This week the
annual Frankfurt Book Fair will be held again. Some 7.000 exhibitors from 100
countries will be there. Some 280.000 visitors from 129 countries are expected.
They will be looking for books and nothing else but books, from literature to
scientific books, from fiction to non-fiction.
Over the
years the fair has changed. Was the fair a necessity to acquire new to be
translated books formerly, now e-mail and skype have made negotiations possible
on a daily scale without travelling.
But also
the product book has changed. The book portfolio exists of printed books
formerly, now the offer has been expanded with electronic books. This year also
the apps have been added as a product and as marketing tools. This also shows
in the booth arrangement as, there are not only booths for printed or
electronic books, but there were also booths reserved for integrators and apps
developers.
This change
has had a long and slow start. In 1970
the book industry started to change the process of typesetting and page make-up
aided by computers. In 1985 the CD-ROM was introduced as a mega book, ready to
store a 25 volumes encyclopaedia. For the Encyclopedia Britannica it was the
beginning of the end, which took place in 2012, when the decision was taken not
to print an encyclopaedia anymore.
This whole
process was characterised as electronic publishing. The term did not only
entail the computing of the production process. But on the Frankfurt Book Fair
1993 the term was expanded to electronic products, derived from books, in the EC
report New Opportunities for Publishers in the Information Services Market
(1993, Consulting Trust). The electronic products were embodied by the first
Sony e-readers and minidisk e-books. In 1996 the term electronic publishing was
canonised with publishing of EC Electronic Publishing: Strategic Developments
for the European Publishing Industry towards the Year 2000.
Electronic
publishing started to penetrate into the realm of readers in 2006, when the
first e-readers with e-Ink screens reached the market. Besides, the publishers
were eventually forced by Amazon to publish e-books. And e-books are doing
well. E-books can now be bought, hired and streamed to the screen.
And this is
only the start. The big bang is still to come and the first rumble can already
be heard. At the Frankfurt Book Fair an e-reader has been announced for TEN
euro (10 euro). Dependent on the quality of the screen and built-in facilities e-readers
cost from 99 to 350 euro. But the German txtr beagle can keep the price so low
as it did not put in high-tech in the device. The e-reader contains facilities
built into smart phones. So no wifi, but blue- tooth to transfer a book. An
Android app takes care to put the books into place. Users of the beagle do not
need cables to connect to plugs, but just two AAA batteries which will keep the
reader going for a year. And when they are empty, just change them. The txtr
beagle has a 5 inch screen with a resolution of 800 x 600. The device weighs only 128 grams,
including batteries. The memory is 4Gb. The e-reader can handle epub and pdf.
The German company presented their own e-reader at The Frankfurt Book
Fair 2009, but the e-reader never reached the market. But having been acquired
by 3M, a new e-reader has come off the drawing table, ready to go into mass production.
UPDATE 14 October 2012 Just saw an interview on YouTube in which the announcement was made for a Kobe Mini e-reader. This will cost 80 euro in The Netherlands; 79 US dollar in the US.