FBF to showcase global talent – 14 to 18 October 2020

Bookfest literary and cultural event to be livestreamed

By
Priyanka Tanwar
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199
FBF
FBF - the cultural extravaganza

Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) special edition, will take place from 14 to 18 October 2020. The annual event will include a digital bookfest, the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) Online Conference and the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) Film Awards. We also did a story on the online edition of the Book Fair here.

Bookfest Digital – the online literary festival will be livestreamed around the world on Youtube and buchmesse.de along with Facebook highlights on October 17 2020 from 10 in the morning to 10 in the evening. The international cultural festival will feature cultural and literary performances; book and technology presentations; discussions on books, politics and society; new advances in travel, lifestyle and cooking; book signing sessions and author interactions; meet and greet with stars and artists; and music and cookery shows.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Jenny Erpenbeck, Ayad Akhtar, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Wohlleben, Kirsten Boie, Don Winslow, Karin Slaughter, Olga Grjasnowa are some of the celebs that will grace the occasion. Canada will be presenting a series of virtual programmes to showcase the diversity, creativity and uniqueness of literary and cultural scene of the land. Spain and Slovenia, the future host countries, will be represented in the program formats along with the former Guest of Honour countries Norway and Georgia. The program can be accessed here.

The Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) Online Conference, taking place on 14 October 2020, will feature award-winning author Bernardine Evaristo as the keynote speaker. Evaristo, the winner of the prestigious Booker prize in 2019 for her book Girl, Woman, Other will address the issues of diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry. Apart from the Publishing track on 14 October, the Academic and Scholary track (October 12), Rights and Licensing track (October 13) and Audio track (October 15) will also be featured at the event.

Other speakers at the event include James Daunt, ceo of Barnes & Noble and managing director of Waterstones; Anand Padmanabhan, ceo of HarperCollins Publishers India; Jonathan Karp, president and chief executive officer, Simon & Schuster; Sophie de Closets, ceo Fayard; Jenny Fry, commercial director at Canongate; renowned literary agents Andrew Nurnberg and Anna Soler-Pont; Magnus Nytell, head of international expansion at Nextory; Bookwire’s global head of audio, Videl Bar-Kar; Eva Kirstine Lægdsgaard, co-founder & chief of strategic relations, Podimo; Javier Celaya, ceo of Dosdoce.com; Julie MacKay, director of international content acquisition, Scribd; Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, director of library network services at the National Library of Finland; Dr. Paul Ayris, pro-vice-provost at UCL Library Services, among others. The program for the event can be viewed here

The fifth B3 Biennale of the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) Film Awards will take place from 9 to 18 October 2020. The annual film festival is organized to honor book adaptations to film in the industry. The program is organized in collaboration with The Arts+, the annual Frankfurt programming which emphasizes books and related creative industries. The niche program has been created to study the parallels between publishing and cinematic versions of a work. The film awards will be presented on October 9 before the grand opening of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, and the schedule for the Awards can be viewed here.

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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