The internet has the potential to save the book trade instead of
dealing it the near-fatal blow it dealt the music industry, the
more optimistic participants at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair
believe.
Fear and hostility towards the web has turned to resignation among
publishers and booksellers, and some - like best-selling author
Paulo Coelho - hope that giving content away for free on the web
might even boost book sales.
Online bookselling is the most important development in publishing
in the last 60 years, according to a survey carried out by
organisers of the world's biggest book fair, which begins on
Tuesday and runs for a week.
Forty percent of the 1,000 industry professionals from more than 30
countries who responded to the survey believed e-content would
overtake traditional book sales by 2018 - although one third of
respondents predicted this would never happen.
Coelho, author of The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes is the closest
thing the publishing industry has to a pop star and a poster child
for the promotional power of Internet piracy.
The Brazilian author, who will make an opening address to this
week's fair, has been distributing digital versions of his books
for free over the Internet for years - a strategy he believes
boosted his book sales in Russia, at least.
"You realise how important it is to give away. If you go to my blog
(
www.paulocoelhoblog.com)
you'll see a lot of free things," he said in an interview.
"I don't know if it sells books, but I know that I'm sharing my
soul."
What most publishers understand by digitisation, though, has less
to do with sharing and more to do with putting proprietary content
online.
Willi Bredemeier, publisher of German electronic information
services newsletter Password, says this attitude betrays the spirit
of Gutenberg, born in nearby Mainz, whose 15th-century printing
technology helped fuel the European Renaissance.
"The heirs of Gutenberg have not yet responded accordingly. We all
started much too late. And then, in many cases, digitisation was
treated in house like an information-technical project," he
said.
Napster memories
While almost all can now see the benefits of online stores such as
Amazon, projects such as Google's book search - which allows the
full text of books Google has scanned to be searched - still
strikes fear into the hearts of many.
Google has scanned well over a million books and has partnerships
with publishers as well as libraries.
"You would sell a lot more books if a lot more people knew about
them. We can help make that happen," it says on its website (
www.books.google.com).
Some fear that book publishers could suffer the same fate as the
music industry, which shut down illegal file-sharing company
Napster at the turn of the century but sat on the sidelines while
Apple cornered the digital music market.
The literary equivalent of Apple's iPod, the e-reader, will be a
hot topic at the book fair, with sales of portable electronic
readers such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader growing
fast.
Technology research firm iSuppli predicts that global ebook display
revenue will grow to $291 million in 2012 from $3.5 million in
2007.
Many eyes will also be on China, who will succeed this year's guest
of honour, Turkey, in 2009, and whose private publishing market -
in contrast to its dwindling state-owned publishing industry - is
being driven by the Internet.
According to studies by the Frankfurt Book Fair's Beijing satellite
office (BIZ) and Chinese trade magazine Publishing Today, 20% of
last year's Chinese bestsellers originated on the internet, many of
them by previously unheard of authors.
"We're in this paradoxical situation where the internet is actually
driving the Chinese publishing sector forward, instead of being in
competition to it," says BIZ director Jing Bartz.
