 Hello and welcome to this joint production of the Indian Writers Forum and news click today we are joined by Mr. Yurgen Bos, he is the President and CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair and he is here in Delhi for the 32nd International Publishers Congress. Thank you very much sir for your time. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I was, since I work at the Indian Writers Forum where we talk and discuss issues around freedom of speech and expression I was looking at the history, the recent history really of the Frankfurt Book Fair and it seems that you really had to walk a very tightrope when it came to first the Chinese delegation then Rushdie's invitation and then I think the Turkish delegation. So how do you walk this very tightrope? Actually it's the DNA of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It always has three dimensions. There's the economic dimension, it's about selling rights. There's the cultural dimension, the reading, the literature festival, the cultural festival, but there's always a political side because books and writers, the people behind the books are per se political when they describe the world as it is and actually the history of the Frankfurt Book Fair goes back like a thousand years and the first moment it became political when there was censorship and this happened already in the 15th century when actually the Catholic Church tried to censor what was printed by Gutenberg. So Frankfurt, the book fair, which was founded in a smaller town about a hundred kilometers away from Frankfurt, had to move to Frankfurt because this was a free city which belonged to the emperor and where a lot of trade was possible and no censorship. So it's the DNA of the book fair being political. I like the interviews that I was looking at where you say that Frankfurt Book Fair is one marketplace and I'm quoting where it has been about the people and basically getting groups of people from across the world. It is the largest book fair in the world but there is a contentious issue of selecting and and and arranging these these so how do you how do you make that selection how do you go through that decision that the largest representation is possible? No actually it's not like we would create who's coming yeah people come because it's this big it's this marketplace it's this platform to talk to each other and we have people from 150 nations coming and there might be book fairs which have a large attendance but it's about selling books. Frankfurt is about intellectual property and it's also this cultural dimension so it's that the publishers would bring their authors to Frankfurt so we don't know what to expect it can be Arnold Schwarzenegger yeah it could be Salman Rushdie it could could be anybody but on the other hand we do have a responsibility for our book fair so we choose some writers we choose politicians and invite them to come to Frankfurt because there's a certain direction in this liberal humanitarian in the history of Aufklärung enlightenment which is very important that's our tradition so if you have a country who says our official delegation like China brings these writers then we would also invite writers which might be controversial so we always try to balance yeah so this is our role actually to balance and actually bring people together but balancing is a difficult few instances where it's a little more specific now again like two years ago we had invited Salman Rushdie to speak at our opening press conference which was a very important for me because at that time we have the feeling that there's a lot more censorship in the world again there's a lot more populistic politics in the world again yeah it's in Europe you see it in Poland you see it in Hungary you see it in many countries you see it in North America you see it everywhere it's populistic and populistic means that people don't listen anymore and then what we think it's about acceptance we do not have to tolerate other people we have to accept the other viewpoint so it seemed for me logical to have Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt because he had a different view and he spoke up and then he came and got into this in the middle of this these political religious discussions yeah so he seemed to be the most prominent person I could get which is a symbol for freedom of speech in fact in that particular festival he said that the guardians of freedom of speech are to be found in publishing but I just like to and there's another comment that he made at the he supported the writers protest that happened here in India several writers felt that there was an impingement on their freedom to write with the rise of the populist governments elsewhere we've seen such a thing here in India are you aware of that that the fact that he also at the festival supported the movement here yes sure and but it's not a typical Indian problem you can see this everywhere and this week I'm also going to speak tomorrow actually about a self-censorship so it doesn't look like censorship but sometimes people are afraid to speak up yeah or people especially as we said in populistic countries where you suddenly get into economic trouble as well yeah and you start thinking do I have to publish this it's going to bring me into trouble it's not doing harm to me but even it might hurt my economic interest but that's already censorship isn't it yeah if you think this way and what's happening in India it's also I think there's a a stadium where people sometimes are afraid that when they speak up they should be quiet yeah it'll sort of stifle other publishing areas do you do you share that concern actually right now I didn't didn't understand and you think the global corporations global corporations like amazon yeah sort of there's this fear that it must be etc here's for instance independent publishers work in indian context for instance there's host of publishers and in fact we do a number of interviews with independent publishers but i'm sure they find out and some of them have told me that they find a place in your book fair for instance that yeah we have these other places yeah do you think it is no I don't think so because usually you see the rise of large corporations and then they break up again it seems to be like a rule when you remember IBM for many years or what happened to these huge corporations on the one hand I do believe this will happen to these as well in one point of time on the other hand I think that there will be political decisions actually to to break up these huge conglomerates and the third thing is actually I think independent publishing will be there forever yeah because they are the ones who identified in new voices the young horses without the the independent ones the smaller ones there will be no huge conglomerates yeah because these conglomerates lose all their power then they have to buy again an independent a young independent actually to get new energy yeah it's a strange world in publishing yeah it's not the huge ones which are making with which which are building up the osus it's the independence they're building them up and then the also of the two books moved to a conglomerate and the same is happening in the internet yeah yeah it is but actually if you if you boil it down to not to the medium not to the book but to the people to the author and the readers or to the publisher translators there are a lot of people in this value chain yeah we work on storytelling if you think of it only a storytelling and it doesn't matter whether you there's a printed book whether there's an electronic book whether there's an audio book whether there's video streaming it's always storytelling yeah so if you focus on the people and that's what we're doing in frankfurt we try to focus on everybody in in this economic value chain but also if you think we have about 10 000 journalists in five days coming yeah but and everybody tells his own story about what he's seeing about the people he's seeing about the stories in the books and that's what it's so important and that's why we have to change ours because the people are changing all the time and in my 30 years in the industries i've seen so many things coming up and i when i started i still had to learn type setting yeah and now says it's all digital yeah yeah we had the first xerox machine and everybody thought this is going to change our world everybody's going to steal our books because he can photocopy everything yeah then the first fax machine which seemed to be a threat the first audiobooks where we thought oh no this is going to take everything away so it's happening every seven years you see something new coming and but you see it somebody said it you have to see there's an opportunity not as a threat keeping that in terms of self-censorship and i think related to that is also the question of how certain mediums make news which were not ways in which you could make news earlier for instance the phenomenon of fake news yeah concepts which are in some ways new so how do you how do you see that actually everybody finds his own truth yeah and this is the problem yeah because if people want to believe what they're here yeah we call it now as you said fake news yeah but for some people it might be the truth because that's what they want to hear so the only thing we actually can do is educate the people we can we have to go into schools we have to tell people to have a critical mind which brings us back to Aufklärung to enlightenment yeah yeah this is so important now it's even more important yeah than ever people sometimes tend to make things try to simplify things but think nothing's simple nothing and if you understand that then you have to question everything my final question to you will i've actually spoken to a lot of publishers and i understand what how they feel about you know you're always translating some other other culture that you want to know off but it's not your own culture sometimes i mean not all the time but most of the times this is sort of the strategy in which and then you want to bring that that culture and tell your people hey this is this is something exciting that that i think i should share with you but do you think that this particular ethos is is is shared around the publishing world and if it's not how do you with at the at the book fair see this yeah yeah on the one hand you see there's not one publishing there's a lot of different there's educational publishing children books whatever you see and i think every book opens a new world to somebody so translation is substantial but on the other hand we have a problem because everybody's going for the one bestseller and usually you buy english from the english world and translate into your language it's a one-way direction yeah books being translated into american english it's in the north american market is less than three percent it's nothing in germany it's more than 30 percent which are translations i'm in india with its 17 languages it's another challenge you even have to do all the translating here so i i i do believe translation is substantial luckily we have a lot of passionate people which brings us back to the independence yeah we'll try to find their niche and their niche might be translating from a certain language where they know the authors where they would travel to though there are a lot of specialized agents in our world and actually there's a lot of translation funding around yeah so what we even we ourselves have a sister company which is a not-for-profit it's an association which is focusing on translations from asia africa and latin america because these three regions actually there are not enough translations in the market so we try to find the money and to subsidize these translations and i've been to the daily book fair years ago not this year but it's some time ago and i've been to to the kakuta book fair which is a long time ago because then they everything burned down that the next year so you know how long ago this is yeah so it's a long time ago yeah no no no again it's always about the people and i like to be here because a lot of friends was indian publishers so for me it's a place where i can meet people but what's very different from frankfurt is in frankfurt you cannot buy books yeah and here it's a huge market yeah yeah people tend to buy discounted books yeah and that that's a big difference so you're right it's a marketplace it's like a carnival on the one hand and but i think frankfurt is more like a mixture from the chapeau literature festival and then there's this our backbone is that the right straight where it's very quiet and all little tables no carnival at all so this is very different thank you so much thank you so much it's been a pleasure