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If you like books, attending the Frankfurt Book Fair is like being a kid in an unimaginably enormous candy store. It is the publishing industry’s largest annual book fair—and this year’s event, held Oct. 4-8 in Frankfurt, Germany, showcased 382,000 titles, including 112,000 new publications. And even if you’re used to walking, wearing comfortable shoes is a must. Aisle after aisle filled 13 exhibition halls, showing the products of more than 7,200 exhibitors. Fair organizers say the event, which is in its 58th year, attracted the largest number of exhibitors ever. Fortunately, shuttle buses that ran from hall to hall helped ease the burden

The good news is that book marketing professionals have more channels through which to promote their titles than ever. But with so many choices and decisions to be made, crafting an effective, far-reaching multichannel marketing campaign is more confusing than ever. Book Business spoke with several book marketing gurus to get their takes on what makes a multichannel marketing campaign work. 1. Take advantage of all available marketing channels. Noreen Henson, marketing manager for Demos Medical Publishing, says her biggest difficulty today is “the electronic revolution in information delivery”—and her constant challenge is to ensure Demos’ campaigns take advantage of this evolution. Among

14 percent The number of book publishers who saw e-book production as a sales opportunity rose from 10 percent to 24 percent from 2003 to 2006. Source: The Industry Source, October 2006 #1 According to a recent survey of 100 publishers, printing is the No. 1 area where book publishers face the most pressure to innovate. Source: Transcontinental 2008 & 2009 During its 2008 trade show, the Frankfurt Book Fair will feature Turkey as its guest country. In 2009, China will serve as the guest country. Top 10 Google announced the top 10 books searched for using Google Book Search.

Amazon.com balked at rival Google Inc.’s request for book scanning data, when it responded this week that it would not provide information the search engine giant had requested via subpoena earlier this month. According to published reports by the Associated Press, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, filed its objections Monday to the subpoena it was served on Oct. 6. Claiming that revealing the information would expose trade secrets, Amazon was not willing to cooperate. The Seattle-based online book retailer offers “Search Inside,” a feature that offers customers the ability to search inside of select books that publishers have agreed to show potential purchasers. Google

Another chapter in the battle for book search dominance was written last week as Google issued additional subpoenas to other major book search players in a bid for information the company believes could be used in its future legal battles. According to published reports this week by Bloomberg, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company filed paper on Oct. 5 in U.S. District Court to seek information from Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo about each of the rival book searches for future use in several lawsuits Google faces. The world’s largest online retailer (Amazon), largest software producer (Microsoft) and most-popular U.S. Web site (Yahoo) have all announced or

Children’s books may be about finding the kid in all of us, but everyone in the children’s publishing business agrees that they have to grow up when it comes to taking advantage of profitable opportunities. The Internet is clearly not going away, yet with the need to protect children from cyberspace predators, publishers have to go through parents to get through to their young audiences. Once you reach them, however, it can’t hurt to be as multidimensional as possible. Jason Wells, publicity and marketing director for New York-based Harry N. Abrams Inc., says kids are looking for books that are not just self-contained

Evan-Moor Educational Publishers Inc. hasn’t always been a major player in the education market. In fact, the company got its modest start more than 25 years ago in a garage, with a staff consisting of three people and an entrepreneurial spirit. Today, Evan-Moor is home to 65 employees and is housed in a 20,000-square-foot facility churning out 60 titles a year in 35 countries. The company provides a compelling example of a publisher who has succeeded in areas other publishers have failed—generating online revenue, profiting from e-books and building an effective search engine strategy. Turning on a Dime It’s funny how a

Several international print publishers announced plans last week to launch a new system they say will protect the copyright of published material on the Web and guarantee them the ability to control their electronic content. In an orchestrated effort to halt search engines from pulling up their content without permission, the World Association of Newspapers, the European Publishers Council, the International Publishers Association and the European Newspaper Association released a statement promising that a new service would be tested by the end of the year. The service is expected to prevent the unwanted dissemination of their published content by using software tags to alert search

The company behind the most-used search engine in the world continued its endeavor to scan library collections from around the word by expanding its book-scanning project to Spain this week. Google announced Tuesday its new partnership with the University Complutense of Madrid in its Google Books Library Project, an effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of book in the university’s library collection, the largest library in that country. The Spanish institution joins Harvard, New York Public Library, Oxford, Stanford, University of Michigan and University of California in the project the company started two years ago. “Out-of-copyright books previously only available to people with access to Madrid’s

After nearly two years of debate and speculation, the world’s top search engine site has launched its much-talked about and highly controversial book search. Google finally rolled out its Book Search on August 30 despite the protests of many in the book industry, who have raised issue with the search’s display of portions of copyright-protected works without prior approval since the concept was introduced in October 2004. The Mountain View,Calif-based company contends the search constitutes fair use and offers publishers the opportunity to request how and if their content will be used. According to Google, the company does “not enable downloading of any books under copyright.