We're bringing the printed page to life: Blippar at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Colum Elliott-Kelly is Head of Education at Blippar, where he enlightens international institutions of learning and publishers about Blippar, and how our visual browser can be used to enrich the learning experience by bringing printed pages to life via mobile phones, tablets and wearables.

He attended this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair – locally known as Die Buchmesse - with Blippar Consultant Laurie Benson, where the pair excited international teams about making their print output digitally interactive in a way people didn’t think possible even a few years ago.

Here he shares his experience in Frankfurt and his thoughts about how Blippar is revolutionising the publishing industry.

Blippar made its Frankfurt Book Fair debut when Laurie Benson and I attended in early October. We’ll be back. After all, the annual Fair represents an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate Blippar’s newly launched initiatives for bringing interactive print to the overlapping worlds of children’s and educational publishing.

It became clear over the course of the week that ‘Frankfurt’ is, for the publishing world, the standout trade show in the annual calendar. It is an opportunity for agents to pitch authors and book ideas, for distributors to strike licencing deals, for service providers to network, demonstrate and sell; it’s an opportunity for professionals of all stripes to attend seminars, presentations, roundtables and lectures; it’s an opportunity for everyone in the industry to know that everyone else in the industry is working, eating and socialising within a few square miles for the best part of an entire week.

This being our first Frankfurt, the Blippar delegation was keen to use the experience not only as an unmissable business development channel but also as an exploratory expedition, so as to perfect our approach to the 2015 event and those in years to come.

In both respects, Frankfurt was a huge success. Every publisher we spoke to was interested in Blippar as a tool for making the printed page come alive in ways few publishers thought possible only a couple of years ago. Marketing departments were excited by the opportunity to turn brochures into e-commerce channels; editors and creative teams were enthused by the possibilities for innovation and user experience afforded by Blippar.

Interactive text enables digital to complement the physical, something that will benefit the education world in countless ways. The printed page (in textbooks, for example) becomes a portal to the online content and instructional tools in which all educational publishers are investing so heavily. For students of all ages, that page becomes a richer, more engaging and ultimately more effective experience. And for the publisher it offers one key advantage: to invest in digital content knowing it will complement rather than compete against their print assets.

It was great to see the publishing community so instinctively receptive to Blippar’s visions – and to generate a huge amount of interest in working with us over the coming months and years. Alongside those successes, both Laurie and I jumped at the chance to attend seminars and presentations hosted by others within the space.

We heard from industry experts and thought leaders on digital business models, app development, children’s books, developments in textbook publishing and innovation in national education systems. Our Business Club pass allowed us to network and exchange ideas with these influential speakers in person. Again, the Blippar platform was enthusiastically received – sometimes with the same wide-eyed ‘no way!’ wonderment we’ve seen in so many young readers already.

As Blippar expands its presence across publishing sectors, building on its proven expertise in generating engagement and excitement and adapting that to books and to the classroom, we’ll be increasingly involved in events like Frankfurt. It’s hard to describe the scale of Die Buchmesse, an intense, creative, often chaotic (sometimes deliberately so) gathering of everyone with an interest in the transmission of ideas, stories and knowledge. Then again, it’s also hard to describe the scale of Blippar’s potential contribution to those businesses. Luckily, when we try, they smile, they call over their colleagues, and they engage. We can’t wait to help publishers generate the same reaction among their readers and customers.