The long view from the Frankfurt Book Fair

The eBook industry is still vibrant and rapidly evolving, but appears to be less frenzied than it was two years ago. The current, more mature market is exploring the intricacies of the book publishing industry.

Within the past two years, book publishers have begun embracing new ideas of book production and developing new business models. And Booktype, our open source platform for publishing, is ready to help.

We recently returned from the 66th Frankfurt Book Fair, where we met with many people involved in self publishing: not just authors and illustrators, but also proofreaders, distributors, service providers and other industry experts.

The people we met with were interested in Booktype, especially the community features of the platform. The social and collaborative tools we’re working on will allow writers and editors to stay in touch.

Booktype 2.0 will also help them make money. We are paving the way to a marketplace where users offer proofreading, art design and more services to other members of the community.

We also saw in Frankfurt that, while publishers understand the industry is changing, they do want to remain open to existing ways of working.

For example, we know that writers are used to composing in Word, and that designers often prefer inDesign for creating artwork. So even though Booktype already makes it easy to write and edit within the platform, Booktype 2.0 will be able to import Word documents and export them to an InDesign compatible format.

The people we spoke to at Frankfurt were also very interested in how Booktype allows for online editing, management and monitoring of a book’s progress. We’ll speak about these benefits and more as we approach the release of Booktype 2.0.

Until then you can learn more about what Booktype does at www.sourcefabric.org or get started today with Booktype at www.booktype.pro.

We look forward to attending the Frankfurt Book Fair again next year.