Booksellers swarm into Frankfurt Book Fair

Oct 14, 2009, 9:36 GMT

Frankfurt - Publishers and booksellers swarmed into the Frankfurt Book Fair in bright sunshine Wednesday as the trade show opened for five days of dealing in book rights and promoting new books.

China, represented by a government-sponsored 1,200-square-metre ensemble of publishers' booths and a separate exhibition about the history of the written word in China, is this year's guest of honour.

Global publishers at the event debated how to develop new ways to make money from books, with a recent survey of industry professionals predicting that digital books in all their forms would outvalue printed books in annual sales by 2018.

Top authors arrived at the fair to be introduced to world publishers and appear on German television literary programmes.

Herta Mueller, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was ill but would try to stick to her Frankfurt appointments schedule, her German publisher said.

'She has only got a cold and she's a bit exhausted by all the excitement of the past few days,' said Christina Knecht, spokeswoman for Hanser Verlag. The 56-year-old Romanian-born novelist, who lives in Berlin, was picked last week as Nobel winner.

Mueller cancelled an appointment in the city of Essen on Tuesday evening, but Knecht said that reports she had collapsed were 'rubbish.' The novelist was staying at a Frankfurt hotel and would try to attend all her appointments this week.

More than 7,000 publishers from 100 nations are exhibiting books at the Frankfurt fair which is held every autumn. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping spoke the previous evening at an inaugural ceremony.