LBF Updates: U.K. Publishers Get Tech Solutions from Germany, Norway and the U.S.

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 4/16/2008 2:41:00 AM

‘How are other countries dealing with the technology issues that are facing all of us [in the U.K.]?’ That was the topic of discussion at Tuesday’s Digitisation: International Solutions panel at the London Book Fair. ‘The Americans are probably leading the way,’ said panel moderator Francis Bennett, chairman of Ehaus. But as the hour-long discussion showed, Norway and Germany are also implementing innovative ways to handle online bookselling, online book searching, and the standardization of e-book formats.

Arlid Bjorn-Larsen, v-p of marketing for the Norwegian online book source Norli, admitted his country’s book market is small. However, that compactness has helped foster cooperation between booksellers and book publishers, resulting in a books database that contains metadata for all books published in Norway, which is used by publishers and booksellers. All Norway’s major bookselling chains agreed on one version of a ‘browse inside’ program, which Bjorn-Larsen said would launch within the next eight weeks.

Ronald Schild, managing director of the MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, a service company for the German book trade owned by Börsenverein, the German publishers’ and booksellers’ association, spoke of Germany’s solutions to tech challenges. His new program, Libreka, offers an alternative to Google Book Search—which Schild stressed was important because there is great risk in ‘letting Amazon and Google dominate the market.’ So far, Libreka has signed up more than 700 publishers, has received more than 60,000 books for scanning, and contains roughly 20,000 books available for full text searching. There is no cost to publishers.