It’s that time of year again. On October 12, the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off, the publishing industry’s annual pilgrimage to Germany, where rights are traded, connections are made, and more than 150,000 trade visitors, representing some 7,500 companies and 110 countries, come together to do (and to talk) business.

Then again, with the launch last year of its ambitious Frankfurt Academy, Frankfurt is never far off any more. From its roots as a once-a-year event, Frankfurt is quickly becoming a year-round platform, with a slate of affiliated international conferences, seminars, and other trips. And with a revamped, Web-based platform—the Mind Network—Frankfurt organizers have embraced the digital change now hitting the publishing industry, and harnessed it to extend its brand, its reach, and to promote an ongoing exchange of ideas within the publishing industry.

Despite a global recession, last year’s fair exceeded expectations, both in terms of attendance and in terms of energy, with a slate of new programs focusing on digital. And despite questions about the future of rights-based fairs in the digital age, traffic in the rights center surged, hitting record levels last year. As a result, in 2011 the Literary Agents & Scouts Center (LitAg), the meeting place for international literary agents, has expanded, with more square footage as well as a new meeting place in the StoryDrive Business Center for a range of creative industries, including books, games, films, and more.

The fair’s professional program is also expanding. The “Frankfurt Sparks” program is back, which includes a slate of speakers and brief, 20-minute presentations right on the show floor. There are new conferences on e-books, metadata, and children’s books. And back for its third year is the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference.

Meanwhile, many of the hot topics facing the industry are already up for discussion on the Frankfurt Web site, including a new campaign called “EveryThink.” EveryThink put 20 questions to 20 industry professionals—a great way to frame the forthcoming fair. Check out the full responses on the Frankfurt blog, but to whet your appetite for the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, we’ve included some clips.

Look for PW’s coverage of the fair online at PW.com and in our show daily at the fair, the Frankfurt Fair Dealer.

Lynette Owen, Pearson Education Ltd.

Q: Economic recession, natural disasters, and radical political change in many countries in the Middle East—and in publishing, the burgeoning sales of e-books and apps, a new generation of dedicated e-book readers, tablets like the Apple iPad. What’s the effect on rights trading?”

“Challenging times, indeed, and rights staff need to be sure that they are up to speed in a world that is fast moving, but not at a consistent pace from market to market,” notes Owen. The economic recession hit some markets for translation rights hard, she notes, while others, like China and Brazil (the latter to be featured at this year’s Rights Directors Meeting), have flourished. The digital scene is, of course, increasingly complex. “The Anglophone companies are undoubtedly leading the way in digital sales, but increasingly electronic rights are being requested as part of the grant of translation or same-language reprint rights. Whether to add those rights to a print license will depend very much on the maturity of the e-book market in the country concerned,” Owen notes. “It may be worth bearing in mind,” she adds, “that a reliable legitimate licensee in a market subject to electronic piracy may be a valuable ally.”

You can hear more from Lynette Owen at the seminar “Rights Express,” part of the Professional Program “Best Practice / New Ideas” on October 12, 2011, 9:15–11 a.m., Frankfurt Book Fair, Hall 4.C, Room Entente.

Nancy Feresten, National Geographic Children’s Books

Q: Kids are digital natives. But print books continue to be the standard for illustrated children’s books. What do you see as the future of children’s digital reading?

The fact that illustrated children’s books are lagging text-only e-books is “a simple accident of technology and distribution,” Feresten observes. When color reading devices are “flexible enough, inexpensive enough, and durable enough,” the balance will surely tip.

So what will children’s digital books look like in five years? “Who knows?” Feresten says. “In this case, though, ignorance really is bliss. It gives us license to listen to the market and use what we hear to invent.”

While much of the conversation is about disruption in publishing, she notes, the inventions still to come, if done right (and Feresten neatly outlines the way in her post), could be game-changers, while carrying forward the best of our print traditions, a world where “booksellers survive. Libraries survive. Printers retool to do short runs and make novelty books. You can cuddle up with your child and a good book at bedtime, carry home eight books from the library in one hand, watch proudly as your kid argues about a book with a friend across town or on the other side of the world, and wrap up the next book from a favorite author for Christmas, topping it with a bow. The children are happy reading in the car and in the dentist’s office waiting room. And no more giant school backpacks.”

You can see Nancy Feresten at the “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital” conference on October 11, 2011, 9 a.m. – 1 p.m., Frankfurt Book Fair, Hall 4.2, Room Dimension.

Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Director, Profile Books

Q: We can never be sure of the precise value of all those sales arising from chance encounters in bookshops, but serendipity is the great unsung hero of publishing. We’ve all been there, and probably found many of our favorite books by chance, in bookshops, passing time, scanning idly—but how about in the digital environment?

“There has been a great attempt at not just replicating the mechanisms of the physical world but surpassing them,” writes Bhaskar, noting things like recommendation engines, affiliate networks, and filtering systems. But, he adds, while these developments have made an abundance of culture more efficiently discoverable, at the same time we risk being trapped in a digital “echo chamber” where our choices are not challenged, but based on our pre-existing predilections.

“One thing is clear,” Bhaskar writes. “In an environment where chance is lost, where algorithms replace luck, and the keyword search term is king, metadata is the fulcrum of discovery. Metadata, in short, decides whether your book is found, and by extension whether your book is bought.”

Bad metadata means your book is invisible—and unpurchasable, he observes. Yet compared to many industries honing in on digital commerce, publishing lags in its understanding of SEO practices, metadata standards implementation, data collection, and analysis and systems investment. “Yes, most publishers have started all the above,” he says. “But we still haven’t fully figured out how to replace the experience of shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store—that sense of surprise, fun, the unexpected—and we haven’t worked out how we can create and capture those impulse buys. We are going to need to, and the answer will be found in a revolution of what metadata we supply, and how we supply it.”

You can see Michael Bhaskar at MetaData Perspectives 2011 on October 13, 2011, 9:30 a.m.–2 p.m., Frankfurt Book Fair, Conference Center, Room Illusion.

Mitch Joel, President, TwistImage

QMaybe the Internet changed much more than we think? The truth of the matter is that the publishing world has forever changed. It’s still changing. Not year by year, but moment by moment. What are publishers to do?

“It’s time to reboot publishing,” Joel observes. “Being on Twitter, having a Facebook Page, or uploading videos to YouTube is one thing: thinking about how to CTRL-ALT-DEL publishing and imagining what that will look like in the next two to five years is a whole other game. Tools and platforms are just that: tools and platforms. The real ‘game changers’ are those who figure how those tools and platforms will help them to reboot their business model.”

Mitch Joel will speak at the Tools of Change for Publishing TOC Frankfurt on October 11, 2011, 8:30 a.m.–6 p.m., Marriott Hotel Frankfurt.