Monday, October 20, 2008

Live Blogging the Frankfurt Book Fair (Four Days Later)

I made my first visit to the world-famous Frankfurt Book Fair last week to speak at an innovative summit of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand book publishers. My job was to give everybody the lowdown on the Canadian book market as part of the opening presentations for the conference.

The Australian and New Zealand book markets share a number of important characteristics with our market here in Canada, such as the large market share of imported books, our concentrated book retail trade, and the challenge of breaking out separate territorial rights for our respective countries (i.e., the option to buy Canadian rights for a foreign-published book as opposed to seeing broader North American rights go to a US publisher). The summit was packed with publishers from all three countries. It sold out well in advance, and was attended by media as well as the Canadian and Australian ambassadors to Germany and the deputy head of the New Zealand mission.

A couple of other quick observations from a Frankfurt first-timer:

1. The book fair—the Frankfurter Buchmesse to the truly initiated—is massive. 7,400 exhibitors from 100 countries. 124,000 new titles on display, including one breathtaking bit of food porn. 300,000 visitors over five days. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trade event of this size before in any business, and it’s hard to not be a bit dazzled by the scale of it all.

2. There are the Sexy New Things that catch a lot of media interest at the fair—new e-book readers rolling out, the sweeping tide of digitization in book publishing, etc.—and then there is the real business that everyone is there to do. In Frankfurt, the real business is buying and selling international rights, and Frankfurt is unquestionably the most important meeting point for rights trading in the global book business.

3. Thanks to the Internet and all of the good web tools we use every day, it is easier and cheaper to communicate with colleagues around the world than ever before. But Frankfurt is a reminder that so much business is about relationships, and also how important it is to refresh and strengthen those relationships face-to-face. I have no doubt that more deals are done before and after Frankfurt than ever before, but it says something that thousands of publishing professionals gather in this one place once a year (and at considerable expense thanks to the predatory pricing of the local hotels) to do business together.

The chance to visit Frankfurt was educational to say the least, and the summit was a really important opportunity to extend some of the existing trading relationships between Canadian and Aussie and Kiwi publishers. Big congratulations to Barbara Howson and the Association for the Export of Canadian Books (AECB) for putting it together, and a special thanks for inviting me to join in.