Under the covers - the future of the book - a view from Frankfurt

TOM FITZSIMONS

Sunday STar Times -  23/10/2011

REUTERS

CLOSING THE BOOKS? Andrea Bauer tweaks a large display at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair.

What will the book look like in 10 years' time? In Frankfurt, home to the world's biggest book fair, everyone's got a slightly different idea.

If the publishing industry seems like just another traditional media dinosaur – waiting, like the music world before it, for the guillotine to fall – well, it's easy to banish the thought in Frankfurt in October.
Walking into one of eight cavernous, stadium-sized halls at the Frankfurt Book Fair, amid the hustle of thousands of people erecting stands lined with books, I'm greeted by an enormous portrait of the very recently departed Steve Jobs.
It's advertising the American journalist Walter Isaacson's biography of the Apple founder, set to be released tomorrow. And even though it turns out the rights have been snapped up before the fair even started, it seems like a sign of something. The enduring cachet of the book, perhaps. Or the way even monolithic industries can move quickly when they need to.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's biggest book festival. Primarily a trade fair, but also part cultural festival and part think-tank conference, it draws something like 300,000 visitors and 7500 exhibitors from 160 countries every year. (Here's another way of thinking about the scale of the thing: they have buses to ferry people from hall to hall.)
It's an international media bazaar – the place where a debut novel can go from complete anonymity to global hot property in a couple of days. This time, if you're wondering, it seems that honour goes to American author Scott Hutchins' A Working Theory of Love, which starts with a young man going through his dead father's belongings and moves towards the building of a human-like robot.
All of the Kiwi publishers I speak to concur: Frankfurt is the mother of all book fairs, a lodestar for the industry. (It's also taking on special significance for New Zealand as the "guest of honour" country for next year's fair – a role that comes with a 2300m2 pavilion and acres of German media attention.)
So how is the publishing world feeling about the future of the book, when sales figures are hopeless, new technologies slow to pay off and internet behemoths like Amazon eager to seize its territory?
Ambivalent, I think is right. Or at least, not as completely gloomy as you might have thought.
Full story at stuff.co.nz