As this year's London Book Fair wound down last Tuesday, some veterans worried about the venue for next year's show, citing both accessibility and intimacy among their concerns. The convention moves out of Olympia's smaller West Kensington location to the more remote confines of the Docklands neighborhood and the hyper-modern ExCel Center. But fair director Alistair Burtenshaw said in an interview that he remained unconcerned.
"We haven't wanted to flood people with information at this year's fair," he said. "But we need to spend the next 12 months informing the community [about things like] how to get to ExCel and how many great restaurants are there." (The fair was forced to move in part because a section of the Olympia space is expected to be taken over by a casino.) The show did, though, make a strong marketing push for the new location, with large posters prominent all around the hall.
LBF reported that overall attendance—which includes exhibitors, booksellers, agents and everyone else—had gone up more than 4% over last year, which would put the figures at more than 15,000 people for the three days. Audited figures are not expected for several weeks. (The LBF is owned by Reed Exhibitions, part of the company that owns PW.)
A double-digit increase in the percentage of international visitors in the rights area is largely believed to have come from an increase in Asian attendence. That increase does not directly affect floor activity, though, which may perhaps be why fair organizers considered requiring that rights directors taking space in the rights center lease exhibit space as well, before deciding against such a move.
The fair also benefited this year from the influx of some unusual startups, among which the most unusual may have been Storycode.com. The U.K. firm uses extensive customer surveys and mathematical algorithms to calculate similarities among books and, consequently, improve reader recommendations.
Burtenshaw also said he plans on beefing up academic and children's sections and adding "keynotes from major global figures in the industry" after a panel featuring HarperCollins's Jane Friedman and Hachette Livres' Tim Hely-Hutchinson drew several hundred people. It was a panel that had a number of highlights, including Friedman's admission that she believed the 3-for-2 discounting program, which Borders does in limited fashion, would soon be more common in the U.S. Friedman said the program devalues books.
