YSU TAKES PART IN FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR ON OCTOBER 10-14

We talked about the participation in the world fair, achievements and the challenges in the sphere with the director of YSU publishing house Karen Grigoryan.

Mr. Grigoryan told us that before being involved in Frankfurt book fair the representatives were to participate in two large-scale programs. The fist was “Fellowship Programme” the aim of which was to support publishing houses of different countries, help them find new ties and carry out experience exchange. The second was “Invitation Programme” within the scope of which the representatives of various publishing houses took part in the competition and a few selected ones were to take part in Frankfurt fair. As a result, 20 publishing houses were chosen and YSU was among them. YSU was represented in a separate pavilion as well which is very important for us as previously YSU was represented only in the national pavilion of Armenia.

YSU Publishing house is also a member of Association of publishing houses of European universities.

Mr. Grigoryan also informed that during the seminars they discussed the problem of copyright, design of books and book selling. The participants exchanged experience discussing all sorts of issues related to book printing, beginning from page layout and up to audience targets.

Foreign guests were interested in Armenian alphabet, Armenian letters but there were not any books and literature about it. Besides, the achievements of Armenians in chess also aroused interest of foreigners but neither YSU nor other Armenian publishing houses had such books to display.

According to Mr. Grigoryan, there are many new tendencies in the classical process of publishing. One of them is making the academic text more available. When we write a monography it traditionally consists only of a text and refers to narrow scholarly links. While the world tendency is to include videos, records, photos which means that contemporary book should be interactive, particularly the book printed for students. The director of the publishing house outlined that authors play an important role in students’ book creation. The problem is in formation of new approaches. Authors must be able to specify what age group the book is provided for, how that group thinks and it is not obligatory that the approaches of the author and consumers coincide. Consumers’ demand is to be understood by the author. And here is the important function of a publisher- to make the demands and offers relevant.

As regards the world’s tendency to make students’ book available in e-version Mr. Grigoryan said that that problem really exists in our country. Unfortunately, not all the literature necessary for students has been digitalized. In his opinion it is very important to do it as it can become a good tool to reveal cases of copying and plagiarism easier and more effectively.