PREVIEW: Books made of paper still rule at Frankfurt Book Fair

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Oct 3, 2010, 1:06 GMT

Frankfurt - E-books are gaining ground in the United States, helped by tumbling prices for e-book reading devices and the huge success of the more expensive Apple iPad, which can be used as a reader too.

But in more traditional markets such as Europe, where gift books and school textbooks count for a big part of sales, the digital version of the book has had little impact yet on publishing.

The Frankfurt Book Fair, which runs from October 6-10, is likely to demonstrate that reports of the death of the paper book are premature.

The fair is the biggest book-publishing congress in the world. This year around 7,000 publishers are expected to attend.

The bulk of the business will be done by some 600 US and 800 British publishers, whose output makes up the main part of fiction and non-fiction in translation round the globe. They will be selling the rights to reproduce their books in other languages.

For half a decade, organizers have given the event an up-the- minute aura with events talking about the coming digital age and the need to adapt or die. But the talk has always been exaggerated: e- books remain a marginal product at the fairgrounds.

Digital sales are on the rise, but still only represent 3 to 5 per cent total sales for US publishers, according to a recent New York Times report. In Germany, one of the world's biggest book markets, the rate is still below 1 per cent, Frankfurt data shows.

Many now say that the alarmist predictions of a few years ago were exaggerated, and e-books are not the threat they once seemed to be.

Germany's book publishing and bookselling federation, the Boersenverein, has just released a survey of 785 local enterprises, showing that most regard e-book and paper books as complementary.

'Print and e-books each have unique selling points in their favour,' the Boersenverein said in a summary.

Books rate as a quality product (85 per cent of respondents) for people of taste (74 per cent). An e-book rates as practical (62 per cent) and trendy (80 per cent), but does not rate well yet as a gift.

Retailers say both formats are very much judged by their covers. For 66 per cent, in-store packaging for an e-book is a key to sales.

This year's fair will have a few corners focussed on e-books, including a testing zone for the public to try out various models of e-book reader device. But for most publishers, e-books are just another bookselling format comparable to hardcovers and paperbacks.

In most of the 172,000 square metres of booth space booked by conventional commercial publishers, paper books will dominate.

The recession in many western nations has hurt the book trade more than technological change. The overall number of exhibitors this year is down markedly from the 7,300 of one year ago as sales stagnate.

A sign of the pain is that many publishers have purged their 'backlists,' the inventories of books that have been on the market for several years, and slowed down new publications too.

The publishers participating this year will arrive with a global sales list of just 310,000 titles, nearly a quarter fewer than in 2009.

Among the big-name authors shaking hands at the fair will be Jonathan Franzen, the US author whose new novel Freedom has caused a sensation among book reviewers and other literati.

Franzen was in the news last month when he complained that the British edition of Freedom was not printed from the final version of this manuscript, but from an earlier draft. The print run had to be pulped.

Ingrid Betancourt, who survived six years as a hostage of FARC guerrillas in the Colombian jungle, will be at the fair to plug her shocking memoir, Even Silence Has an End.

Argentina will attend the fair as special guest, with President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner attending ceremonies to inaugurate the event on Tuesday evening, 15 hours before the fairground opens.

The Argentines are sending more than 60 authors, mainly younger figures they hope to introduce to publishers and to the German reading public. Unlike China, which as special guest a year ago tried to shut out 'negative' writers, Argentina is relaxed about putting its troubles, past and present, on display as a literary topic.

Argentina was ruled by a nasty military junta from 1976 to 1983 and many of its current crop of writers have interesting stories to tell about life under the dictatorship. Buenos Aires has funded translations of many of the books into German to help spur sales.

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