The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business

The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business
Author: Beth Driscoll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108945309

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating business-to-buzzness deals and international networks. In this Element, we pursue an Ullapoolist approach to excavate beneath the production of bestsellers at the Fair. Our investigation involved three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017–2019) including interviews and autoethnographic, arts-informed interventions. The Element argues that buzz at the Fair exists in two states: as market-ready media reports and partial, lived experiences linked to mood. The physical structures and absences of the Fair enact its power relations and direct the flow of books and buzz. Further, the Fair is not only a site for commercial exchange but a carnival of sorts, marked by disruptive historical events and problematic socio-political dynamics. Key themes emerging from the Element are the presence of excess, the pseudo(neo)liberal self-satisfaction of book culture, and the interplay of optimism and pessimism in contemporary publishing.

The Book in Society

The Book in Society
Author: Solveig Robinson
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1770484310

The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture examines the origins and development of one of the most important inventions in human history. Books can inform, entertain, inspire, irritate, liberate, or challenge readers, and their forms can be tangible and traditional, like a printed, casebound volume, or virtual and transitory, like a screen-page of a cell-phone novel. Written in clear, non-specialist prose, The Book in Society first provides an overview of the rise of the book and of the modern publishing and bookselling industries. It explores the evolution of written texts from early forms to contemporary formats, the interrelationship between literacy and technology, and the prospects for the book in the twenty-first century. The second half of the book is based on historian Robert Darnton’s concept of a book publishing “communication circuit.” It examines how books migrate from the minds of authors to the minds of readers, exploring such topics as the rise of the modern notion of the author, the role of states and others in promoting or restricting the circulation of books, various modes of reproducing and circulating texts, and how readers’ responses help shape the form and content of the books available to them. Feature boxes highlighting key texts, individuals, and developments in the history of the book, carefully selected illustrations, and a glossary all help bring the history of the book to life.

A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair

A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair
Author: Peter Weidhaas
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-10-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

A colourful look at more than 500 years of commerce conducted at the renowned Frankfurt Book Fair, from the Middle Ages to the present.

International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia

International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia
Author: Philip G. Altbach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 776
Release: 2015-05-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134261330

First Published in 1996. This encyclopedia is unique in several ways. As the first international reference source on publishing, it is a pioneering venture. Our aim is to provide comprehensive discussion and analysis of key subjects relating to books and publishing worldwide. The sixty-four essays included here feature not only factual and statistical information about the topic, but also analysis and evaluation of those facts and figures. The chapters are significantly more comprehensive than those typically found in an encyclopedia.

The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance

The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance
Author: Angela Nuovo
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004208496

This work offers the first English-language survey of the book industry in Renaissance Italy. Whereas traditional accounts of the book in the Renaissance celebrate authors and literary achievement, this study examines the nuts and bolts of a rapidly expanding trade that built on existing economic practices while developing new mechanisms in response to political and religious realities. Approaching the book trade from the perspective of its publishers and booksellers, this archive-based account ranges across family ambitions and warehouse fires to publishers' petitions and convivial bookshop conversation. In the process it constructs a nuanced picture of trading networks, production, and the distribution and sale of printed books, a profitable but capricious commodity. Originally published in Italian as Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998; second, revised ed., 2003), this present English translation has not only been updated but has also been deeply revised and augmented.

A History of Book Publishing in Contemporary Latin America

A History of Book Publishing in Contemporary Latin America
Author: Gustavo Sorá
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-03-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 100035301X

This book presents a cultural history of Latin America as seen through a symbolic good and a practice – the book, and the act of publication – two elements that have had an irrefutable power in shaping the modern world. The volume combines multiple theoretical approaches and empirical landscapes with the aim to comprehend how Latin American publishers became the protagonists of a symbolic unification of their continent from the 1930s through the 1970s. The Latin American focus responds to a central point in its history: the effective interdependence of the national cultures of the continent. Americanism, until the 1950s, or Latin Americanism, from the onset of the Cold War, were moral frameworks that guided publishers’ thinking and actions and had concrete effects on the process of regional integration. The illustration of how Latin American publishing markets were articulated opens up broader and comparative questions regarding the ways in which the ideas embodied in books also sought to unify other cultural areas. The intersection of cultural, political and economic themes, as well as the style of writing, makes this book an interest to a wide reading public with historical and sociological sensitivity and global cultural curiosity.

The Bookshop of the World

The Bookshop of the World
Author: Andrew Pettegree
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245297

The untold story of how the Dutch conquered the European book market and became the world’s greatest bibliophiles. The Dutch Golden Age has long been seen as the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings captured the public imagination and came to represent the marvel that was the Dutch Republic. Yet there is another, largely overlooked marvel in the Dutch world of the seventeenth century: books. In this fascinating account, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen show how the Dutch produced many more books than pictures and bought and owned more books per capita than any other part of Europe. Key innovations in marketing, book auctions, and newspaper advertising brought stability to a market where elsewhere publishers faced bankruptcy, and created a population uniquely well-informed and politically engaged. This book tells for the first time the remarkable story of the Dutch conquest of the European book world and shows the true extent to which these pious, prosperous, quarrelsome, and generous people were shaped by what they read. “Book history at its best.” —Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books “Compelling and impressive.” —THES (Book of the Week) “An instant classic on Dutch book history.” —BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review

The Publishing Business

The Publishing Business
Author: Kelvin Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2014-07-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1472587383

Publishing is undergoing a sea change. Technology has transformed the relationship between writers and readers and many people suspect that publishing as we know it can't survive. And yet, publishing remains a popular career choice for many creative graduates. The Publishing Business is an invaluable guide to understanding what book publishing is and what it might become. Using popular and current examples, Kelvin Smith demonstrates that to succeed, publishers must prove their commitment to producing accurate, attractive and well edited content, their ability to innovate pioneering digital technologies and their dedication to promoting their titles to new audiences. If your ambition is to succeed in the world of publishing, owning a copy of The Publishing Business is a must. Ideal for students wanting to discover which part of the publishing process is for them, and all those who wish to fully grasp the debates and industry developments revolutionising publishing today.

How Books Came to America

How Books Came to America
Author: John Hruschka
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271068388

Anyone who pays attention to the popular press knows that the new media will soon make books obsolete. But predicting the imminent demise of the book is nothing new. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, some critics predicted that the electro-mechanical phonograph would soon make books obsolete. Still, despite the challenges of a century and a half of new media, books remain popular, with Americans purchasing more than eight million books each day. In How Books Came to America, John Hruschka traces the development of the American book trade from the moment of European contact with the Americas, through the growth of regional book trades in the early English colonial cities, to the more or less unified national book trade that emerged after the American Civil War and flourished in the twentieth century. He examines the variety of technological, historical, cultural, political, and personal forces that shaped the American book trade, paying particular attention to the contributions of the German bookseller Frederick Leypoldt and his journal, Publishers Weekly. Unlike many studies of the book business, How Books Came to America is more concerned with business than it is with books. Its focus is on how books are manufactured and sold, rather than how they are written and read. It is, nevertheless, the story of the people who created and influenced the book business in the colonies and the United States. Famous names in the American book trade—Benjamin Franklin, Robert Hoe, the Harpers, Henry Holt, and Melvil Dewey—are joined by more obscure names like Joseph Glover, Conrad Beissel, and the aforementioned Frederick Leypoldt. Together, they made the American book trade the unique commercial institution it is today.