistic’s list include Colin McAdam’s Black Bugs, a literary novel from the Canadian writer whose Fall was shortlisted for the Giller. William

exploration of the landscape of forests and the ancient genre of fairytales in Whispers from the Forest (Granta). From Atlantic, Matthew Denison updates Suetonius’s scandalous history in Th e Twelve Ceasars.

HarperCollins’ big non-fi ction off ering will be Th e Grand Tour: Letters and Photographs from the British Empire Expedition 1922, a collection of letters, photographs and other documents recording a 10-month trip across the British Empire by Agatha Christie and her fi rst husband.

In Middle Age (Portobello), David Bainbridge off ers a “reassuringly encouraging” view of mid life, drawing on the latest research from the fi elds of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, and reproductive biology. Simon Garfi eld follows his successful book about fonts with Here We Are: A Book About Maps (Profi le). Mapping Personality by Rita Carter (Weidenfeld) is a “brilliantly accessible guide” to the science behind human personality. Also from Weidenfeld, and tying in to the fi ftieth anniversary in 2013 of the shooting of John F Kennedy, Th e Assassination of the President by Chris Lightbown is touted as “the fi rst (book) to use the work of a network of high-quality but little-known independent researchers whose fi ndings have been largely ignored by the mainstream media”.

… And from the Americans

One of the big books on DeFiore & Company’s list is Jen Lancaster’s Jeneration X (NAL), a memoir from the best-selling novelist (Such a Pretty Fat) about the diffi culty of acting her age. Th e Dijkstra Agency will be pushing Amy Tan’s Th e Valley of Amazement (HarperCollins), which stretches from the 1890s to the 1930s, and San Francisco to Shanghai, as it follows a Chinese-American courtesan. A major title for Dystel & Goderich is Joe Bastianich’s Restaurant Man (Viking), a “take-no-prisoners” memoir from the famed restaurateur that is written in “an authentic New York style that is as unapologetic as it is hilarious.”

Continued from page 4

Briefcase continued....

Lauren Beukes: creating excitement

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books to publishers, but with the establishment of eff orts such as Ed Victor’s Bedford Square Books and Andrew Wylie’s Odyssey Editions agents have, notoriously, now become publishers. Th ere is more in this model than just that though; this is about using digital to extract value from out-of-print and under-appreciated works, aggregating them, making them available and introducing them to new audiences. Publishers too are getting in on the act – see Macmillan Compass and Bloomsbury Reader, while Faber Finds was a print forerunner.

Publisher platformsAcademic publishers have become technology companies. Th ose goliaths amongst university presses, OUP and CUP, have both recently announced their digital platforms that libraries will be able to plug into directly. Th ey are not the only ways: the Reed Elseviers and Wileys of this world have long been creating such platforms, as have publishers such as Palgrave. Th e publisher becomes aggregator, retailer, repository and technology provider. No trade publisher has gone this route due to the lack of institutional customers, but academic, journal and STM have le d the fi eld in digital delivery and consumption.

Th is is just a sample, far from exhaustive, so apologies to the many fi ne companies not listed above. What it shows is that the dust has far from settled, but that waiting in the wings are hosts of businesses, ideas and revenue streams that haven’t been fully tapped. Not everything will work, but it is encouraging that risks are still being taken and the entrepreneurial spirit is not just alive, but buzzing around the still staid gates of fortress publishing.

Digital publishing hasn’t become boring quite yet.

Michael Bhaskar is Digital Publishing Director at Profi le Books. He can be found on Twitter as @ajaxlogos and will be speaking at the Metadata Perspectives Conference at the Book Fair, 9.30-1.00, 13th October, in the Conference Centre. ■

discoverable and build a market for themselves in the ever tougher world of monograph publishing.

TouchpressOne of a new breed of publisher (not developer, not studio, but publisher) working through solely digital and specifi cally tablet platforms. See also Winged Chariot. Th ere is a deep commitment to quality of production here that has caught the eye of Apple, the media and the public alike. Th ey don’t think about publishing books; they publish apps, from the ground up, made exclusively for the platform.

UnboundEven if it was Kickstarter that, well, kickstarted the crowdsourced fi nancing model for creative products, it is Unbound that has made the big splash in books. Typically publishers take a risk and try to build demand. Here the demand is created fi rst, pledges put down and then if enough people want it, the book is published. It opens up the fi eld and suggests a new way of trailing works before publication, while carving a niche of its own, as a new kind of publisher not constrained by the standard workfl ow, process and outlay of most publishers.

BylinerAlong with fellow travellers like Th e Atavist, Byliner is an online publisher committed to a new form of work: digital only, shorter, cheaper, more reactive, pitched somewhere between a book and long form journalism. Th ese are works that fi t well with the instant access of ereading devices, with appealingly low prices, but also a continued commitment to the quality of the writing. Th is genre doesn’t really have a name yet but will soon, and it’s not just start-ups, as many conventional publishers start turning their attention to these works.

Bedford Square BooksTraditionally agents represented

N ow that digital is dead/boring/mainstream/integrated, we have a good

sense of what the fundamental business model looks like. Strangely enough, it looks a lot like traditional publishing – sell discrete units of content to people who want to read them. Yes indeed, the “ebook revolution” is pretty radical and transformative.

Ebooks represent a huge change in the nature of the product at one level – there is no paper – but at another are fairly straightforward – not only are they the same words, but they are sold and packaged in basically the same way.

By and large publishers, readers and retailers have fi gured this out and seem to be making a decent fi st of it. Th e hand-wringing, puzzlement and endless speculation of yesteryear has been replaced by that combination of hard-nosed business and hopefulness that characterises day-to-day publishing.

It might be easy to think the dust has settled, but it hasn’t quite. Selling units is but one business model among many. A brief survey of some of the other ones out there is instructive in the depth and breadth of innovation still taking place beneath what I call the “vanilla” ebook revolution.

Th ese examples are not about ebooks per se, but more about how the networked potential of web business models is having an ongoing engagement with the publishing industry.

24 SymbolsTh e elevator pitch is simple: Spotify for ebooks. Simple but eff ective, as arguably Spotify has been the most successful of the new music models to emerge. Th is shifts us away from unit sales models to access and subscription models, which intuitively makes sense in digital contexts and is now fi nding a user base in fi lm as well. Assuming they, like Spotify, which is part owned by the major labels, can get the key content on board, this could be huge. Spotify is valued at

somewhere above $1bn, and proved that unit sales weren’t the be all and end all of digital commerce.

ValoboxTh is is retail that brings new elements to the mix. Th ere is a micro-payment system that works on a pay-as-you-read basis and an affi liate sales model. If you, the reader, recommend a book, then you get a cut of the money if that person buys the book. Genuine affi liate sales models like Valobox could invert retail and hugely empower individual readers at the expense of centralised networks. In this kind of system everyone is a winner; the publisher not only sells books, but more books, while the reader gets rewarded. Th e creative industries are caricatured as greedy, and this could be a positive off set to that image. Valobox aims to be a premium content layer on the web, a much needed and potentially enormous service.

Bloomsbury AcademicTh ere has been a lot of hype about creative commons licences, but most publishers have only dipped their toe in the water – if at all. Bloomsbury Academic has positively dived in, making all new works available free under creative commons licences. Sales are generated by off ering the books in more convenient, paid-for formats, with plenty of extras included in the bundle. And the books become innately more

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Michael Bhaskar


Michael Bhaskar looks at how the networked potential of web business models is being used in publishing

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do better for other fi ctional genres, especially literary authors.

Many feared that the bank crises of 2008, hitting Iceland harder than most other countries and leading to a drastic devaluation of the Icelandic currency, would scare Icelandic publishers from acquiring rights for translations. Statistics show that this is not the case; translations continued to account for half of all fi ction published in Iceland after the crash. Translations of children books were much harder hit. Publishers cast co-editions of price sensitive hardback books from their lists, but they are now slowly returning.

According to Statistics Iceland, Icelandic publishers sold €35 million worth of books in 2010. Th ese are printed books. Th ere is, as yet, no local market for ebooks in Iceland, though one can fi nd titles at the iBookstore and small domestic ebooksellers. As the market is too small for Amazon, Apple or Google, local solutions will eventually be found – many of the components of a functioning ebook infrastructure are already in place.

Th e future development of textbook publishing in Iceland, which is now stuck in crisis, will go hand in hand with the ebook market development. Eventually the Icelandic crime novels will be available in Icelandic on ebook as they are now in translation. Th e irony is that the many Icelanders that own a Kindle or an iPad can purchase English translations of Indridason’s novels with one click, but are unable to purchase his books in Icelandic.

Th is shows well the challenges that await publishers in all small language communities. Readers everywhere tend to read in the language they know best. However, solutions created for digitised publishing are not designed for the local, but for the global markets. It is absurd to think that there will ever be a market for Icelandic publications outside Iceland except in translations. Icelandic publishers have to fi nd their own solutions to meet the demands of their small market for ebooks, and in that way ensure that they will continue to thrive.

Kristján B Jónasson is Chair of the Icelandic Publishers Association. ■

the years from 1940 to 1947. In 1950 the publishing, bookselling and printing sector employed 10% of the work force in the capital Reykjavík. Th e tradition of the “Christmas book” has continued and there is even a special Icelandic term for this Mid-Atlantic “La rentrée”, jólabókafl ód, which could roughly be translated as the “Christmas book avalanche”.

Icelandic bestsellers tend to rush into the nation’s hands with this annual book wave. For almost a decade, the king of the Christmas bestseller list has been the crime writer Arnaldur Indridason, who manages so sell up to 30,000

copies of his slow-paced Nordic crime novels in the two months preceding Christmas. In fact Indridason, alongside a handful of other crime writers, invented the Icelandic crime genre towards the end of the 1990s.

In a country where one or two homicides occur each year, normally the result of one drunk man beating up his fellow drunk, the crime genre was considered to be too implausible in Iceland. Indridason managed to combine the international genre of Nordic crime with traditional elements of the Icelandic novel, thereby not only making crime plausible, but also more importantly creating an exportable fi ction product. Indridason is, to date, the best selling Icelandic author both in and outside Iceland, and his main character, Inspector Erlendur, is as close to many Icelanders as their family members.

Th e appetite for Nordic crime does not stop at local products. As in other Scandinavian countries, translated Nordic crime novels have dominated the bestseller lists in recent years. Most of these titles come in trade paperbacks, the preferred format for most translated fi ction in Iceland.

For the past ten years translations have constituted half of all fi ction published in Iceland, but – as in other Scandinavian countries – many lament the impact and importance of Nordic crime and believe that the media and the publishers could

F ew things are as laughable to an Icelandic publisher as hearing his European

colleagues complain about the smallness of their domestic markets. Even the Baltic States boast of millions of potential customers, not to mention countries such as Norway, Denmark or Finland, which in addition to the size of their trade markets, have a relatively good functioning market for textbooks for elementary and secondary schools.

Iceland however has only 320,000 inhabitants and an estimated 370,000 people on the globe understand and speak the Icelandic language. Th e Icelandic book market relies predominantly on traditional book buyers as a state publisher supplies largely all learning materials for pupils up to the age of 15 and textbooks for most classes in upper secondary school. And almost all books used in universities are foreign, mostly from the likes of McGraw-Hill and Pearson, and other international publishers. Th e market is simply too small to sustain specialised educational publishers.

Although it sounds as if one could come up with better ideas than becoming a publisher in Iceland, the Icelandic book market sustains a number of publishing houses, which supply a range of books in diff erent categories to the Icelandic language community. Th e Icelandic Publishers Association has 42 members, many of whom publish only few books each year, but alongside 120 independent publishers and institutions they manage to produce around 1,500 titles annually. Th e Icelandic PA estimates, based on statistical information from its members, that Icelanders buy at least 2.5 million books each year. Given the compact size of the market, it comes as a no surprise that direct sales constitute 30% of all books sold.

Recent studies of reading habits show that publishers have succeeded in maintaining a strong relationship with their customers, as 70% of all Icelanders over 18 years old buy at least one book a year and more than 40% buy seven books or more annually. Around 93% of the adult population claimed that

they had read at least one book in the preceding 12 months, but the increasing lack of interest in reading among the young population, especially among boys, is alarming. Only half of all 15-year-old boys in Iceland read books for their own pleasure and 25% of them are functionally illiterate. In a country where the book market relies on the willingness of ordinary people to buy up to eight books a year, the future could look better.

Traditionally the Icelandic literary scene lightens up as the daylight diminishes. Most domestic fi ction titles, and most biographies and popular non-fi ction titles are released in the autumn and early winter months to enable to Icelandic book lovers to buy their perfect gift for Christmas. Nearly 70% of all Icelanders do buy books as gifts in the holiday season, a tradition that originated in the Second World War, when the British and later US forces occupied the country and started hiring people for construction work.

Th e war raged in the outside world but in Iceland, even young kids were fl ush with foreign currency. With European trade closed off and imports restricted, the willingness to spend did not match with the supply of goods. However only limited restrictions were placed on paper imports and so it came that the annual output of books tripled in

Publishing for the few

Kristján B Jónasson Photo by RAX / Morgunbladid



Kristján B Jónasson describes the Icelandic publishing scene

March 7 - 11, 2012 Organized by

Th ese kinds of retail partnerships represent a unique opportunity not only to sell our product, but also to market our brand.

Th ere are plans for a whole new range of product lines too, but sometimes extending a brand is as much about saying “no” as it is “yes” to potential opportunities. So, for example, new lines are likely to include eReader and iPhone cases, but you’re unlikely to see Penguin perfume any time soon. We guard our brand carefully, but very occasionally we do break the rules: as in the case of a gentleman who wrote to ask if he might carve the Penguin logo on the headstone of his recently deceased wife, a great book lover.

Th ose of us who are lucky enough to work at Penguin feel a strong responsibility to link the work we do today with the legacy of those before us, and ultimately to continue to fulfi l Allen Lane’s vision. So, in the same way that we strive to publish the very best authors and books of their kind, we will also aim to produce beautifully designed product that closely chimes with Penguin’s core values. Th e Penguin story doesn’t end here.

Penguin merchandise will be available from all good retailers and www.penguin.co.uk.

Rebecca Sinclair is Communications Director at Penguin GroupNote: Quotes taken from Penguin Special: Th e Life and Times of Allen Lane by Jeremy Lewis ■

white panel containing the author and title printed in black sans serif typeface.

And, of course, they came printed with the iconic Penguin logo. Jan Tschichold, an infl uential Penguin designer in the 1940s, said: “We aimed at making something pretty smart, a product clean and as bright as two pins, modern enough not to off end the fastidious high-brow, and yet straightforward and unpretentious.”

It was a vision that would last. Fast forward 75 years and, with such clear aff ection for the brand

around the world – and with retailers eager to expand their non-book off ering – now seems an ideal moment to introduce a global line of merchandise. At the time of writing, ten Barnes & Noble stores across the US, including Union Square, New York, are displaying Penguin “boutiques”, which showcase Penguin books alongside the recently-launched merchandise.

A sk any Penguin employee what they think sets their company apart,

and design is bound to come near the top of the list. Penguin has always been renowned for its beautifully designed books – both on and inside the covers – and has played an intrinsic role in the development of graphic design, typography and illustration for more than 75 years.

Its iconic tri-band jacket has ingrained itself in public design consciousness, and is recognised around the world from New York and London to Beijing and Rio. Today, this distinctive paperback livery is sported on Penguin Australia’s Popular Penguin series, which has sold more than two million copies in the last couple of years and raised the international profi le of the brand with a whole new generation of readers.

And now Penguin fans – and those who just love good design

– are able to purchase Penguin merchandise around the world too, with a range of products including notebooks, mugs, book bags, water fl asks, luggage labels and, for the truly relaxed reader, a deckchair. Th e love for the Penguin look just keeps on growing.

Penguin’s design success story starts right back with the origins of the company, when its founder Allen Lane launched the fi rst ten paperbacks in 1935. Th ey were remarkable in a number of ways. Firstly, they were priced for the masses (6d, the price of a packet of cigarettes). Secondly, they were

quality titles: “I wanted to make the kind of book which, when the vicar comes to tea, you don’t push under the cushion. You are rather more inclined to put it on the table to show what sort of person you are,” said Lane.

And thirdly, they would be packaged attractively in order to encourage not just traditional bookshops, but also railway stations, tobacconists and chain stores, to display them. “I have never been able to understand why cheap books should not also be well-designed, for good design is no more expensive than bad,”

he wrote as he plotted his venture.Th e Penguin tri-band design

was the work of Edward Young, a 21-year-old offi ce junior (who was also despatched to London Zoo to sketch a penguin for the logo). Th e template he created consisted of three horizontal stripes; upper and lower bands colour-coded by genre (orange for fi ction, blue for biography, green for crime and so on) and a central

Beyond the page

The iconic tri-band jacket has ingrained itself in public design consciousness and is recognised around the world


A sketch of the Barnes & Noble boutique stores, which showcase books and merchandise


Rebecca Sinclair outlines Penguin’s plans for a global line of merchandise

Abu Dhabi International Book Fair your marketplace in the Arab world!28 March – 2 April 2012

Join our seminars for academic and educationalpublishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Business opportunities for academic publishers in the MENA Region

Wednesday 12 October | 14.30 – 15.30Venue: SPARKS Stage | Hall 4.2 B408

www.adbookfair.comVisit us at our stand | Hall 5.0 E943

every book, newspaper or magazine is available as an accessible ebook or unabridged downloadable audio. So the need and demand for services such as RNIB’s Talking Book Service continues to be high.

Despite this, the fl agship service is today under threat by the recent government cuts. A number of local authorities have completely ceased funding membership of the service for their blind and partially sighted residents and others are setting stricter guidelines; one authority cancelled the Talking Book Service for readers who read fewer than 20 books last year. Th ese decisions along with cuts to local public libraries and a reduction in public transport in many areas are having a huge impact on the lives of blind and partially sighted readers. RNIB will continue to fi ght these government cuts and to campaign for equal access to books, newspapers and magazines for blind and partially sighted consumers.

Th e advent of new technologies in digital reading means many barriers are disappearing, but there is still a long way to go. By working together across the supply chain, publishers, developers, device manufacturers, retailers and libraries we can all ensure that, as the world of digital publishing evolves, blind and partially sighted readers can benefi t fully from this revolution in access to the published word.

Anna Jones is Media and Culture Offi cer at RNIB. Sarah Hilderley is Accessibility Project Lead at EDItEUR.

1 Th e EDItEUR and IDPF workshop seminar will be held today at 10-12pm (Room Facette, Hall 3, West).For more information:

• Accessible Publishing pages at www.rnib.org.uk/publisheradvice or www.publishers.org/accessibility

• Th e Accessible Publishing, Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers and the Enabling Technologies Framework project please contact Sarah Hilderley at [email protected] or Andrew Tu at [email protected]

• Th e WIPO VIP Initiative: http://www.visionip.org ■

a variety of languages.In addition, EDItEUR and the

International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) are holding a workshop seminar at the Frankfurt Book Fair entitled Accessible Publishing with EPUB31. Th is is open to all interested publishers. Th e new EPUB3 standard off ers enormous opportunities for accessible publishing as it incorporates many of the features of the highly accessible DAISY (Digital Accessible Information Systems) standard. Th is session aims to give practical and informative advice to all publishers interested in EPUB3 and accessibility.

As a member of IDPF and the DAISY Consortium, a leading participant in EPUB3 development, RNIB welcomes the features and

functions of EPUB3 that will enable the next generation of publications to be fully accessible. Over the coming months as the EPUB3 specifi cation is adopted by publishers, authoring tools and reading systems, we look forward to seeing these accessibility features implemented to their fullest extent.

However, ebooks and downloadable audio are not for everyone – certainly not yet. Not all blind and partially sighted readers have the skills, resources or dexterity to be comfortable with new and developing technologies; not every device off ers features that enhance accessibility for a person with sight loss; and not

R eading using ebooks “couldn’t be easier. I can purchase and download

a new ebook in minutes, read the ebook, navigate the text and the menus, all using synthetic speech.” So says Robert, a delighted blind reader.

By publishing digitally, publishers have the potential to reach people who might not have been able to read their books before. Digital publish-ing means a brighter future for access to books, newspapers and magazines, especially for blind and partially sighted readers. Th e pages that were previously closed to them are opening up, through ebooks and through unabridged downloadable audio content. Ebooks can be read by adjusting the text to a larger font, using synthetic speech or with an electronic braille display.

Th ere are varying, but increasing levels of accessibility for Kindle, iBooks and Adobe Digital Editions. Th e new version of Digital Editions, released this summer, means that a wider range of ebooks can now be read independently thanks to improved accessibility functions.

Th is is welcomed by Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), a member of the Right to Read Alliance. We are working in partnership with publishers, developers, device manufacturers, retailers and librarians to realise the potential of digital publishing for people with print impairments, including sight loss and dyslexia.

A major development over the last couple of years has been the number of books that can be read using text to speech. Th e Alliance worked with the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors and the Association of Authors’ Agents to achieve the “Text to Speech recommendation” in 2010: that is that publishers routinely enable text to speech on ebooks, at least where there is no unabridged audiobook edition commercially available.

Some publishers were already doing this, and since the recommendation others have followed suit, resulting in a

major shift. Looking at the UK Top 50 titles for a week in August 2011, we saw that 43 of them were available as ebooks and all but two had text to speech enabled. Th is advance is great and we hope others will follow suit for their titles, and include their back catalogues.

For publishers wishing to improve the accessibility of their digital products there is much advice and guidance. Th e international standards agency, EDItEUR, has recently published Accessible Publishing, Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers, which gives detailed guidance for all types of publishers, small or large, in their endeavours. Th is straightforward document explains how publishers can tackle both the organisational and technical aspects of accessibility.

All publishers can improve the accessibility of their digital content and these guidelines are designed to assist with departmental detail, fi le formats, workfl ow issues and the various technical challenges that may be encountered. Th e guidelines

form part of a joint project, the Enabling Technologies Framework, which EDItEUR is delivering in collaboration with the DAISY Consortium. Th e framework project is funded by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) under its visually impaired persons (VIP) initiative to facilitate access to copyrighted works for people with print disabilities. To access the guidelines please visit http://www.editeur.org/109/Enabling-Technologies-Framework/ or http://www.visionip.org where they are published in Word, HTML and Accessible PDF, and in

Reading the future

Digital reading means many barriers are disappearing, but there is still a long way to go



Anna Jones and Sarah Hilderley explain how digital publishing is making more books availabe to blind or partially sighted readers

BUILD AND DISTRIBUTE eBOOKSDELIVER TO MANY PLATFORMS AND DEVICESSELL IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGEREACH A GLOBAL AUDIENCE

Presentation

Today / 12-Oct

Information Management Hotspot

1:45 PM

eBook SalesMulti-channel Publishing

Custom Publishing

HALL

4.2STAND

N 443

www.qbend.com

Daily DemosAt Our Stand

10 am12 pm

2 pm4 pm

MOREREACH

W ith the global economy still struggling to get on a solid footing in

2010, the world’s largest publishers had a mixed performance in the year, although the majority of companies managed to post sales gains in the year.

Th at was defi nitely the case at Pearson, where revenue increases in trade and educational publishing combined to keep the UK-based publishing giant atop the Livres Hebdo/Publishers Weekly world publishing rankings with sales of close to $8.1 billion. Among Pearson’s closest competitors, divestitures, currency fl uctuations, and softness in some markets dropped revenue at all but Th omson Reuters.

Th e fi rst change in the listing came in the seventh spot, where McGraw-Hill Education, with a revenue increase of 2%, pulled ahead of Grupo Planeta, which had a 6% decline in the year. Th e top 10 publishers had a more North American fl avour in 2010 compared to recent years, with Cengage and Scholastic displacing the European giants Holtzbrinck and De Agostini Editore in the top 10 (though it must be noted Holtzbrinck and De Agostini’s revenues are from 2009, as 2010 fi gures are not yet available).

Th e accession of Cengage and Scholastic refl ected the growth of educational publishing among the top 10 publishers. Between 2008 and 2010, educational publishing revenue in the group rose 19%, and its share of revenue increased to 27%. Much of the gain came from publishers serving emerging nations, including China, which has made education a high priority. While scientifi c/technical/medical publishers generated the largest share of sales among the top 10 publishers, trade sales fell in the 2008–2010 period, representing 31% of revenue last year.

A CEO panel that includes Li Pengyi, president of China Education Publish-ing and Media Group, John Makinson, CEO of the Penguin Group, and Arnaud Nourry, president of Hachette Livre, will debate global publishing issues based in part on insights from the global ranking. New Horizons in Global Publishing will be held today from 2:30 to 4:00 pm in Hall 2, Room Dimension. ■



Pearson stays at the top of global publisher Rank Publishing Company

(Group or Division)Parent Company

1 Pearson Pearson Corp.

2 Reed Elsevier Reed Elsevier Corp.

3 Thomson Reuters The Woodbridge Co. Ltd.

4 Wolters Kluwer Wolters Kluwer

5 Bertelsmann Bertelsmann AG

6 Hachette Livre Lagardère

7 McGraw-Hill Education The McGraw-Hill Cos.

8 Grupo Planeta Grupo Planeta

9 Cengage Learning Apax Partners et al.

10 Scholastic Corp. Scholastic

11 Holtzbrinck Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck

12 De Agostini Editore Gruppo De Agostini

13 Wiley Wiley

14 Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Education Media and Publishing Group Ltd.

15 Shueisha Hitotsubashi Group

16 Kodansha Kodansha

17 Shogakukan Hitotsubashi Group

18 HarperCollins News Corporation

19 Springer Science and Business Media EQT and GIC Investors

20 Informa Informa plc

21 Gakken Gakken Co. Ltd.

22 Oxford University Press Oxford University

23 Bonnier The Bonnier Group

24 Grupo Santillana PRISA

25 RCS Libri RCS Media Group

26 Egmont Group Egmont International Holding A/S

27 Kadokawa Publishing Kadokawa Holdings Inc.

28 Simon & Schuster CBS

29 Woongjin ThinkBig Woongjin Holding

30 Daekyo Publishing Daekyo Network

31 Klett Klett Gruppe

32 Cornelsen Cornelsen

33 Reader’s Digest RDA Holding

34 Mondadori The Mondadori Group

35 Messageri Italiane-Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol

Messagerie Italiane

36 Harlequin Torstar Corp.

37 Sanoma Sanoma WSOY

38 Média-Participations Média-Participations

39 Lefebvre-Sarrut Frojal

40 Higher Education Press Higher Education Press

Source: © Livres Hebdo. Figures are based on sales generated in calendar 2010 or, for corporations with a fi scal year, from fi scal 2010. Data are from publicly available sources and include sales of books, journals and digital products. Publishing data were not available for Pannini and Disney/Hyperion.


list

Ingram’s inventory of physical and digital content

and related products is the largest in the industry.

More content. More reach. More sales.

MORECONTENT

REACH

HALL 8.0 STAND M902

ingramcontent.com @ingramcontent

F R A N K F U R T F A I R D E A L E R

Parent Country 2010 $ Revenues

2009 $ Revenues

UK 8,095.14 7,756.40

UK/NL/US 7,147.12 7,367.12

Canada 5,637.00 5,470.00

NL 4,718.81 4,910.77

Germany 3,844.32 4,256.95

France 2,872.96 3,259.03

US 2,433.00 2,388.00

Spain 2,427.08 2,586.58

Canada/US 2,007.00 1,958.00

US 1,912.00 1,849.00

Germany N/A 1,874.79

Italy N/A 1,843.20

US 1,699.00 1,611.00

US/Cayman Islands 1,673.00 1,600.00

Japan 1,591.73 1,448.14

Japan 1,492.55 1,352.07

Japan 1,436.20 1,385.05

US 1,269.00 1,388.00

Sweden/Singapore 1,149.18 1,228.77

UK 1,038.98 1,074.90

Japan 952.88 845.94

UK 941.71 938.65

Sweden 927.22 937.71

Spain 851.93 884.50

Italy 804.56 828.88

Denmark/Norway 792.22 838.77

Japan 791.79 614.67

US 790.80 793.50

Korea 722.76 N/A

Korea 692.79 N/A

Germany 617.45 667.72

Germany 583.88 617.97

US 582.00 758.00

Italy 549.25 612.23

Italy 525.36 494.66

Canada 467.53 468.85

Finland 464.45 610.37

Belgium 434.33 456.95

France 430.48 450.21

China (PR) 392.15 367.91

Th e listing was compiled by Rudiger Wischenbart (www.wischenbart.com) under the aegis of Livres Hebdo. N/A = Not Available

a relevant piece of information when you already know what you are looking for. Th is is a great addition to the tool-set that humanity can use to uncover, research and analyse information in its purest form.

The problem with the current search system, in the context of discovery, is its limited ability to operate outside the “keyword” model. New approaches based on “semantic web” ideas – once more developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web – should make it easier in the future to uncover deeper connections between “web objects”, but for now this is still a long way away. So, if I am looking for a recommendation outside of my usual spectrum of interest, search won’t help much.

Word-of-mouth is a very powerful discovery channel as it acts in a peer-to-peer fashion where the sender is already connected to the recipient for personal reasons. This peer-to-peer filter allows new information not only to travel the internet very rapidly (thanks to the fact that our society is tightly interconnected), but also

to be quickly evaluated by the recipient on the basis of who the sender is. Word-of-mouth is the natural channel for recommendations and recommendations are the most powerful drivers of discovery.

publishers won’t make it into supermarkets or onto the homepage of online book sites. Th is in turn can create a negative cycle that could push publishers into investing less in titles that are unlikely to become bestsellers, in turn discouraging writers from thinking about picking up the pen (or the iPad these days), and so on.

The result is that, if these books were not available in bookstores for us to browse and discover, we could end up with a much smaller selection of books to choose from. One day, the only

choices might be between the adventures of young magicians or vampire love!

From browsing to e-browsingTh e natural question is: can discovery be moved online? Th e internet has revolutionised so many things, why not discovery? In other words, how could the experience of browsing in a bookstore be recreated online?

Let’s look at online discovery from a general perspective before looking at the specifi c

case of books. Th e two primary discovery modes on the internet are search and word-of-mouth.

Search exploits the ability of online text to be indexed automatically. Search is the most effi cient way to discover

W andering around London on a rare sunny afternoon, I

came across a small bookstore. I walked in and noticed a selection of books on a table with a handwritten note on cardboard saying “Scientifi c Travels”. Th e books looked quite interesting as I have a keen passion for science. Th e shop owner walked up to me and I asked him about the books on the table, and if he had any particular recommendation. He explained that the books covered adventurous travels in the 19th century for the purpose of scientifi c advancement. He pulled out a book called Th e Great Arc by John Keay, which tells the story of a brave group of geographers who mapped the great arc stretching from the southernmost tip of India to the Himalayas. I bought the book and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Expert adviceI think this episode is highly representative of how most books outside of the bestseller lists are discovered: recommendations by someone knowledgeable about a subject. It may be a friend, a passionate bookseller or a professional book reviewer who writes for your favourite magazine. In most cases, we need someone else to help us uncover the next interesting read.

Bye-bye bookstoresUnfortunately – at least in the US and UK – the number of bookstores closing down is on the rise due to many unstoppable factors (economic slow down, growth of online and the advent of ebooks). Th e more cynical commentators would argue that we should not look back as progress always leaves a trail of disruption in its path. If bookstores can’t compete online, so be it. Personally, I don’t disagree, but I am conscious that with the demise of bookstores we are going to lose something hard to replace: the most important “discovery” channel for books.

500 books a dayIn the UK alone, 150,000 new titles are published every year. Th is is an astonishing number when compared to music (few thousands) and movies (few hundreds!), and it’s the main reason why discovery is so hard.

Online retailers can certainly off er the “long tail” of book titles as they don’t have shelf space limitations. Th is doesn’t help with discovery though, as browsing for books on these websites tends to be confusing and unstructured. (I would argue that this is because of “search” being the main way to navigate rather than “browse”.) Supermarkets have become a very important channel for book sales, representing more than 20% of the market, but their off ering is generally limited to the top 50 titles due to the cost of physical shelf space.

Amazon has done a very good job with their recommendation system, but the focus is on up-selling rather than helping with discovery. If I have never bought a book about scientifi c travels on Amazon, I will never get a recommendation for books on that topic.

Wizards and vampiresBooks that don’t get enough marketing push from the

Socialising book discovery

I am conscious that, with the demise of bookstores, we are going to lose something hard to replace: the most

important “discovery” channel for books


Matteo Berlucchi


Matteo Berlucchi explains how Anobii aims to aid the discovery of books online

Pssst! You should read thisTh e problem is that word-of-mouth is not controllable. Th e word “viral” is often used in this context because of the intrinsic inability to harness the distribution of information via a peer-to-peer approach. Wouldn’t it be great if word-of-mouth could be tamed and used as the lymph behind an online system designed with book discovery in mind? Indeed it would, but I think that something even better could be achieved.

Th e ideas behind two hugely successful online platforms can be borrowed to try to solve this problem: Facebook and Wikipedia.

Facebook has created an organised way to manage your friends and peers. Because Facebook has kindly decided to allow anyone to hook into their “identity and friendship” management platform, it is fairly easy to develop a service that can highlight your friends’ recommendations and reviews around their own reading habits.

Facebook provides a structure for word-of-mouth that was missing at the time of viral emails. If you recommend a book to your friends, only your friends will see it. Th is is good because I have no interest in some random person’s recommendations.

Wikipedia has shown that people like to share their knowledge with others. A book recommendation comes from the fact that we have some knowledge about the topic or subject that a book relates to. On what basis would we be able to recommend it otherwise? How would we know that that book is better than the next?

If we were allowed to share our knowledge about our favourite topic by defi ning it on an online

system – similar to Wikipedia – so that we and others would be able to add, rank and discuss relevant books, I think a lot of people would enjoy that.

Anobii, together we fi nd better booksTh is is what Anobii is trying to achieve: an online service where

readers can create topics or contribute to existing ones by adding and reviewing

relevant book titles in a sort of open and shared directory.

Th ese topics are the online equivalent of the table with books about scientifi c travels I mentioned earlier, but without the space limitation of a store (nor the costs!) and with the scalability of the internet.

Follow me!We are also introducing the concept of friends (including Facebook) and followers (thanks Twitter!), so that each reader can build connections with their friends or with the people they fi nd interesting because of their contribution to topics.

What we are hoping this will achieve, is a system that off ers a vast and very original reader-powered browsing system, where knowledge and passion is shared via topics, and friends’ contributions are highlighted and shared with their peers.

If we succeed, we may be able to help readers discover unique books they would never have found otherwise. At the same time, we may also help less known authors to connect with new audiences. Wish us luck.

Matteo Berlucchi is CEO of Anobii. He will be speaking at Frankfurt SPARKS, the Digital Initiative of Frankfurt Book Fair, today from 11.30am-12noon (Hall 8). He can be found on Twitter as @matteoberlucchi. ■



business. Can you talk about the innovations you’ve helped usher in over your 14-year career there?CG: Certainly you don’t thrive as a publisher for so many centuries without innovating along the way, and I’ve had the chance to work on many cutting-edge projects in recent years. As reference publisher, I helped build new digital products, from Oxford Dictionaries and Oxford Reference Online to the re-launch of the Grove Dictionaries and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Most recently, in my digital role, I worked on University Press Scholarship Online, off ering other university presses the opportunity to publish their monographs with us using our Oxford Scholarship Online platform. We are also working on ambitious new OUP-wide discoverability initiatives that will be rolling out over the next few months.

You mentioned how tough it is to set a course when the market is shifting beneath you. But not only is the market shifting, but the technology too. Is part of your job to try and see around corners, to help the press develop plans and product that can sustain unexpected change?CG: Change does come fast, and crystal-ball gazing skills would be highly attractive for anyone working in publishing right now. Th e challenge of creating business models and appropriate access to educational and academic content across multiple markets is immense, but the digital shift is also an immense opportunity to be an agent of positive change to the communities we serve. And a p ositive way of thinking is imperative if we’re going to get anywhere. I’m often surprised by how large OUP’s appetite has become for exploring new ideas. If I can help build more of that momentum then I’ll feel like I’ve landed my dream job. How often can you say that? ■

a much greater level of co-ordination and planning, both on the infrastructure side as well as on publishing strategy. Since our user communities are reorganising themselves, often fi tting into multiple market segments in new, interlocking ways, our strategic initiatives need to be in-step across the divisions, and I hope to help facilitate that.

Specifi cally, what are some of the things you expect to address right away?CG: Right now, since it’s a new position, I’m meeting with folks to determine where my eff orts will prove most helpful. OUP is already making good headway on our digital learning platform and assessment programmes, so I’m trying to understand as much as I can about the solutions we’re putting in place there, and I expect this will to be a strong focus of activity for me. What interests me is the variety of activity I’ll now have a chance to help direct. For example, there are a number of ways for the Press to work more closely with other departments of the University of Oxford on initiatives that support our joint mission. Th ere are few other publishing houses at which I’d be able to explore such rich opportunities.

OUP, a centuries-old press, has been among the most active innovators in the publishing

I n a sign of the digital times, Oxford University Press announced in late September

that it had appointed Casper Gratwohl to a newly created role as Senior VP, Group Strategy. A 14-year OUP veteran, Gratwohl was most recently VP of Reference and Digital Publishing within OUP’s Global Academic division. But in his new senior management role he will now work alongside all of OUP’s business units on a range of activities designed to address OUP’s “strategic agenda”. So what will this new “strategy” job entail? FFD caught up with Gratwohl, and asked.

There really aren’t very many “strategy” posts in the publishing industry. Can you

talk a little about what made this position necessary at OUP?CG: We all feel the upheaval that publishing is going through, and everyone is watching like hawks for new models to carry us into a sustainable digital publishing environment. But one of the things I learned working in reference and academic publishing over the last decade is that it’s hard to maintain the internal focus necessary to set a course, and then follow it, when your market is completely transforming itself. So, a new position like this it will help us maintain that focus.

Another reason for a strategy position is OUP’s strong divisional organisation. Th is was a very clean structure in the pre-digital era. But the business now requires

Gratwohl lands dream job


Caspar Gratwohl


Andrew Richard Albanese talks to Casper Gratwohl about his new “strategy” role at Oxford University Press

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Review. It would not be unfair to note that he took a less supportive line towards the creative industries. Not only did his report fail to acknowledge the high levels of innovation taking place across all sectors – a development entirely down to the structural underpinning of copyright – it also proposed a number of changes to the law which would severely undermine intellectual property (IP).

Worst of these is the idea that European law should be amended so that any novel form of copying technology should automatically not be cited as a copyright infringement. It has been disappointing to see that in its response to the Review – published in August – the government agreed to take forward this proposal. It will undoubtedly run into the sand when it encounters the European Union, but it would nevertheless

has allowed Ministers to plough on with implementation of the Act – although a separate review has led them not to introduce measures to enforce blocking of infringing sites.

Th at decision may not matter given another High Court judgment, this time in July, which found that under the Copyright Act, rightsholders (in the guise of the fi lm studios) could force an ISP (in the form of BT) to block an infringing site (in this case, Newzbin2). Th e full ramifi cations of this judgment will not be clear until 14 October when BT explains how it is going to implement the order. Following that, we can anticipate a raft of similar cases brought by rightsholders with respect to other blatantly infringing sites.

So against this backdrop of the courts adjudicating in favour of rightsholders, we have the Hargreaves

F or anyone working in the world of creative industry lobbying, one fi gure has

dominated the landscape in 2011: that of Professor Ian Hargreaves. His review and report, and the government’s response to it, have set the parameters for a number of policy debates that are now raging (almost literally) across the policy forest. An escape from the Westminster-Whitehall milieu to the relative calm of the Frankfurt Book Fair aff ords a good opportunity to refl ect on what has been said, and more importantly, what has to be said next.

Hargreaves’ report in May plopped into a policy pond already rippling with the developments around the Digital Economy Act. Th e attempt by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) BT and TalkTalk to derail the Digital Economy

Act at Judicial Review failed. Th e judgment from the High Court in April found that the Act was a “fair and focused” way to reduce online copyright infringement and to educate consumers. Th is decision

Lobbynomics v. guessonomics



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Richard Mollet gives an update on the Hargreaves Review of IP

Richard Mollet

have been more comforting not to see this idea embraced.

Th ere are similar concerns with the Hargreaves / Government proposal to extend copyright exceptions to allow all data and text mining. Currently, scientifi c publishers license such uses in what is widely recognised as a highly permissive regime. Only those whose motives appear not to be “non commercial” are not granted permissions or licences. In this way, access to copyright works and the underlying – or in some cases, fully integrated – data is carefully managed, to the benefi t of owner and miner alike. An exception would erode all controls, kill a nascent market in licensing stone dead and expose the investment of publishers to widespread copyright infringement. And this from a report which had as its premise the spurring of economic growth!

It gets better. Hargreaves made much of the importance of evidence to back up policy positions, calling indeed for an end to “lobbynomics”. Imagine our surprise, therefore, when it transpires in the supporting documents to his review that the economic impact of these two most radical proposals are “not quantifi ed”. I would back our industry data against this “guessonomics” any time.

So where next? In a very timely fashion, the House of Commons Business, Innovation & Skills Select Committee has announced an inquiry into the Hargreaves Review. It is very robustly kicking the tyres of the report recommendations and appears to be sympathetic to the rightsholder case that economic growth is at risk if copyright is signifi cantly weakened. Th e Publishers Association, along

with other rightsholder bodies, will be giving oral evidence to the Committee in the forthcoming session of Parliament.

We will also continue to liaise closely with the Intellectual Property Offi ce, which has the herculean task of implementing the Hargreaves recommendations. Many of these, such as improving legislation around orphan works, virtual learning and library digital archiving, we strongly agree with. (Th ey were good ideas when Andrew Gowers proposed them fi ve years ago and they are good ideas now.)

We are also keen to be closely involved in the development of the big ticket item from the review, that of the Digital Copyright Exchange. Provided this is a private sector owned and operated rights-registry style portal, with non-compulsory

trading facilities for those who want them, then it can only be a positive development. Anything other than that, and it will require serious consideration.

Th ese conversations take place against a backdrop in which the Coalition Government is stepping up the pressure on search engines and ISPs to do more to work with us to combat infringement online, and a Labour opposition which is starting to get its act together on creative industry policy, and has a positive stance towards the importance of copyright. Whether, in a year from now, we see Hargreaves as a continuing problem, a positive report, or forgotten history, will depend greatly on the next few months of creative industry lobbying.

Richard Mollet is CEO of the Publishers Association. ■


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with Amazon’s $9.99 price for ebooks, Apple’s then CEO Steve Jobs responded that the prices “would be the same.” Th at public pronouncement, as one suit alleges, “was a signal” to publishers that everyone was in on the “conspiracy”. Th e following day, 28 January, Macmillan CEO John Sargent told Amazon of its switch to the agency model. “Th is would have been irrational if Macmillan had not expected its primary competitors to follow suit,” the fi ling notes. “Acting alone, no individual publisher would be able to sustain the supra-competitive prices.”

Th e fi lings off er no proof of its claim, however. And the fi lings also reveal a fundamentally-fl awed interpretation of the ebook business. Th e fi lings complain that the conspiracy eff ectively ended “retailer discretion” for ebooks. But the suits’ comparison of ebooks to physical books belies the fact that ebooks and print books are diff erent

products: retailers actually buy and sell copies of physical books, while consumers license access to ebook editions. Under scrutiny, the “price-fi xing” claims rest on a deep misunderstanding of an ebook business still very much in its infancy.

With investigations under way in some states over ebook pricing, however, and reported federal interest into Apple’s business practices, the question is whether the claims are strong enough to advance the case to the starting line. Motions to dismiss are usually not successful at this stage, class action attorneys note, and should the case progress, that could be damaging enough. After all, even if the case is easily defensible, attorneys say, it raises the prospect of publishers being deposed about pricing, the economics of digital publishing, and other core business operations. ■

Agency model lawsuitsF ive US class action law fi rms

are now wrangling over who will take the lead in a suit

fi led against Apple and the “Big Six” publishing houses (Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan) over the implementation of the “agency model” for ebooks, writes Andrew Richard Al banese. But while the procedural battles begin, the initial fi lings suggest the suits are based on a shaky foundation.

Th e battle began on 9 August, when lawyers for fi rm Hagens Berman fi led suit in a California federal court alleging fi ve major publishers’ (the Big Six excluding Random House) near-simultaneous switch to the “agency model” in early 2010 represented an illegal scheme to artifi cially infl ate the price of ebooks in conjunction with the release of the Apple iPad. Five “copycat” suits were later fi led by competing fi rms in New York, and California, and the court is now considering a

motion fi led by Hagens Berman to consolidate the cases in California – with Hagens Berman in the lead role.

Th e fi ling of copycat suits is common in American consumer class actions. “It is more the rule than the exception,” one class action attorney explained. “If a case is perceived to be a good one, there will be multiple fi lings by diff erent fi rms in diff erent courts, and the fi rms will then compete to see who will become lead counsel.” In the coming months, the defendants will most likely move to have the suits dismissed on as many grounds as possible, the attorney added, and will also seek to delay discovery in the case while the motions are considered.

According to the fi lings, the price-fi xing conspiracy allegedly worked like this. In January 2010, when asked by reporters how Apple’s ebookstore would compete


Under scrutiny, the “price-fi xing” claims rest on a deep misunderstanding of an

ebook business still very much in its infancy

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somehow impervious to criticism. It was amazing how the same word in English could make me feel not vulnerable but elated. For me, writing in English was like stepping behind a curtain and shamelessly stripping off all restraints.

And so I ventured to take a whole generation to the therapist, allowing them to express, under the sedative powers of the English language, how it felt to have grown up in the rigid mindsets of Mecca in the 1950s and 1960s, and then to be thrust mercilessly through the cultural shock of the third millennium.

Now, as the demand for online publishing grows ever stronger, we face the further challenge of fi nding a new, cosmopolitan language, concise and highly artistic, and perhaps partly visual, which can defuse our historical prejudices and crumble the barriers of our parochial thinking. We must click with everybody, fulfi lling our roles not only as Saudi or British or German or Chinese writers, but as global writers.

We can only hope that the unstoppable fl ow of publications about the Arab Spring will not turn into restrictive clichés for the next generation of Arabic books and Arab writers. Th is is the threat I perceive in the question I am asked wherever I go in the world: “What is your role in the Arab Spring?” Th e real battle writers are waging against oppressive conditions on a local level is overshadowed by the protestors in the streets of Egypt or Tunis or Syria. Far from the headlines, Saudi writers – to give just one example – are fi ghting against the veiling of opinion and of existence itself. But history repeats itself; revolutions are hijacked by those who leap to the vanguard of the suicidal crowds, leading them in unpredictable directions, as the whole world watches and even cheers the usurper on.

Raja Alem was joint winner of the 2011 Arabic Booker Prize for her novel Th e Dove’s Necklace. World English rights for Th e Dove’s Necklace have sold to Overlook Press in the US and Duckworth will be publishing in the UK. ■

Th e required change was too drastic for individuals initially unprepared to lower our guards or let go of our taboos. As a writer, I was still subject to the tension between West and East, between myself as an individual with free will and freedom of expression, and my role as a mouthpiece for society, broadcasting and upholding its reservations.

But gradually, the distance I gained from my travel and living partly abroad helped me to approach this schizophrenic tension between cultures. And writing a book in English was a way to escape the automatic self-censorship that I felt was inevitable in Arabic.

It was like choosing to walk blindfold through a minefi eld of

taboos, armed only with the English language to help sweep and defuse. I allowed myself to touch with a foreign hand what my tame senses wouldn’t allow me to explore, and to express that which, in Arabic, I would have felt naked expressing. It was a cathartic experience, and it took me to another world in which my city of Mecca was no longer the city of God, but a hostile steel and glass jungle, and in which I felt

T here is a scene in my novel Th e Dove’s Necklace in which the main character, Nora, is

fl own by private jet from Mecca to Marbella, transforming herself from the girl shrouded from head to toe into the mistress of a wealthy Sheikh.

As she absentmindedly watches the television screen in front of her, Nora is shocked by the Qiblah indicator, an image of the plane roped from its spine to a faraway black cube. It displays the plane’s position in relation to the Ka’aba of Mecca, regarded by Muslims as the centre of the world and in whose direction they prostrate themselves in prayer. In dismay, Nora sees the plane’s trajectory as a refl ection of the leap she herself is taking westward; struggling to escape the cube’s unrelenting pull, stretching the rope until it snaps and sends the plane smashing into the horizon and the cube disappearing into space.

Th at snap refl ected 9/11, which was – in a way – a manifestation of the opposing pull between the fi xed direction of the Qiblah and the rapidly diverging world.

On the other hand, the crumbling of the World Trade Center was immediately and unpredictably followed by the crumbling of barriers between nations. It rapidly developed in the form of online protests against the Iraq war, which engaged participants from all over the world, regardless of their religion. I recall visiting Italy after the invasion of Iraq, and seeing anti-war fl ags hanging from every window in almost every small Italian town. In my mind I equated those fl ags with every email my friends or I had sent in protest.

In an epiphany, I realised the powerful changing role I was playing within the global web of communicators; that I, a woman from Mecca, was an engine propelling the world. I bet that at some point from 2002 onwards, that same moment of empowerment was felt by most individuals on earth. And even if it did not succeed in stopping the war, it marked nonetheless the emergence of a new superpower, that of the technology of communication; an earthquake with continuous

aftershocks – with the Arab Spring amongst them.

Likewise those tremors were felt in literature and culture. We could sense the expansion of this borderless digital realm, a global club in which the world’s artistic creations could reach directly to an international audience without the stewardship of publishers, press or political systems. Publishing online was another eff ect of this seismic shift.

In short, we were facing a challenging era. Not only did publishers have to shift from being guardians of public taste to midwives of those new creations, but we writers and artists had to leave our trenches and establish neutral territory which could be shared with a global

audience. Without my being aware of it, my writing stumbled in the face of this challenge. Amidst the clamour for democracy locally and internationally, it took me fi ve years to set free my most recent novel so that it could belong to this new era, to abandon its dissembling, ambiguous style, to address not the safe legends of history but the politically tricky present, and to penetrate right to the human heart of Mecca.

Th e hijacked Spring

As the demand for online publishing grows, we face the challenge of fi nding a new, cosmopolitan language, which can defuse our historical prejudices



Raja Alem looks at the changing roles of writers and publishers within the global web of communicators

Raja Alem receives the Arabic Booker Prize

PW President George Slowik, Jr, noted that Reed Exhibitions “brings to PubMatch the expertise and long experience of managing BookExpo America and the London Book Fair, respectively. Th ese book fairs are valuable tools in the worldwide rights industry, making them invaluable to the PubMatch community.”

According to Jon Malinowski, President of Combined Book Exhibit and PubMatch co-founder, “PubMatch is fast becoming the leading website for multilingual rights information around the world. Th e addition of Reed

Exhibitions as an affi liate partner is a huge step forward in realising the potential of PubMatch.”

Currently the membership

of PubMatch is nearly 3,000 and Malinowski and Slowik expect that number to climb to 10,000 or more by the end of 2012. PubMatch affi liates include Taiwan-based Lee’s Literary Agency and Author Marketing Experts, based in San Diego. Th e PubMatch website is off ered in English and simplifi ed Chinese, and traditional (or complex) Chinese. German is to follow later this fall.

Malinowski said new programming on PubMatch includes an improved catalogue-generation feature and search capabilities, plus a section dedicated to service providers – with areas included for translators, illustrators,

editors, trade associations, distributors and wholesalers. Another new section is to include an employment exchange by country; already the site is streaming in Publishers Weekly’s popular job postings.

More information on PubMatch is available from the PW stand, 8R925. ■

Reed Exhibitions joins PubMatchR eed Exhibitions, whose

trade fairs include BookExpo America

and the London Book Fair, has signed on as an affi liate partner to PubMatch, the book-publishing and rights database founded earlier in 2011 by Publishers Weekly and Combined Book Exhibit, writes Jim Milliot. Th e addition of Reed Exhibitions adds the capability for conference attendees and exhibitors at BEA and LBF to obtain real-time rights information in several diff erent languages.

Steve Rosato, Event Director for BEA, says, “BookExpo America is thrilled to be able to have a formal relationship with PubMatch because we see it as a value add for everyone who participates in BEA. It is a tool that enables our attendees and exhibitors to maximise what they get out of BEA when they are there, allowing for them to interact with more people in advance of the show and continue to transact business after BEA.”

“Reed Exhibitions has worked with both the Combined Book Exhibit and Publishers Weekly for many years and I can think of

no better partnership to launch this innovative new venture,” observed Alistair Burtenshaw, Director of Publishing and Books at Reed Exhibitions. “Th e London Book Fair and BookExpo are delighted to be working with PubMatch and look forward to showcasing the service to our customers.”

It is a huge step forward in realising the potential

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while also helping to provide a more enduring solution for content producers who need to earn a living.

Ebooks are the hot topic, but what other important, looming issues do you see on the horizon?PB: Th ere are many issues, but I would point out two. First, we really do not understand how privacy should work in a networked society. Th e US and Europe are perhaps at two opposite poles in their current willingness to protect and respect the individuals’ data and privacy. At the same time, however, the benefi t of forsaking a little privacy in exchange for enhanced, customised online services is becoming increasingly obvious. How we educate people about their privacy choices, and how we engineer into our digital systems the privacy protections we enjoy in real world transactions, is a long-term project.

Th e other area I would point out is the preservation of books and culture. We are producing more information faster than ever before, and yet we lack the means of ensuring that it will be available for future generations. We cannot, and should not, try to save everything. But developing a methodology for sampling wisely, so that gaps in our preservation strategy are not crippling, is a major challenge. On one hand, saving digital culture is easy because data are easy to replicate. On the other hand, we don’t know how to ensure that we can fi nd, access, and use, the exabytes of information we store.

Despite the challenges, are you optimistic about the future?PB: I am, but not because I feel we’re going to develop digital understandings that erase the tension facing our existing institutions. I am optimistic because I believe we will generate new ways of creating and sharing knowledge and culture beyond our wildest imaginations. Our growing social complexity means that we must be willing to be brave, even radical, in how we think about organisations, while keeping a clear focus on the values we need to survive, including respect for one another. ■

as many diff erent kinds of publishers. Relationships may be strained in some areas, but cordial, even deepening in others.

What do you see as some of the major issues to be addressed?PB: One is the necessity of localisation. For digital lending and access, there is no reason why, technically, libraries must be community-based, with physical branches serving individual neighbourhoods. A single national digital library could serve an entire country.

However, there are many reasons why library branches must continue to be based in their neighbourhoods, to ensure computer access, and to foster community interaction, for example. Th is tension, between the pressure for digital aggregation and the need for community-based service, is something we haven’t fi gured out yet, and part of the solution is to re-address how we fi nancially support our communities, and their libraries.

Another issue is business models and the sustainability of library-based ebook lending. Digital content permits far greater control by content producers over terms of use, and that threatens the ability of libraries to own and preserve books. Whether we can move beyond restrictive licensing structures is something else we have not worked out. Society does not benefi t from excessive control over the creative and intellectual arts. We learn from sharing knowledge with each other. In a digital age, we must learn to take advantage of new opportunities,

A s the digital future unfolds, perhaps no relationship is being

tested more than the relationship between libraries and publishers. From ebook licensing, to the preservation of our shared literary heritage, we face new challenges – and opportunities – that will in a matter of years change dramatically the institutions and values that have endured for centuries.

Recently, Publishers Weekly added Peter Brantley, Director of the Internet Archive’s Bookserver Project, as a contributing editor and blogger on library issues. PW editor Andrew Richard Albanese caught up with Brantley to talk about some of the simmering issues facing libraries and publishers in this era of rapid change.

What’s your take on the state of relations between libraries and publishers?PB: Th e relationship between libraries and publishers is awkward, and sometimes diffi cult. In an increasingly networked global society, both sectors are encountering a deep transformation in how data and information are prepared and distributed, transitioning from physical objects to digital manifestations. Although the organisational form of library and publisher is stable, the functions and relationships of those organisations in relation to their suppliers and users, as well as to each other, are in a period of great change. But, I think it is important to remember that there are many diff erent kinds of libraries – public libraries, school libraries, university libraries – as well

We can work it out


Peter Brantley


Peter Brantley talks about the changing relationship between libraries and publishers

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recessions (this is most certainly not the fi rst). We overstretched and had to retrench. We had our unexpected “fl ops”. But we had always seen this work as a Christian calling – not just our own idea – and we found God faithful through it all: even when David contracted Lyme Disease, with serious heart damage, resulting in premature withdrawal from full-time work in 1994. From then on until David’s death in 2002 we were home-based, taking on specifi c projects and, in his words, “cheering from the touchlines”.

Over time Lion’s reputation steadily grew. Lion established itself as the No 1 publisher of children’s Bibles in the UK, a position it still retains. Some children’s Bibles are still in print after 30 years. Th e Lion Children’s Bible (fi rst published in 1981) has now been translated into 71 languages, eleven of them only in the last year, and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide since its fi rst publication.

Meanwhile, societies around the world have been undergoing rapid change. Institutional Christianity is in decline in much of Europe and alternative spiritualities have gained in popularity. By contrast, in other places, such as Korea, China, much of South America and parts of Africa, Christianity is strongly resurgent.

Lion idea ahead of having any books to sell! We had minimal capital, so everything was on a shoe-string. Language partners’ editions of the Photo-Guide paid for the printing, including the UK edition – which we then had to sell fast to bring in the return that would keep Lion going.

We gathered a team around us – all committed to the basic idea and ethos. We needed to grow quickly to do the job. Very soon we were overtrading on capital. In 1975 Lion became a Public Limited Company with several hundred small shareholders.

Being international, the business involved much travel, within Europe (east and west) and beyond, to Cairo and the Far East. Th e friendships that developed were and remain very special.

Th e list grew and developed too. We created children’s books for all age-groups, fact and fi ction, paperback lists, educational books – all with the same essential aim and vision. Th ey sold in the general bookshops, and also through specialist Christian outlets. Many Christians gave the books to friends, and those without a church background found them helpful themselves.

Th ere were many struggles – disruptions caused by strikes,

I t was in 1971 that David Alexander, previously an editor at InterVarsity Press,

set off by car from Berkhamsted, England, with half a dozen project ideas in his bag to try out at the Fair – the world’s great ideas marketplace. He had his sleeping bag in the boot, though in the event he stayed in a local home.

Th e vision was to create books from a Christian perspective that would appeal to a wide range of potentially interested people. Th at meant accessible, colourful presentation and co-editioning to enable cost-spreading.

One of those fi rst six projects – all published in the autumn of 1972 – was Th e Photo-Guide to the New Testament, using some of David’s photographs taken on an overland journey to the major Bible lands in the summer of 1971. Th ese were to illustrate a major new book, published under the Lion

imprint in 1973 as Th e Lion Handbook to the Bible.

Th is became something of a company fl agship. Starting with an initial English language print-run of 90,000 copies, in its various editions since then (it has never gone out of print) it has achieved sales of more than three million copies, in some 30 languages worldwide. It also led to the Handbook series of multi-contributor reference/information books.

At the end of the 1971 Book Fair, publishers representing six diff erent languages had signed up for the Photo-Guide. Importantly for the future, there were publishers who bought into the idea of Christian books for the general market. Not “cross-

over” titles, but created primarily with this market in mind – eliminating the jargon, assuming no background knowledge, highly visual, and building on the needs and contact points many ordinary people still have with the Christian faith.

Th e Lion name was registered. We were (precariously!) in business. We rented a one-room offi ce above a freezer centre. We took on a salesman who for the fi rst six months sold the

Th e Lion still roars at 40

Societies around the world have been undergoing rapid change. Institutional

Christianity is in decline in much of Europe and alternative spiritualities

have gained in popularity. By contrast, in other places… Christianity is

strongly resurgent


David and Pat Alexander presenting the fi rst Lion Handbook to the Bible


Pat Alexander and Paul Clifford look at the general market for Christian books and at thcelebrates its 40th birthday

at the growth of Lion Publishing as it



for a book for enlightenment, guidance or reassurance or out of simple curiosity. And that’s where Lion comes in.

In 2003 Lion Publishing merged with London-based Christian publishing fi rm Angus Hudson Ltd. Th e merger created the present Lion Hudson, off ering four imprints (adding Candle and Monarch to the general-market orientated Lion and Lion Children’s lists) that now publish 150 new titles a year between them and are expanding the range of co-editioning even further. Th is spring, the company reached 200 languages. Its turnover is in excess of £9m and it is satisfactorily profi table.

From the fi rst, the company established a very wide range of strong publishing partnerships around the world. Th ese remain one of its most important assets as we seek to continue to meet people’s real needs in the present day.

Lion Publishing is the forerunner of what is now Lion Hudson. Pat Alexander co-founded Lion Publishing with her husband David. Th ey met while they both worked at Inter Varsity Press. Paul Cliff ord is Managing Director of Lion Hudson.www.lionhudson.com ■

David Alexander

A key issue for Lion has always been to try to identify people’s needs – “where they itch” – and to meet them through our books. Around the world these needs have been slowly changing: a growing requirement for simple information and for good retellings of Bible stories for children in many places; but, by contrast, for less overtly Christian material in parts of the West. Lion takes a holistic view of people, so we believe that issues in their emotional, relational and intellectual lives need addressing alongside their spiritual or religious ones. Believing that the Christian faith is equally holistic, the Lion lists have adapted and changed to address these varying requirements.

Th e rise of the internet has also impacted on what Lion can do. We all use the internet to source key information and this reduces demand for informational books, particularly for adults. Large, multi-author illustrated books with their demanding investment in terms of time and money are now much more diffi cult to make viable. At the same time, new technologies off er fresh ways of publishing this material.

Th ere remain many points of engagement: key rites of passage (birth, marriage, death); a residual respect for and interest in Christian heritage, even if only as a cultural expression, to which many parents want to introduce their children; stress-points in life (and not just the most obvious such as divorce or bereavement); and confusion or anxiety brought on by profound social change or intellectual challenge such as that raised by the so-called New Atheists. At many of these times or in many such situations, people reach

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printed books or redeemed against the price of any children’s book. Five years ago the industry also launched Quick Reads, an initiative aimed at the millions of adults in the UK with low literacy levels. It produces and sells books by brand name authors specially written to be accessible to those who struggle with literacy. But neither of these initiatives is focused on encouraging the millions of adults in the UK with good literacy levels who read emails, websites, social media, news, magazines and cereal packs constantly but, for whatever reason, simply never read a book.

Previous projects to engage this sector had often got caught up in an overload of worthiness. Th is is not the place to emphasise the vital value of universal literacy – here at the world’s largest book fair that should rather go without saying – but for too long the focus on engaging teenagers and adults in reading was that it was something important, something good for you, something you should or had to do.

Ask any regular reader why they read and it is not to make them a better person, it’s because they enjoy it. Sure, reading a great book may teach you new ideas, or about history or society, or about how other people live, and the sum of this knowledge might just make you that bit better. But the passion that drives heavy readers is the pleasure not the self-improvement. And it is this passion that World Book Night has utilised through the network of volunteer givers.

Th e process for World Book Night is fairly straightforward, a simple act of passing on books and passion from the heart of the trade, through a network of bookshops and libraries to dedicated book lovers who gift them to new readers. A selection of books are chosen and specially printed; 20,000 people volunteer to gift these books within their communities to those who don’t regularly

centres, libraries and bookshops; and in prisons, hospitals and the workplaces of some of the hardest to reach non-readers.

In addition tens of thousands of passionate book lovers gathered at events around the country to celebrate books and reading, including the largest book event ever held in the UK – Trafalgar Square saw almost 8,000 people gather to hear readings by authors including John le Carré, Margaret Atwood, Alan Bennett, David Nicholls and celebrities ranging from Nick Cave, Stanley Tucci and Rupert Everett to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

World Book Night originated at a round table discussion at the Book Industry Conference in May 2010 and was the brainchild of Canongate MD Jamie Byng who, with an extraordinary group of passionate and dedicated individuals from across the trade, made World Book Night happen – from getting the industry green light to the night itself – in just six months.

Th e purpose of the discussion was to consider ways to build a stronger dimension, aimed at capable but reluctant adult readers, to the very successful annual World Book Day and the Quick Reads initiative, which promote books and reading to respectively children and adult learners. Th e idea of the gifting experience has its origins in a conversation Jamie had with Margaret Atwood in 2005, about a little known book written in the 1980s called Th e Gift by Lewis Hyde (subsequently published in the UK for the fi rst time by Canongate). It is something of a treatise on the power of the gift economy, from the giving of physical gifts to the “gifts” of creativity and art.

World Book Day was launched in the UK 15 years ago and works eff ectively across the schools network, with more than 14 million £1 book tokens distributed every year. Th ese can be used to purchase specially

A t the heart of World Book Night lies the simplest of ideas and

acts, that of putting a book into another person’s hand and saying, “this one’s amazing, you have to read it”. It is this most basic of transactions that is also at the heart of every great reading experience, whether it’s a friend, a teacher, a bookseller or librarian, a review, a blog, or even Oprah or Richard and Judy, our best reads start with someone reaching out and saying “you should try this”.

World Book Night is an amazingly ambitious project that launched in the UK this year and saw 20,000 people volunteer to share that incredibly simple experience of gifting a book with 48 light or non-readers to share the joy and love of reading. In

total one million books (40,000 copies of 25 specially chosen and printed titles) were gifted across the UK and Ireland on street corners; on buses and trains; in cafes, pubs, bars, village halls, arts



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World Book NightJulia Kingsford refl ects on the success of WBN and looks forward to next year’s event, w

Julia Kingsford

engage with reading; these givers choose where to collect their books from a network of signed up libraries and local bookshops (thereby placing these vital and increasingly under threat pillars of reading communities into the heart of the process); and fi nally the givers take the copies of their chosen books and put them into the hands of non-readers with whatever variation on “this one’s amazing, you have to read it” that they wish.

In 2012 World Book Night will develop and evolve. Th ough the name was a natural evolution of World Book Day celebrations, we will earn the “World” part of our name in 2012 as World Book Night becomes truly international. Th e date is moving to 23 April, the USA is confi rmed

as our fi rst international partner and conversations are progressing with countries across the globe about developing the World Book Night model elsewhere.

Led by experienced bookseller and publisher Carl Lennertz, and with the full support of the major publishers and ABA, WBN US is developing ambitious plans to see the gifting experience and engaging events happen across all 50 states. In the UK we are turning our givers and impassioned participants into year

round reading ambassadors – a word-of-mouth network for the power and value of reading, that encourages community support of local bookshops and libraries, as well as the reading, sharing and giving of books.

Th e 25 World Book Night titles will be announced later this

month and have been informed by a public poll of favourite books that saw more than 8,000 titles nominated. As I write, more than 100 people are involved in the challenge of reading through the top 100! We are working closely in partnership across the reading industry – with the PA and publishers, BA and booksellers, Th e Reading Agency and libraries, and other reading and literacy charities – to ensure the all-round value that World Book Night can deliver to the industry, to impassioned dedicated readers, but above all to those who are only now discovering the wonderful, enriching experience that reading brings to life.

Julia Kingsford is CEO of World Book Night ■


t, when WBN becomes truly international

John le Carré reading on stage in Trafalgar Square

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printed. But the ruling nevertheless creates uncertainty. It also gives publishers yet another potential lever of control when it comes to library usage – and at a time when the shift to licensed access of ebooks is already impacting the

ability of libraries to purchase and lend content. “At the very least, libraries must demand information from publishers about where every item has been manufactured,” Duke University’s Kevin Smith noted. “But what I really fear is that publishers will begin to manufacture more of their works overseas and then try to demand a higher price – one that includes public lending rights.”

What seems more likely, on the other hand, is that the ruling could be used to stop the sale of used books – especially textbooks – a secondary market at which publishers and authors have long chafed. While the defendant in the Wiley case, Supap Kirtsaeng, is “an unsympathetic party,” Smith concedes, who created a lucrative business re-selling unauthorised foreign textbooks in the US, the Second Circuit’s decision, he notes, now off ers publishers an easy path to scale back the secondary market for used books. And not just for the Supap Kirtsaengs of the world, but for everyone; they just have to print their books overseas.

Th at outcome is a potential negative the Second Circuit judges themselves acknowledged. “Both the majority and the dissent agree that this interpretation of the First Sale doctrine is a job-killer,” Band noted, “because it encourages the exportation of US printing jobs”. ■

US Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 (with Justice Elena Kagan abstaining) in the case of Costco Wholesale Corporation v. Omega, SA, which affi rmed a Ninth Circuit decision that enjoined big-box store Costco from selling

copyrighted, foreign-made Omega watches (authorised for sale only in foreign territories) in the US.

Because the Supreme Court deadlocked, however, the Ninth Circuit ruling is non-binding on other circuits. Th e Second Circuit ruling, however, goes further than the Omega decision, and could be particularly harmful to libraries, explained Washington-based attorney and library consultant Jonathan Band.

Basically, the Ninth Circuit ruled that First Sale still applied to foreign manufactured goods if they were imported “with the authority of the US copyright owner,” Band explained. In other words, if a US library bought a book in the US from a US publisher, and that book happened to be printed in China, that library, under the Ninth Circuit interpretation, would still have the right under First Sale to lend the book. “Unfortunately, the Second Circuit rejected this exception,” Band noted. Th us, in the Second Circuit, the First Sale pillar libraries have relied on for decades to lend books does not exist for books manufactured outside of the US, even if it was legally purchased in the US from a US publisher.

It seems highly unlikely that publishers would seek to stop libraries from circulating trade books because of where they were

A merican librarians and used booksellers say their core activities are now in

question after a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the “First Sale” doctrine in US copyright law – the provision that enables libraries to lend, and consumers and bookstores to re-sell books – does not apply to works manufactured outside the US.

While the verdict stands as a signifi cant victory for US publishers in their fi ght against the “illegal importation of foreign works,” especially textbooks, critics say the overly broad decision could upend decades of common practice in the book business – and could encourage the outsourcing of US print jobs overseas.

Th e ruling comes in the case of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Supap Kirtsaeng, in which Kirtsaeng, a Th ai-born US student, stood accused of importing and re-selling unauthorised foreign editions of textbooks in the US. In its decision, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit affi rmed, by a 2-1 margin, that Kirtsaeng “could not avail himself of the fi rst sale doctrine,” because the statute says products must be “lawfully made”. Th ose words, the court ruled, limits First Sale “specifi cally and exclusively to works that are made in territories in which the Copyright Act is law, and not to foreign-manufactured works”.

Th e verdict is the second decision in a year to limit First Sale. In December 2010, the

First sale doctrine

What seems likely is that the ruling could be used to stop the sale of

used books – especially textbooks – a secondary market at which publishers

and authors have long chafed



The US copyright decision could harm libraries, used bookstores, and encourage foreign printing. Andrew Richard Albanese explains

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Frankfurt Fair Dealer, October 12, Day 1

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