Mia Dekeersmaeker

Well Folks, today I had meetings with the public, (very interesting),

with some interesting collegues,

and also a day of interesting speeches.

Because this Book Fair is also presenting China, India and the Arab World.

So today I’m a little bit exhausted, when you know that the Fair had yesterday, Friday, 53.146 visitors. Only publishers. Because now, during the weekend, the Fair is also open to the public. And to be honest it was croweded, overcrowded.

So tomorrow I bring you four books that I find interesting. Not an easy task to do. Because this Fair gathers 7.373 stands. German exhibitors form the largest group, followed by the British and the USA.

E-books on the rise

A book is an e-book is a computer game is a film is a website

It’s all about the content.

For several years, more than 30 per cent of the products exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair have been digital.

The selection of digital products presented by the publishing industry is on the rise.

At this Bookfair 361 exhibitors include e-books in their assortment. New at the Bookfair this year are the book communities, internetmarketplaces and mobile applications such as the collective stand Books&Bytes who provides an overview of everything new with regards to books and the internet.

With the hype around the new generation of reading devices such as Kindle, iLiad and the Sony Reader, a lot of market growth is expected, especially in the education and fiction genres.

Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian author and guest at the Fair, put it this way:

“For fifteen years, as a media form, the book has proven unsurpassable. Of course, e-books are slowly claiming ground and it’s likely that, in due time, the digital form may override papaer. But this will take a few more years, which gives is-publishers, booksellers and writers – a precious moment before the Web makes its move. Yet what I saw as a writer came as a surpirise, and a lack of understanding of the Web on the part of the industry. Instead of seeing in this new media an opportunity to invent new ways of promotion, publishers concentrated on creatin micro sites, which are totally outdated, and a few of them complained about the ‘misfortunes’ of the other cultural industries, perceiving the Web as the ‘enemy.’ This is probably the same attitude the copyist monks had with regards to printed books back in the 16th century. Yet, given that book as media are still widely used, why not share the whole digital content of books for free? I was lucky enough to see this hapenning to my books in Russia, back in 1999, where I had a very difficult beginning. Given the great distances, my books were very poorly distributed and the Sales were very low. Yet, with the appearance of a pirated digital copy of ‘The Alchemist,’ that later on I included on my official website, sales took off in an amazing way. To this day, I have reached the mark of over 100 million books in this territory.”

Exciting times are coming up, I’m looking forward

My book the ‘Earth has Fever,’ ‘Die Erde hat Fieber,’ ‘De Aarde heeft koorts,’ is published as a ‘Book on Demand’ and as ‘E-Book.’ Because I believe very strong that digitisation will shape the future of publishing.

The organisers of the Frankfurter Book Fair have conducted a major survey to find out how digitisation will influence the future of the publishing industry, and who will be the thriving force behind it.

Over 1000 industry professionals from over 30 countries responded to the survey, issued via the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter.

The most interesting results:

China’s digital influence in international publishing predicted to increase threefold in next five years

Consumers, Amazon, Google believed to drive the digitisation process

online bookselling named as most important development of the past 60 years

As the much-hyped e-readers hit the stores, and digitisation continues to revolutionise all aspects of the book trade, this year over 70 per cent of respondents revealed that they feel ready for the digital challenge. The survey also reveals that current opinion is divided on the future of the e-books and digital content to overtake traditional book sales as early as 2018, whereas a third predict that this will never happen.

The industry predicted, however, that consumer attitudes would evolve-with over half thinking that Internet users will be more willing to pay for digital contenct in five years time than now.

Interesting not?