News

Book Expo America · BEA begins today in New York. This book fair is a display window and meeting point for the American publishing world.

The fair is bringing together under one roof all the largest and smaller players in the American publishing world. International publishing houses will also be there: at last year’s edition over 1,500 publishers from 32 different countries exhibited at the BEA. And the trade visitors came from 88 countries.

This year, the event expects to have still more foreign visitors, since many will take advantage of the BEA to hold meetings they missed at the recently passed London Book Fair due to the volcanic ash cloud.

This year the Ute Körner Literary Agent is represented at the BEA by Sandra Rodericks, who will use her stay to meet up with colleagues from the North American publishing houses.

Spain and its publishing industry will over the course of this edition be in the sights of the trade fair: in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Gremio de Editores de España (Publishers Guild of Spain) and the Instituto de Comercio Exterior (Overseas Trade Institute) a symposium has been organised to take place during the week under the title BEA Global Market Forum: Spanish Publishing.

The BEA affords a unique opportunity for access to a concentrated source of information about the new trends in the North American publishing sector. With an annual turnover of some 40.4 thousand million dollars (2008), the American book market is the largest in the world.

There has been a very notable upward trend in school and technical books. Particularly positive was the sale of digital books: technical books invoiced $451 million, while the generalist publishers invoiced $113 million, though the generalists are expecting a further 10% increase from e-book sales.

In the sphere of rights publishing, English remains as ever the most important business language. Of translations into the Spanish language, for example, between 60% and 70% are of books originally written in English.

Link: BEA Global Market Forum: Spanish Publishing

Link: www.bookexpoamerica.com