I was reading about how book sellers in Frankfurt where judging how popular books where going to be by how many where stolen…
The Frankfurt Book Fair has an indicator to help publishers gauge public interest in the new offerings presented at the annual exhibition — the unofficial “most stolen book” index.
Bild am Sonntag and Germany’s ZDF television have come up with lists of titles most stolen from 15 leading German publishers’ stands set up in the Frankfurt trade fair grounds.
“The most-stolen books are usually the most-sold later on,” Claudia Hanssen of the Goldmann Verlag publishing house told Bild am Sonntag newspaper, which published a list of the 10 most stolen German-language books this year.
“They’re the popular ones and are most likely to end up on the best-seller lists,” Hanssen added.
The German translation of Nobel Peace prizewinner Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” outlining the dangers of global warming, featured among the mainly German titles on the list.
More than 100,000 people attended the book fair, which ended Sunday. There were 7,448 exhibitions where publishers from 108 countries presented some 400,000 different books, videos and other products.
[Reuters]
This made me wonder, is there an equivalent festival in the U.S.? And do they track stolen books as well? Or are they typically American and worried about losing the money from the un-paid for book…
And that said… if I was publishing a German language book, and wanted to make a splash. I’d hire people to steal my book while at the festival… so publishers (and reporters) thought my book was a hit. But considering my common spelling and grammar errors… I think that it wouldn’t work. Common sense would win.
Leave a Reply