Frankfurt Book Fair 2018 Day 1: Characters Drive Publishing!

Georgia Made by Characters shows off the unique alphabet of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018 Guest of Honor and reminds us all that characters drive publishing!

The Georgian alphabet, called the Anbani, is made up of unique, flowing characters and is “an integral part of the country’s expressive language” according to Simone Buhler, Head of the Guest of Honor Program at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Her overview of this year’s Guest of Honor, Georgia, is here.

The exhibit, called Georgia Made by Characters, is centered around this unique alphabet and features not just books, but artifacts, films, and even DJs. As this digital version of Georgia Made by Characters shows, the Georgian characters promise to be colorful, playful and inspirational!

MarkLogic at Frankfurt Book Fair

MarkLogic’s theme for the Frankfurt Book Fair is “Go Beyond Your Content” and we will be talking about how publishers are investing in data to connect their content and customers. This is a key strategy for the future of information delivery. It can speed product development, create better products, and deepen the connection to the customer to build trust.

To convey this important message, we are bringing our own characters to the fair. On our stand in Hall 4.2 L94, we have three MarkLogic solution partners: FontoXML, Orbis Technologies RSuite and EBCONT Enterprise Technologies.

And during the fair we will be hosting ‘Office Hours’ with five publishing industry experts. These ‘characters’ all have hands-on experience with the many digital transformations of the industry and are here to answer your questions and provide advice on what is next.

STM Association 50th Anniversary

The STM Association Frankfurt Conference was, this year, a special meeting to celebrate the association’s 50th anniversary. Through the many changes in the industry, the STM Association has stayed true to the mission of advancing science through the publishing and sharing of scientific research.

The many characters at this year’s STM Frankfurt Conference echoed these themes. Daniel Ropers gave his “Impressions of a Newcomer” after one year as SpringerNature’s CEO. He joined SpringerNature because “nothing is more important than advancing knowledge in the world.” Sharing his initial expectations, Ropers thought that processes would be stable and the role of the publisher well understood. Upon finding a complex network system with many players and huge challenges, Ropers said that “this is more exciting than I thought!” His take is to promote cooperation in a collaborative effort to re-establish publishing as a partner to the entire scientific research system. This may be a difficult effort, but “the rewards will be huge” and will contribute to the “shared purpose of advancing the world.”

Ropers’ comments were echoed by the many other characters at the event. His fellow CEOs hit on the major issues of the trust and the role of publishers and their brands. David Lefer from the NYC Tandon School of Engineering talked about innovation and stressed problem-finding, not problem-solving. And members of Elsevier Pride, C4Disc and the Workplace Equity Project stressed not just the role of diversity but structures to promote it.

Congratulations STM Association on your 50th! And here’s to the next 50 years!

FontoXML – Helping Create Your Characters

Joining MarkLogic at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018 is our partner FontoXML. Established in 2012, their mission is to “make it easy for everyone to create structured and intelligent content.” Fonto’s core product is the FontoXML editor. This intuitive, web-based editor helps authors easily create structured and intelligent content. Working with systems that manage intelligent content (for instance MarkLogic as in this video), FontoXML Editor is often the ‘friendly face’ to the content. It is also a powerful tool that enables authors to access, create and edit content with any schema – and performs real-time validation to ensure the content’s quality and easily handles annotations, links and rich media.

According to Taeke Kuyvenhoven, Co-founder and CCO of FontoXML, customers in many industries (publishing but also pharma, aviation, legislation, manufacturing) are moving from unstructured to structured authoring to promote re-use, adaptability and multi-channel publishing. But the efforts have typically been focused on a “small group of technical writers.” The larger group of “occasional writers and subject matter experts” was left out of the picture and continued to use traditional editors. Fonto’s ease of use makes it easy to include this larger group by providing the right structured authoring tools at the right time. Authors can create, use structure intuitively, and tag content as they write and then participate in the review and revision process without ever having to know the schema or edit at the tag level. Bringing these authors into the process can greatly reduce the editorial effort and speed the development of content.

Based on this powerful editor, FontoXML has created several industry and task specific apps. Most notable for publishers is Review App. This tool enables users to review content, collaborate on the review process, share comments, proposals, questions, and answers, and mange the entire process including author participation. Taeke sees demand for these tools increasing as “publishers and everyone seeking to create intelligent content continue to seek new and better ways to speed the process while maintaining high quality standards.”

Come by the MarkLogic stand 4.2 L94 and get a demo of FontoXML and hear firsthand from Taeke what publishers are doing to create better content.

The Characters of Publishing

For this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, MarkLogic has invited five real characters to hold ‘Office Hours’ on our stand. For two hours each day, we will be featuring one of these experts who, in their work with and for publishers, have participated in nearly every phase of publishing’s digital transformation.

On Wednesday Oct 10, David Worlock will be holding his office hours from 1300-1500. David is a renowned industry expert and has forgotten more about publishing than most of us ever knew! There at every major shift in the industry, David is both a trusted advisor to and a feared interrogator of CEOs and strategists across the industry. At the recent Outsell Signature Event, Stephen Carter, CEO of Informa, attempted to pro-actively prevent David’s tough questions by “being comprehensive.” But the tough questions came, and all Stephen was able to achieve was the creation of the phrase “being Worlocked.”

I asked David what was on his mind for this Book Fair and he shared these thoughts:

• Publishers are more and more aware that they “need to get an underlying data strategy in place if they are to weather digital change and the competition for attention in a networked world.”
• Threats to the industry are many but “those who know how they handle their underlying data resources have more confidence that they can pivot successfully to face both as they occur.”
• Despite some notable exceptions, there is a feeling in the industry that “though margins are flat, it is important now to invest in R&D to meet the challenges of producing information products and services in an AI / machine learning, robotic processing world.”

Come take your turn in the hot seat and sign up with a time for David or any of our experts here.

Visit MarkLogic!

MarkLogic is once again in Hall 4.2, the center of all things technical and innovative at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Come on by 4.2 L94, have a chat with our MarkLogic Partner solution teams, get some sage advice from our experts, and tell us where you think the future of publishing is going. See you there!

Blogging from Frankfurt, Matt Turner, CTO Media & Manufacturing

P.S. If you are online following along…stay tuned for Day 2!