London Book Fair 2006: From Cover to Cover.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Ashling, Jim1

With hundreds of book fairs around the world--ranging from small-town literary gatherings to the annual mega-events in Frankfurt, Germany--only about 35 fairs are regarded as international enough to attract the attention of leading global publishing houses. While some competition and rivalry exists among the larger" trade shows, the Lore don Book Fair wanted to enhance its international reputation by billing itself as the "world's leading spring publishing event" in its 2006 promotional literature.

This year, the 35th annual London Book Fair was held March 5-7 in its new location at ExCeL International Exhibition and Conference Center in London's Docklands. The 100-acre site, which opened in 2000, provides 65,000 square meters (699,654square feet) of space in what is Europe's largest column-free hall. Exhibit space is divided into two main halls, and the Book Fair filled the entire North Hall. A central aisle between North and South Halls (the Boulevard) provides easy access to cafes and bars as a convenient place to meet exhibitors and attendees in the opposite venue.

More than 20,000 visitors were expected to turn out for the event, and the 2,000 exhibits amounted to a 20-percent growth over 2005, according to show organizers. Perhaps the doom-mongers were wrong again. In spite of industry downturn predictions, fewer visits to public libraries, and claims that reading is out of fashion, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) recently reported book publishing industry net sales of $25.1 billion in 2005, a compound annual growth rate of 9.1 percent from 2002 to 2005.

Although the E-content Pavilion was billed as "a showcase with the latest technology available to information professionals," the section actually contained only 11 exhibitors. Featuring shell-scheme booths, minimal display equipment, and a laptop here and there, the pavilion seemed to suggest that e-content isn't playing much of a part in today's publishing industry, which is far from the truth. Exhibitors, who said they spent most of their time directing attendees to their companies' main stands in other areas of the pavilion, agreed that they would be better served combining all media in one location in the future. The busy stands for Elsevier; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Taylor & Francis; and Thomson Corp. in other areas of the hall were proof that interest was indeed there.

Google, Inc. significantly elected to take a large stand in the middle of the hall, which the company dedicated exclusively to the Google Book Search service. The stand focused on ways to persuade publishers to allow Google to index their book content to sell more books. Handouts included an information pack (available in English, French, German, and Italian) with the words: "Let them use the search engine they use to find everything else."

Google also took the opportunity to present its seminar titled How to Promote Your Books on Google to three separate packed audiences. Google, after all, followed the guidelines from the show organizers, who designed initiatives to attract booksellers and to drive the book selling business. Interestingly, Amazon.com was not an exhibitor.

Many publishers remain fearful about Google and Amazon. Concerns range from digitization to incursions into electronic publishing, while ignoring the boost in sales to back lists and the promotional benefits of digital sample pages. Book publishers still seem to be against digital downloading, a stance that music publishers abandoned some time ago. While publisher CEOs may rail against Google and Amazon, people are still flocking to their stands, seminars, and services.

The small attendance at the E-content Pavilion was contrasted by the technology that was prevalent all around the show. A parallel e-content seminar program was well-attended. In one session, titled Advances in E-content Distribution and presented by Gary Coker (head of research and development) at MetaPress, approximately 100 attendees (both publishers and librarians) heard Coker describe ways in which publishers can improve the reader's experience when delivering e-content. He said usage studies show that readers spent less than 4 minutes on a publisher's Web site and viewed fewer than six pages. To make those fleeting visits as useful as possible, he recommended that publishers focus on content, findability, and visibility. Users, he said, find content through search engines and A&I services. Usually they are first directed to publisher sites. To attract site visits, metadata should be widely distributed, and features such as alerting e-mails and RSS feeds should be adopted.

To encourage readers to stay on the publisher's site for as long as possible, Coker favors the use of features that allow users to "find more like this" or have results clustering so that they can jump to author-, subject-, and document-type clusters. Coker refers to this as "finding" rather than "searching," a service that online commerce sites such as eBay have refined so well.

Other technology-related sessions included the relevance of copyright in the digital age, e-marketing and effective Web site design for booksellers, issues on collecting e-books in libraries, the future of books in the digital age, online books, and taking control of your digital assets, which are current e-publishing hot topics demonstrating that e-content is not an issue to be relegated to the back of the room.

One technical development that proved to be an attention grabber was Margaret Atwood's LongPen. The best-selling Canadian author demonstrated the use of her robot arm, which lets her sign autographs on her books by remote control. (But isn't that the main reason anyone would want to attend a book signing in the first place, i.e., to meet the famous author face to face?)

Atwood's attendance was part of a new book fair feature called Author of the Day. Each day, one of three writers was in the spotlight for seminars, bookseller meetings, round-table discussions, and book signings. The other featured authors were crime writer Karin Slaughter and teenage fiction author Louise Rennison.

For more information on the conference, visit http://www.lbf-virtual.com.

PHOTO (COLOR): London's ExCeL International Exhibition and Conference Center

PHOTO (COLOR): Floor map of the 35th Annual London Book Fair

PHOTO (COLOR): The central aisle between the North and South Hails at ExCeL

PHOTO (COLOR): Visitors at rest in the Boulevard

PHOTO (COLOR): Visitors gather for coffee and a quick meal

PHOTO (COLOR): Google's stand highlighted Google Book Search

PHOTO (COLOR): McGraw-Hill's stand offered tables, chairs, and company news

~~~~~~~~

Text and photos by Jim Ashling

Jim Ashling runs Ashling Consulting, an independent consultancy for the information industry. His e-mail address is jashling@aol.com. Send your comments about this article to itletters@infotoday.com.