Last week was, as you won’t have failed to notice, a week of conferences. There was the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the largest trade events of the year, and here at ALLi Towers, we held the regular SelfPubCon to tie in with that calendar. This week, I will reflect on the big highlights from both of those, as well as provide some snippets of the latest news.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
As always, if you want to get into the details of what happens at Frankfurt, I highly recommend Porter Anderson’s ever-insightful analysis at Publishing Perspectives.
Wiley’s New AI-Publishing Deal
The first big story that caught my attention from the Frankfurt Book Fair was the announcement of a new AI-publishing deal. Yes, I know these aren’t new, but this one features Wiley, one of the world’s largest academic publishers (for those who still need reminding of the relative scale of academic versus what we think of as “big” publishing, one of the largest publishers outright).
This matters because of Wiley's scale, but also because of the context and content: academic research (much of it, of course, publicly funded, but that’s a whole other issue). Wiley is hoping to partner with a host of innovative start-ups in the AI space to produce tools to help scientists with their research. Those tools would, of course, also be of interest to all of us.
Neilsen Figures
I was also interested in the Nielsen figures from the Frankfurt Book Fair regarding the state of the global publishing industry. Headlines include a booming Spanish-language market and a somewhat gloomier picture for the U.S. and U.K. They also suggest that crime fiction is doing well, while nonfiction is faring less so.
Of course, the real picture is not clear from Nielsen figures. It’s easy in retrospect to point out the wild inaccuracies of the annual findings from DataGuy that we used to anticipate at such events. But at least during that period, major conferences were interested in the wider publishing picture, including actual figures for the indie sector (even if those figures were guesses).
Contentshift Finalists
Finally, I want to mention the finalists of Contentshift—the start-up pitching contest at Frankfurt. Think of it like the innovation prize at Futurebook. It’s great to report on innovative success, and the winner this year is Gamebook, a platform specializing in creating interactive content.
It’s exciting to see what trends are coming down the line. Gamebook’s focus on interactivity is definitely a trend to watch and one that excites me as a writer. I love the idea of immersing my readers in a multisensory way in my books, and the thought of doing so with nonfiction as well as fiction, blurring the lines between books and games, really excites me.
