'2011 London Book Fair' by Andrew Whittaker

The growth of digital

There was a certain end-of-term informality about the final day of the 2011 London Book Fair (LBF) on Wednesday. After 72 hours of meetings, greetings and tweetings, the exhibitors drew breath and by and large seemed to call it a success (and a welcome tonic to last year’s ash cloud disappointments).

I spent the day meeting with the aggregators that help Thorogood sell their books in digital format around the world. In common, they talked about how rapidly the ebooks market is evolving; both in terms of buying habits and in the processes used for converting books to digital format.

We’ve been selling PDF files of Thorogood titles for some time. And now we’re adding epub format files to the catalogue – so that Thorogood books can be read on ebook reading devices like the Kindle and its competing cousins. For us, and for the rest of the publishing world, the next big leap forward lies in adapting more visually-led books for the digital world. Art books, graphic novels and titles like our own Speak the Culture series are much harder to marry with the demands of digital.

However, there were firms at LBF promoting new software that purported to do the job. So, envisage a book displayed rather like a glorified app – one that can bolster content with video clips, audio and links, and which can display rich artwork and photographs within the flow of the text. Sounds impressive – and the samples I saw were very promising indeed. It remains to be seen whether the book buying public will accept the reduction of their weighty, elegant design-led books down to an electronic image in quite the same way that they seem to be doing with text.

Andrew Whittaker

Spring Break

Happy Spring/Easter break – and for Twitter followers – Happy Tweaster, Tweetsters!!

Easter is the first real chance of the year to grab a holiday. A lot of people do just that and head off to the slopes or the sun, to the country or the coast.

It gives a chance to ‘recharge your batteries’, as we like to describe the process of emotional rebalancing that a break from work can provide.

As well as a physical change in routine and the variation that a change of location can provide to the senses, it is worth thinking of topping up mental reserves through the effects of good books! It doesn’t matter whether you are Kindle-ing or paper-ing your reading – they all count.

Reading does affect mental well-being – a recent letter in The Times pointed out that in cases of mental health problems, doctors would do well do ask patients how many books they were reading – and on the answer, ‘none!’ they should suggest that it would help to read more.

So, if holidays can give a physical rest, then mental reconnection is just as important. And why not look at ways of improving your approach to life?

Two books this year that have given me pleasure in this dimension are:
How to Live:Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers by Sarah Bakewell – a literary tart of a name, you could say; and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton – who usually hits the right philosophical ‘button’.

Oh! And if you want anything to sharpen your business thinking and freshen up your thought processes for the return to the office, then anything published by Thorogood would help – maybe for starters anything written by Barrie Pearson or by John Adair.

Neil Thomas

The London Book Fair-Bounce Back or Stay-Away event?!

The London Book Fair starts next week and runs from 11th to the 13th of April, inclusive. It has been going for forty years. Will it last another forty?

Last year’s event featured The Ash Cloud, which sounds like a new work of fiction by a popular American author dissecting a family being torn apart by feuding, after the family home is burnt to the ground. Film, Paperback, translation and foreign rights will all be available at this year’s fair!

Actually, the impact of flight cancellation and disruption blighted the 2010 London Book Fair and prevented many exhibitors and visitors from attending. It will be interesting to see if it has bequeathed a legacy of non-attendance to this year. Questions that people will have been asking ahead of booking up are, undoubtedly, ‘did my not going last year impact me or my business?’

Sure enough, Thorogood will have its key people there again this year, using the networking opportunity afforded by the Book Fair to meet up with new and old contacts in the service industries that surround publishing: the agents, the aggregators, the distributors, the rights sales people and so forth.

What of the future though? If only a few more each year decide they can live without going, it would quickly lose its appeal. I also wonder at what point a virtual exhibition will replace it. Instead of traipsing round aisle after aisle of a big book fair, you will be iPadding around an electronic exhibition, stopping to look at any onscreen ‘stall’ that appeals and to have impromptu or pre-arranged ‘face time’ with people you want to meet; and ditto having video-linked web meetings with people you want/need to do business with.

Will all exhibitions go that way? This might be unlikely as some products you need to touch and test, for example furniture or yachts. Will Book Fairs go that way? Why not? After all, despite years of thinking that the bookshop was the only way to sell books, the publishing industry now realises that it isn’t. For books, more than many other products, bookshops and book fairs may become a thing of the past. One thing for sure is that it is going to be interesting to see if the 2011 London Book Fair is a bounce back or stay-away event.

Neil Thomas

CPD - after hours

Many of Thorogood’s incredible range of Special Reports now qualify for CPD.

Take for example the recent Report published on Mediation, authored by Alex Bevan, Guy Hollebon and Lucinda Bromfield. Not only do you get real insights into this increasingly vogue area of professional development, but also you can use it to obtain CPD hours.

It is worth your while looking through the whole range of these Reports to grasp their range and their value to you in your daily professional life and your professional development.

The main idea behind the Reports has always been to examine a key area of practical importance and to get analysis and understanding of the key issues as well as techniques for overcoming problems and avoiding pitfalls.

Thanks to Thorgood’s work on distance learning, through its sister company Falconbury, it realised that CPD could be applicable to these Special Reports and the mechanisms to achieve it could be set in place. Thorogood has sought to apply CPD qualification to all relevant Reports and will do so, similarly, on Reports published in the future.

As a further feature for professional firms – you can now subscribe to our Reports service – this makes all the Reports in their latest editions available for download within your firm and all users can utilise the CPD process when reading them.

Please look at the Reports we publish in the light of this new CPD enhancement.

World's Business and Culture

Companies are chasing each other all over the world, trying to outdo their competitors in the search for more customers and cheaper suppliers.

The successful ones know that a better cultural understanding leads to better commercial results with buyers and sellers in ‘foreign’ countries.

Not surprisingly, Thorogood’s practical guide The World’s Business Cultures and how to unlock them is the handbook of choice for the savvy international trader.

The Chartered Management Institute recognised this in shortlisting The World’s Business Cultures for its Management Book of the Year, 2010.

It didn’t quite win as the prize went, predictably, to the long-established US management guru, Henry Mintzberg. Quite why escapes me! And, after all, Americans are the ones who would benefit most from reading Thorogood’s book on the business cultures of various countries!!

Neil Thomas

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