A new format of international industry debates under the label of ReBoot: Books, Business and Reading was recently launched, with the aim to pursue in regular events on what it’s seen as key issues for debate and sharing of relevant hands-on experiences.
On April 21st, 2021, Maria Cardona, on behalf of the Pontas Agency, took part as a speaker at a ReBoot Books online event about the lead topic "Where did the trading floor go?", focusing on the rights trading side under pandemic conditions. The subtitle to the session she participated in was: "The value of agents’ own networks, micro-fairs and digital rights in the search of the best practices to succeed in a virtual and decentralized rights market."
Rights trading is at the heart of the book business, and of all the big international fairs which have been cancelled now for over a year. What impact is this having on the business and on working practices? These were the key questions that an interesting group of people and a crowded audience discussed for one hour.
The goal of the session was to tackle the issue of rights trading in our new contexts, with book fairs being limited in their offerings as meeting platforms, an increasing de-centralization in trading, partly with improvised fairs by individual houses (publishers, agents), partly with virtual platforms.
Although we, at the Pontas Agency, like many other agencies around the world, have been as creative and innovative as we could, finding new ways to meet with all our contacts in order to keep being very active selling rights of the authors we represent, we agreed with Kris Kliemann, another of the speakers, when she said: “The beauty of book fairs was that we were all together at the same time, coming from the five continents with no time zones.”
