Guardian reports Frankfurt, online and from San Francisco

First the facts. Nothing in my print version Guardian this morning that I could find about Google Editions. As reported in the Bookseller daily email a couple of days ago this was announced at the O'Reilley Tools of Change Frankfurt event ( #TOCFrankfurt ) as was the timescale of before the middle of 2010. I have found online a report from Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco. Now a comment. This is not unusual. The Guardian quite often seems to present one view of the world for an online audience and quite another for the print audience who pay for the limitation. Digital news is often not reported in print. The global Kindle is on the business page ahead of Monday availability. The advance news was in a photo caption linked to two pages of knocking copy reprinted from the New Yorker. Oh dear I may be going off topic. Continues on readG blog.

The thing is that my expectation of the Guardian books review section tomorrow having any technology reporting from Frankfurt is quite low. Even the news summary from the Bookseller has vanished. This literary world continues almost unchanged and something like TOC must come as a bit of a shock. Guessing from the available blogs found through Twitter there seems to be some sort of continuing tension.

Eoin Purcell gives more detail on the criticism of TOC from some publishers. As memory serves it was the software fans who first used email but now a lot of people do. So the O'Reilly experience could be interesting even for trade publishers.

I think the Google plans will change the way books are considered. The discussion around this will grow during 2010 and follow Kindle interest over the rest of 2009. There will be lots of interesting copy in the Bookseller. The email service is available free and there is a prize draw if you sign up.

Meanwhile still not much about the #weiss_raum . some links to podcasts but I cannot find free audio translation. The drupa innovation parc was not well reported at the time given the interest in machinery although Web-to-Print has since been widely discussed in UK media. Maybe something similar will happen as Frankfurt is clearly a technology show.