1997 Frankfurt Book Fair Report
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Print on Paper Still Rules at the 1997 Frankfurt Book Fair
- After climbing down off the train at Frankfurt’s main rail station in the morning hours of October 15, 1997, I had no need to consult my map for the route to the world’s largest book fair, since streams of humans -- many of them carrying physical evidence of publishing and booktrade ties -- were pouring out the east exit of the station and were working their way along Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage past a cross-traffic of automobiles and streetcars towards the fairgrounds. As I joined the ranks, I felt I had become part of an international pilgrimage of bibliophiles. Arriving at the site, in fact, the first hurdle I needed to clear -- in order to enter the fair and even before paying the registration fees -- involved standing in line at a booth entitled "Legitimation," where I had to prove my professional connection to the world of books. (The general public was only allowed to enter for two short days, on the following weekend.)
- The magnitude of the facility itself was astonishing. Miles and miles of exhibit aisles awaited me, dwarfing all other conventions and trade shows I’ve ever attended. Each of ten gigantic fair buildings, not counting the administrative offices and towers, was filled to the brim with publishers, book agents, dealers and electronic information brokers. My building of choice (one of two structures dedicated to “International Publishing”) bore the generic German title of “Halle 9.” I boarded a crowded transit bus for the half-mile commute from the front gate. (Fair-goers will be able to arrive conveniently at mid-fair -- at Halle 6 -- by rail come 1999.) As I passed buildings one through eight, I noticed that one entire building was dedicated to art books, another strictly to titles in science, technology and medicine. Halle 9, by itself, consisted of three floors of exhibit space, each floor of which would have easily encompassed four football fields.
- One of my purposes for visiting the fair was to judge the extent to which publishers around the world have turned to presenting information in electronic form and, just as importantly, to what extent any such format has supplanted the printed word. This question was symbolically answered for me, I thought, as soon as I purchased the 1997 Frankfurt Book Fair catalog: it consisted of two printed catalogs (a compact guide and the full 1,300-page directory) supplemented by a CD-ROM version of the latter. Such a dual-track approach to publication, that of both ink and electrons, seemed to hold in many cases where cyberpublishing was evident at the fair.
- There were over 8,000 publishers in attendance overall. A portion of Halle 4 was dedicated to "Electronic Media," featuring less than 500 software, film and other media producers. Given these ratios, it became clear that vendors of the traditional book were the ones to tell me whether the book was endangered or dying. As I spoke with publishers’ representatives from dozens of countries, I found that digitization plans do not yet include novels, non-fiction and monographs ("Where’s the profit?" the dealers ask), but are limited to electronic journals, to reference works such as dictionaries and handbooks, to language teaching and other interactive educational products, to heavily graphics-based children’s stories (to hook the next generation on the medium, in part) and, of course, to the ubiquitous computer games.
- Two distinct exceptions may indicate the present limitations of the book in digital form. One publisher has just completed a CD-ROM that includes a number of page-by-page facsimiles of books from the University of Vienna Library by Sigmund Freud and by other pioneers in the field of psychology. While of potential interest to those who have no other access to these books and with fast chapter searching capabilities, this graphic format does not allow for word searches. Another product, a multi-diskette set that translates as "Digital Library of German Literature," does allow for word searching and concordance work. The striking feature of both these examples, of course, is that the works in question are older titles within the public domain that present no copyright entanglements and for which printed copies have existed for years.
- Finding nary a sign of what might be called a contemporary "digital book," I was reminded time and again of the linear nature of book literature, something scarcely compatible with the jumping and mid-stream interrogating of interactive computing. Or are they incompatible after all? At one booth, to my glee, I noticed that a German Internet provider was actually touting the values of reading books, as if Gutenberg were the new boy on the block, through supportive analogies: "Reading is clicking with your eyes!" and "Reading is surfing in a book!" Two phrases at this same cyberbooth, to my mind, summed up this theme well: "Computers don’t replace books. Books don’t replace computers."
- Perhaps the book may become a museum piece in some future era. Perhaps there will be a way of “clicking with our eyes” across book-length manuscripts, a way that bypasses print on paper. Perhaps someday we will surf through long series of portable sentences that are no longer physically located between two covers. Judging by the premier purveyors of information today, however, judging by those representing their latest technologies at the Frankfurt Book Fair, that day is still far off.
WESSWeb > European Book Fairs > Frankfurt Book Fair > 1997 Report
