Publishing: the vital frontiers

In one country buyers prefer high quality literature in soft covers and get their mass market in hardback; in a neighbouring state it’s the other way round. Harsh anti-discount rules in France are matched a 20-minute tunnel ride away by the UK’s Wild West discounting. It keeps everybody on their toes.
Yet Brussels tries to make all the same. As recently reported in these pages, the European Commission financed a study by Rightscom UK Publishing Market Watch 2004: Book Publishing on the "competitiveness" of the region’s publishing (as if the results would make the slightest difference to the book trades of the countries concerned). Thanks to the nature of the diversity mentioned above, there was very little to compare, although lining up all the facts and figures filled lots of pages.
In fact the authors of the report admit that it isn’t possible to make comparisons, since statistics are collected and processed by different kinds of organisations. (Oddly, the reporters see an advantage in this mess: "The variety of sources provides some form of ’reality check’".)
Nobody seems to mind the fuzziness. "Despite the large differences in absolute market sizes between 15 EU countries," the Rightscom study notes, "when a comparison is made that takes into account the size of the population in each member country, the relative size of the markets substantially evens out."
Of course, Germany has been the biggest market in Europe (with the UK number two) according to the study, which uses data from 2000 and 2001. When I sought statistics for the previous year last summer, only Germany and France had them ready, showing total sales respectively of € 6.1bn (£4.2bn) and € 1.66bn (£1.16bn). May I suggest that everybody stop publishing for a year or even two, so that the statisticians can catch up?
Useful information on the book trade can be gathered only one country at a time. This may require travelling to a country, taking out a notepad and scribbling away. The best section of the report does just this kind of thing for Europe’s new member states, who haven’t had the bad luck to be included in comparative studies until now.
As for Europe’s old members, let’s just say that the clash of titans in the UK and in France in recent months, and the tireless activity of the Bertelsmann empire builders, not to forget the expanding shadows thrown by the likes of Amazon and Google, prove that there is promise in books. Just how much promise ought to be easier to demonstrate than does this report.
Book to film at Bologna
Back in the days when the Bologna Children’s Book Fair was a quiet place, an annual gathering of true believers, which included a number of creative Brits (but almost no Americans), part of the charm was in the old-fashioned look of the exhibition halls. The stands resembled ancient shops in the ruins of Pompeii. In later years Bologna’s management caught up with other fairs in stand design, but fell behind again when publishing expanded its horizons to new media.
Today Bologna, like the tortoise in the fable of La Fontaine (still in print in just about every pavilion at this fair), may be winning the race against the hare.
The fair is focusing on electronic rights and film-based products that can deliver the goods. A small TV/Film Rights Centre was inaugurated three years ago, at once separate and easily accessed from Bologna’s traditional rights sector. This year’s fair, to be held from 13th to 16th April, will see an expansion of the facility to include licensing. The fair’s Elena Pasoli says: "The links and connections between books, TV programmes, films, toys and stationery are getting tighter and tighter. From now on we’d like to be known as a ’contents’ fair."
The new centre, open to TV and film agents as well as producers and broadcasters (licensors and licensees), consists of an exhibiting area for individual and collective booths and a meeting room for presentations. The full package, priced at € 2,100 (£1,461), includes a booth, use of the rights centre, plus access to phone, fax, computers and internet. Or a minimal service for € 360 (£251) provides a four-day fair ticket and access to online rights listings provided by Bologna’s exhibitors, who include more than 1,100 companies from 60-plus countries.
Belgium is perhaps the country most affected by the lack of a language barrier, with its southeastern provinces looking to France for its reading, and the rest of the country speaking Flemish and reading Dutch books produced in the main in the Netherlands. The brain drain has affected both the culture and the book economy for more than a century, from Maeterlinck to Simenon.
But the drain also goes the other way; too bad it’s only comics. Hergé (real name Georges Remi) managed to export the comic albums of Tintin everywhere in the world (British kids, and immature adults, have bought 12 million of them). His Brussels studio was fitted out like a private bank (with Remi supervising the labours of a team of artists).
What few of Remi’s non-Belgian readers knew was that he had collaborated with Nazi sympathisers and their periodicals during the German occupation, and published racist material.
A new book by a French bookseller-author endeavours to show that the Tintin character Captain Haddock inherited his imaginative expletives from none other than the explosive writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and from one of his nastiest books at that. It’s only a guess, but a good guess. (Céline, Hergé et l’Affaire Haddock by Emile Brami, Editions Ecriture).