White Space, Frankfurt Book Fair starts soon online

This week I am thinking about the Guardian and the Hay Festival where there is a sponsored promotion for the Sony Reader. It seems to me that the print journalists have yet to report this in full. Also this week there is a Book Expo in New York complete with a Digital Zone. I reported on the London Bookfair for OhmyNews (still on the Science and Technology page) and put some of the talks on YouTube. Something is happening here not only about eBooks but in attitudes to print. The Espresso is a token of a change in digital printing. Exactly when this happened is a bit uncertain, but maybe things will be clearer around the time of Frankfurt.

Stands at Book Expo
Aptara 3166
DNAML 3165
Endless Ideas 3159
Ingram 3162
Kindle 3160
Libre Digital 3164
Overdrive 3158
Sony 3161, 3163

Bernd Zipper organised the drupa Innovation Parc last year, concentrating on "Web-to-Print". Digital publishing is a way to take the content online as well as the admin and pre-press. Part of the problem for print journalists seems to be all the cultural assumptions around print. Frankfurt could be the place to sort some of this out.

The White Space project - "weiss-raum.com" - starts with the design of the printed page, the space for the type. It is not clear yet what will fill this space. the topic is print but mobile devices could be nearby.

Bernd Zipper comments

Many experts predict that print is close to death. I say: print as we have known it in the past is already dead. But print lives and grows. And it does so where print technologies make use of the new opportunities of the internet in production and marketing. Where the printed word is a powerful part of a synergetic media diversity. In the weiss'raum, this can be shown with practical examples already in use, or on the basis of concrete concepts for the future. Here, manufacturers are called upon to provide the crossmedial publication technology, media companies to implement integrated publication, those with an interest in the media and journalists to articulate their requirements. For them, the weiss'raum will be a meeting place and an inspiration.

So when did print "die"? Not very clear but maybe it has already happened as claimed or maybe it will not be recognised until October. The idea that print is now something else, part of communications based online, is attractive if well explained and easy to implement.