Eastern Europe

The Polish literary trade is currently having a tough time, battling a combination of old and new challenges. Although thirty-eight million people is a sizable demographic for which to cater, it is an unpredictable market. Many international top performers, particularly high literary authors, are not greeted with the same warm reception by this generally commercially-minded audience.

Design studio turned publisher FUEL made a splash in 2004 with the publication of their first book The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. Since then London-based principals Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell have built up an extremely eclectic list that includes books by the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, a photographic catalogue of home-made tools from Eastern Europe and an anthology of images from the cult blog Bibliodyssey.

BEIJING - Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel's sprawling biographyof China's reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition. The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the Communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Nor that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, wept when he was placed under house arrest. 

“Wide open and full of potential” is how Anne Landa, rights and exports manager for Sourcebooks Inc., characterizes the market for licensing international rights. “It is simply about placing the right books with the right people and seeing the whole thing through,” Landa—who works out of her home office in San Diego, Calif.—says about selling licensing rights to publishers around the globe for Sourcebooks. International licensing rights increased 20 percent last year at the Naperville, Ill.-based publisher. Sourcebooks, an independent publisher of more than 900 trade titles, has had books translated into 36 languages and published in 34 countries. Landa says she expects the upward

Offshoring has taken on new meaning in recent years. The Web, electronic file transfer, advancements in foreign technology and faster, better ways to communicate globally have all stirred the waters of opportunity for tapping the American marketplace from overseas. A global marketplace has swelled beyond what many expected. For some, this means greater opportunity, savings and growth. For others, it means the promise of more jobless Americans, more abandoned factories, more unfair labor competition. For many book publishers, specifically, it means more options for manufacturing books cost-effectively. It means new options for digital content creation, design and editorial. It means increased profitability, growth