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The director of an EU-wide children’s literature project has said Europe must continue to work with the UK after Brexit.
Sylvie Vassallo, head of Transbook, a European children’s book network, has said she “absolutely” wanted to involve the UK in future projects. “Europe is more than a political entity and we want to work together,” she told The Bookseller. “The UK is part of the European community and it has a strong history of publishing children’s books. Our other European partners have a lot to learn from the UK.”
Transbook, funded by the EU's Creative Europe Programme, said European projects would not benefit from excluding the UK.
Vassallo was speaking at a conference to mark four years of Transbook, which helps publishers and illustrators move into the digital sphere, as well as form partnerships across borders.
The project has seven international partners, one of whom is Sam Arthur, the co-founder and c.e.o. of Nobrow. Arthur has run ‘Pop-Up Lab’ workships in association with Transbook in the UK and said the project had reminded him of the importance of our “European cousins”. “Because of Transbook artists came to the UK from Europe and further afield and our illustrators and creators were influenced and inspired by them. The cross-pollination of ideas was wonderful.”
The other publishing partners are Cplj-93 (from France), Literárne Informačné Centrum (Slovakia), Art Basics for Children (Belgium), Tantagora (Spain), Europäische Kinder (Germany) and Hamelin (Italy).
One of the big themes of the conference was economic models, and how publishers still haven’t found a way to make money from digital children’s books or apps.
Arthur said Nobrow “probably” won’t continue to make apps, even though their Professor Astrocat app has been downloaded tens of thousands of times. “With apps, you have to invest in good programmers and it is so difficult to make the money back… With Astrocat we at first offered the app for free and had really good numbers in terms of downloads. But how do you get people to pay in the long term? And how do you keep the app current? Once it comes off the main [app store] menu it kind of disappears. I’m not sure in the long term that it’s a good business model.”
Julie Stephen Cheng, a French illustrator, added: “You have to be really committed to a digital project to get funding. Creating an app is really expensive and the relationship with producers is complicated, they are attracted to new projects and can abandon old ones.”
However, Miroslava Vallova, publisher at Literárne Informačné Centrum, said publishers need to keep in step with the digital world.
“We are really on the verge of something new [in publishing] and if we don’t take a step now we may lose out,” she said. “It is thanks to Transbook that we have been able to work towards our future presence in the digital world and participate in events around Europe. For us it is a vital part of our future.”