I only had a couple of hours at the London Book Fair today and it took me that long to walk around the whole thing. Here are preliminary impressions.
1. Unlike BEA, there are no vast piles of freebies. Perhaps that’s just the economy.
2. SF stuff is rare. The big publishers are advertising some SF titles, but the only small press pushing SF is the one with all of the L. Ron Hubbard books. As Darren Nash pointed out to me, the SF business has conventions. Other literary subdivisions mostly don’t have such events on a similar scale to attend.
3. A lot of space was taken up with people from foreign countries promoting their authors. I saw stalls for Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and many others.
4. The show has a special India theme, and one of the bigger companies was a printer. They advertise that you can get your books delivered to stores more cheaply having them printed in India and shipped out than printing them locally. This can’t be good for the environment, can it?
5. There is also a lot of emphasis on ebooks. I saw a chap from Sony bemoaning the proliferation of document standards. Also the Espresso book vending machine. I’ll try to spend some time at the latter stand tomorrow so I can see how long a book takes to print, and how good it looks.
6. My feet are sore (14,000+ steps today).
BEA is preparing people for less books at this year’s show, also. They are saying it is because of the economy. It is interesting to see such a small turnout from SF publishers at LBF. I thought it would have a better turnout.
Tom:
The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that any small presses are there. It must be hugely expensive, and I can’t see what they hope to get out of it.
As far as I am aware, only BEA does have the tremendous outflow of ARCs. That’s why I didn’t go to London or Frankfurt, even with the proximity, but will be at BEA next month. Will you be there?
My question on the Espresso is this: The copier in the office needs service every two days and the Espresso is like 12 times mor ecomplex. How is reliability? How is the price?
G:
Would love to go to BEA, but I’m not allowed in the US right now.
Daniel:
The machines are still being talked of as “beta”, so I guess reliability is poor and price is vast, but these will change if they get big orders.
As G says, LBF is not the place for freebies. There were a few book tote bags of varying quality knocking around, but what few freebies there were were aimed squarely at bookshop owners, ie stock buyers. Very little else. I got handed a couple of books to consider for Angry Robot, but didn’t blag anything.
Frankfurt, meanwhile, has a different approach: you can buy books off the stands. That’s refreshing – very frustrating spotting something you’ve wanted for years on the stand of an LBF remainders company, often complete with price sticker, but not being able to buy it. But then again Frankfurt also lets the general public in – the aisles in the German halls are fifty deep with students and families on the last two days, the weekend. Which is different.