Frankfurt book fair focuses on bevy of media

Frankfurt's annual book fair is celebrating its 60th year with a star-studded lineup of contemporary literary greats, as well as a look at the written word's jump from the printed page to the digital screen.

Frankfurt's annual book fair is celebrating its 60th year with a star-studded lineup of contemporary literary greats, as well as a look at the written word's jump from the printed page to the digital screen, organizers said on Wednesday.

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International best-seller Paolo Coelho, as well as Nobel laureates Guenter Grass and Orhan Pamuk, are among the guests at the five-day Frankfurt Book Fair, which opens Oct. 14. The featured nation is Turkey.

Alongside its traditional highlights on education and fighting illiteracy, this year's fair will focus on the impact of new media and electronic readers on the traditional printed literary world. Both Sony Corp. and Amazon will be presenting their electronic readers, the Reader and Kindle, respectively.

"What we are now seeing is something new," book fair director Juergen Boos told a news conference. "It is no longer the computer that is being simulated, it is the book."

Yet Boos stressed his belief that electronic books will not replace their printed cousins, but enhance them by offering new formats where sentences are combined with visual images to cater to a fresh generator of readers.