With the professional days of the Frankfurt Book Fair wrapping up, fair director Juergen Boos shared that the annual event saw a rise in professional visitors this year, with preliminary numbers showing some 114,000 trade visitors, up from 105,000 in 2023, and a 7.5% increase in exhibitors.
It was “definitely a good fair,” said Brad Rose, VP of content strategy at Hoopla, the digital library service. Rose was seeking to sign up more international content for Hoopla, which services more than 11 million regular users in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
“I’m now finding that I’m getting more yeses than before,” Rose said. “I think the international community is beginning to better understand just how diverse the community we serve really is.” He added that that contrary to many people’s expectations, the most popular non-English content on the site is in French and German, rather than Spanish.
Spencer Ruchti, events manager at Third Place Books, attended the fair courtesy of a fellowship with Books Across Borders. “Attending Frankfurt, you see thousands of people meeting at tables at various booths, and suddenly you see how the sausage is made—how foreign rights are acquired, how smaller publishers are brought on for distribution, how books are produced for TV and film,” he said. “A lot of those conversations start or continue at Frankfurt during and after hours.”
Reflecting on the fair, he said, “One thing that immediately becomes clear is that other countries value cultural crossover—in this case, literature in translation—far more than the U.S.” But he was also concerned by some conversations that were foregrounded at this year's fair. “AI’s role in 'content' creation and adaptation has been a central topic of dozens of panels. It’s disappointing to hear prominent decision-makers in American publishing toy with the idea of replacing the labor of literary translators with AI,” he said. “It’s a dangerous slope, and I don’t think they see where the road ends beyond a tighter bottom line.”
A Bird’s Eye View
While the fair’s visitor numbers have grown, Boos acknowledged that the fair is still adjusting to a post-Covid reality. One aspect of that reality is a decline in the number of exhibitor booths (despite the bump in exhibitors) compared to pre-pandemic levels.
"Stand-wise, we are still below 2019," Boos said, chalking the decline up to the consolidation of publishing companies in France and Germany, as well as budget cuts by the German government, which stopped NGOs and cultural institutions, such as the Goethe Institute, from exhibiting at the fair. Nevertheless, said Boos, the cuts are not likely to curtail Frankfurt's participation at other fairs abroad.
Boos noted that, in recent years, the fair has been trying to balance its role serving the trade while also accommodating growing interest from the public. As a result, Saturday attendance will be restricted to 60,000 people, in what Boos called "an experiment" in crowd management.
This year’s fair has inaugurated a new pavilion dedicated to programming around the “new adult” publishing—covering romantasy, urban fantasy, and other ascendent genres—and is offering a combination of events for the public in German and English. "The young people are reading in English now, and, accordingly, we’re featuring more English-language authors and content,” Boos said. He admitted that the popularity of new adult publishing took the fair by surprise: “I had to change my perspective there, and I didn't have it in strategic planning."
Looking back on this year’s fair, Boos said he now clearly sees the interconnectedness of various media industries. "In the past, you had language rights, film rights, game rights, and we had to do business in between," he remarked. "Now, where you sell in one format, there’s a domino effect." He noted the vibrancy of the new books-to-film rights center, which hosted more than 100 tables on Friday.
Looking to the future, Boos saw two related trends. First, he's observed an interest in emerging markets, particularly in Eastern European and central Asian countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan—"which before," Boos remarked, "identified with Russia, but are now finding their own identity—and they find it in the books." Second, he saw “uncertainty” surrounding elections in Germany, the U.S., and elsewhere around the world. “In some countries, they see books as a threat and the first thing elected officials do is raise the VAT on books and cut funding to the cultural sectors," he said. "We, as the fair, see the book as a necessity to keep democracy alive."
