Frankfurt

Organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair said Tuesday that book sales have stood up so far to the global economic crisis, but acknowledged that the industry is changing.

"The publishing industry is doing well," Gottfried Honnefelder, head of the German Booksellers Association, told reporters as the annual fair opened. "Books are resistant to economic cycles, an indication that they are not luxury items, but basic necessities."

On a recent holiday morning, I waited nervously in a pack of cyclists at a shopping mall parking lot outside Frankfurt, Germany, suited up in helmet and Lycra and waiting for the starting gun. I didn't have a prayer of winning the bicycle race, an amateur "everyman" competition staged in conjunction with a pro event on the same day. But I did have something I'm pretty sure no one else in the peloton did: Nokia Sports Tracker.

Infineon Technologies, the German chipmaker, warned Thursday of a wider operating loss in its communications unit this quarter because a project to supply equipment to Nokia had been delayed.

A spokesman for the company said that Infineon had also received lower orders than expected for an unidentified project to supply chips for high-speed Internet phones.

Deutsche Telekom chief executive Rene Obermann said Thursday the company is satisfied with sales and usage of Apple's iPhone, adding that the company has so far sold more than 100,000 of the devices since its November debut.

At Telekom's annual general meeting in Cologne, Obermann said the devices made by Apple Inc. were the most popular multimedia device sold by its T-Mobile cell phone division.

He said that iPhone customers used the Internet 30 times more on average than other mobile telephone customers, and that a third of iPhone customers had bought the most expensive user plans.