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"Deals are still being done", reports the Financial Times in an opinion piece on this year's Frankfurt Book Fair. "To bankers, Frankfurt means one thing: finance. To the book world, it means the same," states the article.
"Every year, Germany’s financial capital hosts the world’s biggest book fair; a week of international rights negotiations and – for the luckiest authors – eight-figure advances. Seminars – this year’s theme was e-books, the future of publishing? – are a sideshow. Credit crunch or not, the book fair is about doing deals. And, so far, in the not-so-genteel world of publishing, deals are still being done.
"At two o’clock in the morning, the lobby of the Frankfurter Hoff hotel presented the usual scene: publishers comparing notes, drinking like Romans, surrounded by the underlit skyscrapers of Deutschland AG. There were also more countries present than ever. This year’s official guest, and perhaps next year’s emerging market crisis, was Turkey. (Iceland, this year’s emerging markets crisis, is guest in 2011.) And the Bertelsmann party was as lavish as ever, even if the rooms’ gilt ceilings had a Titanic-like splendour. Otherwise, it was business as usual."