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What Goes On at Frankfurt?
Publishing executives from around the world flock to Germany each October for the biggest annual event in the book industry, the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is the place where deals are cut, trends are set and emerging authors are launched to sink or swim in the international market. The fair also provides a forum for art and ideas, and politics often enters the scene as writers speak out on the world’s most pressing problems. In an extension of that tradition, this year’s fair (October 9-14) is themed “Bridges for a World Divided.” Organizers have set up a series of special exhibits and events to support the dialogue between east and west, rich and poor, tradition and innovation.
Frankfurt is famed for its vast and bustling exhibit halls, its cocktail parties and readings. But as every publishing insider knows, what really counts are the business deals made there. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest marketplace for foreign rights and licenses, where a company from one country sells the right to translate and publish a book to a firm in another country. Publishing representatives from more than 100 countries come to Frankfurt to proffer their wares. If a publishing house can create a buzz about a book at Frankfurt, the work could blossom into an international bestseller. New products are introduced at Frankfurt, too, from electronic books to multimedia educational tools. And each year technology buffs talk of the end of the book as we know it – while printed and bound volumes continue to fly off the shelves. Most publishers agree there is plenty of room for both kinds of media. “The Internet isn’t eating up books, it’s writing new ones,” says Matthias Winter, manager of an Internet encyclopedia established by German publishing giant Bertelsmann. The company will be showing off both its reference website and its most recent print publication, a guide to the site that is already producing healthy sales. Some 400,000 titles are being presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, 100,000 of them recent publications. In addition to exhibits run by publishers, which are grouped by country, the fair is hosting an international book display, “Globalization Between Equality and Diversity,” as part of its theme. The exhibit brings together approximately 700 recent titles on the historical, economic, social, political and cultural sources and consequences of globalization. Each year a country is named guest of honor at the fair; this time it is Lithuania. The Baltic state is showing off its diverse literature at a national stand as well as in the International Center, the fair’s cultural exchange forum. As in other years, the fair also features exhibits on specialized fields, from comic books to hand bookbinding.
Most of the action at the Frankfurt Book Fair revolves around special
events, including panel discussions, receptions, film screenings and concerts,
as well as readings and other author presentations. A highlight on the
calendar this year is the conference Frankfurt Futura Mundi, an international
platform for prominent thinkers in the arts, politics, business, science
and religion. Speakers include Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and
Algerian writer Assia Djebar, as well as Huanming Yang, director of the
Beijing Genomics Institute, and Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF.
Also in keeping with the theme of the fair is a seminar for Arab and Iranian
publishers sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes. On October
13, the fair reaches its climax with the presentation of the Peace Prize
of the German Book Trade, which this year goes to Nigerian writer Chinua
Achebe. Images from dpa and Frankfurt Book Fair. Links |
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