Substack<\/a> newsletter.<\/p>\nCameron Abadi: The Frankfurt Book Fair has its roots in 15th-century Germany. How did it evolve through that time, through the many centuries of political and social upheaval in Germany?<\/p>\n
Adam Tooze: So it\u2019s tied up really with the history of print capitalism and the Reformation in Europe. Folks may know that Johannes Gutenberg, who is the originator of the Western trajectory of printing, in the 1400s made his great breakthroughs in Mainz, which is just up the road from Frankfurt. And in the 1460s, his business partners decided that Mainz was too small a place to really push their business hard, and they moved to Frankfurt. And so from the 1460s onward, Frankfurt becomes a center for printing.<\/p>\n
By the 1500s, there\u2019s something that you might begin to recognize as a fair going on\u2014an awful lot of trade had to be conducted in fairs at this period. Merchants would travel and bring their wares. It\u2019s the most efficient way of organizing a market. And the 1500s puts you, of course, squarely then in the origins of the European Reformation. From the 1510s, \u201920s onward, you\u2019re really at the hub of all of that. And by the 1560s, we see the publication for the first time of a catalog of all the books that were brought to the fair 100 years on essentially from the innovations in printing that had begun in the mid-1400s. And this is the origin essentially of Western comprehensive, running bibliography. It\u2019s the beginnings of Amazon book culture, right, in the mid-1500s in West Germany.<\/p>\n
And from that period onward, from the 1560s through to the 1700s, Frankfurt was the preeminent book fair of the Western world. It increasingly runs into trouble, though, because of various types of censorship and very, very hot fierce competition from Leipzig, in Saxony. People who know their Reformation history will know that Saxony plays an outside role in the history of the reformation through its sponsorship of people like Martin Luther. And by the 1700s, it\u2019s just a way better place from which to operate and do business. And so in the 1760s, the Frankfurt Book Fair dies and really ceases to operate through the 20th century. So, if you ask, is there a history of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Weimar Republic or Nazi Germany? Why have I not seen any amazing modernist adverts or whatever? Because there weren\u2019t any, because there wasn\u2019t a fair.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s really in the aftermath of World War II that the Frankfurt Book Fair comes into existence in the form that we know today. And this is not by accident because Frankfurt\u2019s claim to fame in the 19th century was that in 1848, \u201949, it had been the home of Germany\u2019s first elected parliament, a national elected parliament, the so-called Frankfurt Parliament that met in St. Paul\u2019s Church in Frankfurt and drafted a constitution that is a classic 19th-century liberal constitution. And when West Germany was in the business of going beyond just having a single currency, the Deutsche mark, from \u201948 onward and was moving toward a constitution in \u201949, the St. Paul\u2019s Church constitution was really the bedrock of the German democratic project. It was also influential in Weimar, but it was even more influential in the 1949 founding. And so in the church, a group of newly created West German publishers hold a fair signifying that Germany is going to be a democracy, it\u2019s going to connect to the 19th-century heritage, and it\u2019s going to do so through free publishing. And that\u2019s really what launches the Frankfurt Book Fair in its modern incarnation.<\/p>\n
By the \u201950s, it was already a very major player. It\u2019s very rapidly internationalizing. And then from the \u201960s onward, the other association people may have with Frankfurt other than sausages is the Frankfurt School, the cultural Marxism. And so Frankfurt is a hub of radical left-wing politics in Germany. It\u2019s some of the most hard-line elements of the Green Party. Joschka Fischer famously come out of the Frankfurt scene. And so the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is West German capitalism\u2014insofar as Germany has a financial market, it\u2019s in Frankfurt\u2014and West German and global capitalist publishing are slap-bang in the middle of Germany\u2019s closest approximation to the Parisian left bank, essentially.<\/p>\n
And so the Frankfurt Book Fair becomes this very controversial thing, frequently politicized by radical students and so on. It becomes a whole thing, really, all the way down to the present day, where there has been big scandals over Salman Rushdie and Palestinian authors. All the usual kind of cultural political drama you\u2019d expect in Germany has played out there.<\/p>\n
CA: How big is the global publishing industry exactly, and how is that reflected in Frankfurt\u2019s economic footprint?<\/p>\n
AT: If you start from publisher revenue, like net sales licensing, like the narrow, tight, legit definition of what book publishing and other types of publishing are generating, it\u2019s about $76 billion in 2022. And you can break that down. $26 billion is coming from the American side, so one-third. Germany generates about $10 billion. Japan, $9.3 billion. India, $9 billion. The United Kingdom, $5 billion. I\u2019m not sure, actually, whether China\u2019s numbers are in here because, as I know from personal experience, publishing in China has a whole different dimension. But that kind of a ballpark is what we\u2019re talking about. So, if you\u2019re a penniless author, it\u2019s oligarch money. From the point of view of the global economy, it\u2019s a pinprick. You know, a hundred trillion in annual value added, publishing is a relatively small part.<\/p>\n
But one way of thinking about the publishing business is that it\u2019s the thing the entire cultural-industrial complex, to a considerable extent, balances on. Because that\u2019s where the intellectual property is. And if you look at the cultural industries across a broader kind of remit, we\u2019re talking significant percentage points of GDP. We\u2019re talking maybe 3 percent of global GDP is the creative economy, all cultural and creative industries taken together. And almost all of those have some publishing element. If you add up employment, it\u2019s not a terribly productive sector. So maybe UNESCO thinks that the share of global employment in the creative industries is closer to 6 percent of global employment. So that\u2019s huge. In the book subsector alone, some estimates put the wider book value chain as providing 3.7 million jobs across the world.<\/p>\n
So Frankfurt is big business, right? It\u2019s not global megabucks, it\u2019s not artificial intelligence, but as the real annual pivot, it\u2019s a huge deal. And I remember going as a kid in the \u201970s\u2014it was just paradise because the books are cheaper than they are in regular bookstores. Apparently they had to ban people bringing suitcases to the fair because people were getting run over because hordes of book-crazy people would be charging in to try to get the really heavily discounted books.<\/p>\n
CA: Are the book industry\u2019s traditional gatekeepers still in place? Have disruptions from technologies such as AI or platforms such as Amazon affected the traditional structure of the book industry?<\/p>\n
AT: In my segment of the publishing world, over the time I\u2019ve been publishing, it\u2019s less than I would have expected, to be absolutely honest. The basic structure of the deal, as I was just describing it, still seems to hold very much. I mean, there have been these moments of self-publishing breakthrough. Fifty Shades of Gray was probably the first truly gigantic global bestseller, the erotic novel series. Like those are the ones I think really broke through. And that was originally self-published, I think. But it doesn\u2019t seem to have fundamentally shifted the model. The big-bucks deals that you hear for first novels and so on are still with the publishing houses you expect to see. Because in the attention economy, after all, you know, it\u2019s crucially about how you steer people. And marquee outlets with big names that can secure favorable promotion deals with Amazon still have really considerable clout. Audiobooks have changed the game somewhat in that people really are very heavily invested in those.<\/p>\n
CA: Is English hegemonic in the publishing industry? Or has China\u2019s presence at Frankfurt risen over time, as a reflection of its growing global power?<\/p>\n
AT: I mean, the way in which people talk about this is really fascinating. English is still \u201cthe great source hub.\u201d A source hub, basically it\u2019s a little bit like the dollar\u2019s functioning with the global foreign currency system. The vast majority of translations are into English or out of English. So English is the hub, and other language literatures basically rotate around that, right? So there\u2019s very substantial translation of Korean or Japanese or Spanish texts into English. And the traffic between the spokes is much, much more modest. And it is going to be interesting to see how that works. Because the one area where there really can\u2019t be any serious argument about AI\u2019s extraordinary utility is in translation. And that may begin to change this\u2014like the possibility of making moves between Korean and Spanish or Chinese and Spanish is tantalizing and quite dramatic, I think.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s role is as a large buyer and a relatively cautious exporter so far. So they buy and they pay well, in my experience, for the rights for English-language texts. And it\u2019s an effect simply of the scale of the market there, which is gigantic. And book culture is a powerful and significant thing among educated Chinese people. They like to buy books. They have beautiful bookstores across the whole country. You have a series of very, very well-selected, impressive bookstores. So I think the bottom line is that English remains hegemonic as the source language, but Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and to a lesser extent Chinese are increasing their presence and their bargaining power in this market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 7,000 exhibitors from over 100 countries are expected to participate in this year\u2019s Frankfurt Book Fair.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,4229,1398,96,89293,22729,145,89294,89295,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-207297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-economics","10":"tag-education","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-fp-insider","13":"tag-fp-weekend","14":"tag-germany","15":"tag-homepage_regional_europe","16":"tag-ones-and-tooze-fp-insider","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}