London Book Fair goes digital

The 40th edition of the London Book Fair focuses this year on digital media’s effects on publishing. The London Book Fair Digital Conference, The Digital Now: Creating Lasting Change, took place a day before the fair opened and hashed out various disruptions and possibilities of the digital turn. Meanwhile the book fair itself takes on digital topics through the Digital Zone and Theatre, featuring over 40 exhibitors from across the digital supply chain. At the Theatre visitors can see presentations of the latest products and suppliers from companies involved in digital publishing. Visitors can also attend several seminars covering the latest trends in digital publishing at The Digital Seminar stream.

The key themes of the Digital conference
What’s going on in the digital publishing market? Key themes at the conference were the future of enhanced ebooks, the importance of ebook discoverability, pricing strategies and business models. Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber and Faber, opened the conference by affirming that the publisher won’t grow obsolete because she’s already squarely in the thick of the digital turn. “We are not learning to be digital publishers, we are in the digital market.”

Discoverability and pricing of the ebook
Ebook discoverability, one critical theme, emerged as a key challenge for vendors. According to Evan Schnittman, buying books is a leisure activity, so the competition for an ebook should be viewed differently from its physical counterpart. Gordon Willoughby adds that pricing for ebooks is influenced by where the costumer is when he buys it and must take into account that e-books compete with film and music downloading. “It is digital vs all the other options you have sitting on the sofa.”

The Kindle and the Kobo
The speakers overall saw potential in ebook readers. Willoughby claimed that putting books on the Kindle generates sale: if a customer bought 10 physical books before they own a Kindle, after they own a Kindle they bought 33 physical and Kindle titles. Michael Tamblyn from Kobo discussed the growth of the sales of their ebook readers: “It took 10 months to get 1m users, 90 days to get the 2nd million, 14 days to get next million.”

Threads for e-books
The conference also had its skeptics, with repeated warnings that Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook could monopolise routes to the customer. Michael Comish from BlinkBox calls them “frenemies”. Evan claimed that the enhanced ebook and the app, especially for narrative works, are already dead and entirely unnecessary, since what sells e-books also sells p-books. Enhanced content is unnecessary because “If a book is a hit in p, it’ll be a hit in e.” Only educational ebooks might find a viable market. However Faber and Faber’s head of digital, Henry Volans contested that statement: “Apps are a phenomenon of our age and are here to stay.”

The London Book is 11th – 13th  April.
http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/