Here’s news from the New York Times about the digital side of the publishing industry and its effect on the world of books:
Book Fair Buzz is Not Contained Between 2 Covers
by Motoko Rich
The book publishing industry is notorious for jumping on bandwagons: witness the flood of “Da Vinci Code” knockoffs that clogged tables at the front of bookstores a few years ago, and the stream of novels featuring vampires that are crowding bestseller lists now.
So it should be no surprise that at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade convention that ended Sunday in New York, publishers seemed to be putting their own stamps on the increasingly frenzied conversation about electronic books that has hijacked the business.
There were the panels: “Giving It Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense and When They Don’t,” “Red Hot Readers: Market Adoption of Mobile eReading Devices” and “Jumping Off a Cliff: How Publishers Can Succeed Online Where Others Failed.” Tina Brown, rasping with a bad case of laryngitis, kick-started a discussion with the chief executives of four New York publishing houses by asking if they were shocked when Amazon.com began charging $9.99 for e-books — “that paltry, pitiful sum.”
Interead, a British company that introduced its new Cool-er electronic reader the first day of the Expo, sponsored a booth at which two blond women in tankinis handed out nonalcoholic margaritas and more potent piña coladas to a steady stream of conventiongoers who stopped by to watch demonstrations of the new devices. HarperCollins decided mostly to forgo the traditional giveaways of advance paperback editions of forthcoming books, and instead gave out gift cards redeemable for electronic galleys of titles like Neil Gaiman’s “Odd and the Frost Giants” and Mary Karr’s “Lit.”
So far e-books represent 1 to 3 percent of total book sales. But they make up the fastest growing part of the industry, and publishers, authors and booksellers have no idea just how big they will become and how they might affect profits and reading habits in the future.
Inevitably there was a backlash. At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”
Anxiety over digital publishing was heightened by the recession that has dampened book sales, and belt tightening was in evidence throughout the convention. Attendance at the event, which gathers publishers, booksellers, authors, agents, consultants and, increasingly, technology companies, was down by 14 percent from the last time the convention was held at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York two years ago.
Robert Sindelar, managing partner of Third Place Books, an independent bookstore in Lake Forest Park, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, said that this year he brought only three people to the convention, as opposed to five in previous years. He said sales were down nearly 5 percent in the first four months of the year, following a 9.5 percent decline in 2008.
Still, he said he would never consider giving the BookExpo a miss altogether. “It is good for us to come to remind them as they are seeing those 10 Kindles on the subway on the way to work what value we feel we bring to the industry,” Mr. Sindelar said.
It was a bit more difficult for booksellers to find some publishers at the convention this year as several of them had decided not to build their customary large booths on the exhibition hall floor. Some small presses had no visible presence at all, while venerable publishers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan, the company that owns Farrar Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, holed up in bunkerlike rooms in the bowels of the convention center, far from the fray of the exhibition floor.
Random House, the world’s largest consumer publisher, provoked endless chatter about its decision to take a vastly reduced space on the exhibition floor with room for just four autograph signing stands, moving all its meeting space into a windowless room downstairs.
But as rival publishers carped that Random House was missing the opportunity to make serendipitous connections with booksellers walking the exhibition floor, a schedule of book signings by authors like Lorrie Moore and Tracy Kidder attracted crowds. Even though Pat Conroy canceled an appearance because of his health, hundreds of people waited in line for an hour to pick up an advance copy of his latest novel, “South of Broad.”
Whether all those people were actually going to help sell the book was another question. One of the first three women in line for “South of Broad,” an elementary school librarian from Pennsylvania, confessed she was just grabbing a free copy for herself.
Some publishers wondered how much value they were getting from the show. It has been a perennial question for a long time but one made more urgent by changing economic times. “Frankly, standing out there it’s like Groundhog Day,” said David Shanks, chief executive of Penguin Group USA. “It seems like one B.E.A. after another every year, and you all sort of run into each other.”
Rick Joyce, marketing director of Perseus Books, said that “in a weird way, these conventions were like the Internet before the Internet” in that they enabled networking. The challenge, Mr. Joyce said, was to figure out how BookExpo “could do something that the industry needs rather than continuing to do something that is better done on the Internet.”
For Perseus, the answer was a stunt: over 48 hours, the company produced “Book: The Sequel,” a collection of first sentences to imagined sequels of famous books submitted online by readers around the world. Editors, designers, production staff and publicists worked in a corner of Perseus’s booth wearing baseball jerseys emblazoned with the book’s logo. On Saturday the publisher distributed 13 editions, including paperbacks, e-books, audio and even Braille versions.
But for many attendees the Expo remained much the same as always: a chance to schmooze and reconnect with contacts throughout the industry, even if some of the parties were more subdued than in years past.
And booksellers, a reliably starry-eyed lot, still craved interaction with authors. At a party given by Hachette Book Group on the roof of the Hotel Gansevoort in the meatpacking district, Mary Yockey, a buyer at Anderson’s Bookshops in Naperville, Ill., said she was thrilled to meet Julie Powell, author of “Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” That book has been made into a movie, to be released in August, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Ms. Powell also has a new book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” coming out later this year.
“I’m going to read the first book again,” Ms. Yockey said. “We sold tons of them.” And she hopes to do it again for the new one.
The soudtrack to the Broadway musical is finally going to be released!
1) Check the SOUND – you’re on Broadway, get with it!
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