MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
September 24 – October 1, 2009 Edition
Thousands to Attend Frankfurt Book Fair
Frankfurt, Germany (Authorlink News, September 24, 2009)–The Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the largest trade shows in the world, is scheduled to take place October 14-18 in Frankfurt, Germany. Guest of honor will be China.
Nearly 300,000 people are expected to visit about 7,000 publishers and other exhibitors at the show. Some 400,000 book titles will be on display.
The Fair will emphasize the challenge of conquering digital worlds, discovering foreign markets, and developing new business models.
Novels for the mobile phone, non-fiction books for e-readers, games for online communities and film adaptations for smart phones will be among exhibits.
Big names in the worlds of literature and television, politics and music wouldnt miss this incomparable festival of books and content: Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced that she will attend the opening ceremony in 2009. Frank Schätzing, Günter Grass and Richard von Weizsäcker are also expected at the Fair. International stars like Tim Parks, Margaret Atwood, Håkan Nesser, Leon de Winter, Donna Cross and Nick Cave will assemble in Frankfurt, as will the numerous authors from this years Guest of Honour China, who will include the Nobel Prize winner for literature Gao Xingjian, along with Mo Yan and Yu Hua.
On the Monday before the start of the Fair, the German Book Prize will be awarded for the fifth time in Frankfurts Paulskirche. So far, along with Herta Müller, Terézia Mora, Sybille Berg and Wolf Haas, 16 other authors appear on the longlist. Visitors can experience the newly selected prize winner, as well as the shortlist authors, live and up close at various Book Fair events.
This years Fair will be the most important weve ever had for trying out new things announced Juergen Boos, Director of the Frankfurt Book Fair about the upcoming industry event. Here's an overview of the most important events and topics of this year's Book Fair.
The question of how we can earn money with digital content is on everyones mind, said Boos. The time is now ripe for new ideas and business models – whether they be off- or online, mobile or stationary. In Frankfurt, people and ideas from about 100 countries come into contact. It is thus the ideal opportunity to find the quickest path from an experiment to a business model. Nearly 2,500 events will take place over five days on the site of the Frankfurt Book Fair; trade visitors anticipate a packed programme of lectures, conferences, tours, presentations and discussion forums. Around 7,000 exhibitors are expected to take part in the fair this year.
The digitisation hype has taken hold of the industry all over the world – but the printed book is and will remain the nucleus around which all other business models will gather: While the publishing industries in the USA and UK lament the recession, revenues of the German book industry remain more than just stable – sales actually grew by 0.4 per cent to 9.6 billion euros in 2008. International book markets like Latin America, China and India have also experienced gains. The business of rights licensing in any form is thereby gaining in significance: The number of registrations in the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre, the meeting place for agents at the Fair, has increased by 11 per cent in 2009. Read more about the Fairs call for successful business models.
