Publishers Weekly‘s Judith Rosen described e-books as “the elephant in the Javits Center.” There was indeed an elephant there but I don’t think it was e-books.

Javits is of course the coliseum where the publishing industry assembles annually to celebrate books, extol brick and mortar bookshops and glorify booksellers at Book Expo America. Visitors perform the ritual known as “the crawl,” strolling up and down the aisles of the 675,000 square foot coliseum like browsers in a bookshop the size of Versailles. Though references to digital technology are plentiful they are not inescapable.  You can actually pretend that the book is the reigning artifact of civilized humanity and that the Red Death is not standing outside the ballroom patiently waiting for our dance to be over.

Oren Teicher, the CEO of the American Bookseller Association, shattered the fantasy by reminding his constituency that the plague was already in the room and they damned well need to do something to expel it. “The simple fact is that to most consumers, if you don’t exist online you simply don’t exist,” he said.

To prevent the the printed book from becoming “a relic of an antique era” he called for a host of new business models. The one that raised our eyebrows was ending the returnability of books. If anything is a relic of an antique era it’s the custom of permitting bookstores to return unsold stock to publisher for full credit.  Whatever good reason for instituting returnability a long time ago it has done more to undermine the publishing industry than an invasion force of Kindles, Nooks and iPads.  If anyone seeks the real elephant in the Javits center it is this pernicious practice, and if Mr. Teicher knows of a practical way to expel the beast, we welcome the endeavor.

See BEA 2011: Teicher Calls for New Retail Business Models

Richard Curtis

If u cn rd ths u r nt ded.

Doomsday, scheduled to take place yesterday, failed to materialize. That means Book Expo America is on.

Fundamentalists, whose loins had been girt and garments rent for months, were deeply disappointed and not a little upset with prophets who obviously committed a rounding error in their prognostication of End of Days. But exhibitors and attendees of Book Expo America, which opens its doors to the public on Tuesday, are rejoicing despite the fact that prophecies of the future of publishing are even more dire than those of the end of the world. (See Prediction of Doomsday Spook BEA Attendees).

Those of you who held back, reluctant to spend money on a convention that might vaporize before it opens, can now safely make plans to attend BEA with relative security. We say “relative” because it is possible that the auguries set for May 21 were a few days off as a result of failure by Biblical scholars to account for one Leap Year in 1996.

That glitch notwithstanding, we’ll see you at BEA.

Richard Curtis

Anxious exhibitors and attendees of next week’s Book Expo America are scrambling to draw up contingency plans to move to another venue in case predictions of Judgment Day, set for the Saturday before the book fair opens, turn out to be accurate.

Though countless end-of-the-world prognostications have not materialized to date, this one, posited by Biblical authorities, is disturbingly convincing. The End Times theorists have calculated a precise timeline from Creation, which they date at 11,013 BC, to final destruction on May 21, 2011. That spells bad news for attendance at BEA,which has been flagging for several years.  “The last thing we need is an apocalypse,” said one Expo executive. Unfortunately, conference organizers and the brass at International Digital Publishing Forum were not aware of the projections, ignored them or failed to take them seriously.  This misjudgment may cost dearly, as few insurers cover exhibitors for losses or damages incurred when Kingdom comes.

There is a slim possibility that some publishers or visitors will be spared. According to the Doomsday website, “God declares that only a remnant, a relatively small number of people, will be saved.”  Here, thanks to their deep pockets and abundant resources, Big Six publishers like Random House and HarperCollins, and large retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, have a better chance at salvation than small presses and independent bookstores, who fear that we may see another round of consolidation by major companies at the expense of smaller ones.

There is also a small window of hope that the prediction is premature. Convention organizers researching the matter think that the prophets may have confused Saturday’s cataclysm with the one predicted for 2012 in Mayan scriptures.  BEA-goers will breathe a huge sigh of relief but will think twice about attending next year’s bookfest.

Not all publishers are preoccupied with The World to Come. One exhibitor we spoke to said “Rapture?  Screw Rapture. If my goddamn books don’t arrive from the warehouse I’m gonna freak out.”

What do you think? Comments submitted after the world ends will not be considered.

Doomsday details here. Exhibitors and attendees are advised to check the BEA website for updates.

Richard Curtis

It looks as if the business we described a while back, a way to autograph e-books, is going to get off the ground.  The system developed by two enterpreneurs, “Autography”, will be on display at Book Expo America this spring, according to the New York Times. Here is our original article.

***************

When we broached the idea of replacing physical book conferences with virtual ones (See A Book Conference You Can Attend in Your Bathrobe), a number of readers observed that there was one big problem: how do you autograph virtual books?

A team of enterprising businessmen, T. J. Waters and Robert Barrett, know how, and they’ve launched a service for publishers and authors called Autography.

Waters’ entrepreneurial tale is a fascinating one “I wrote an ebook entitled Prior To The Snap as a companion guide to my Wiley-published business book Hyperformance.” he explained in a recent email to me. “The eBook became wildly popular with troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Next thing I knew I was invited to join a USO tour going overseas. I asked a grad school friend (and high end IT geek) about developing a method to autograph the ebook like I would a hard cover book. The rest, as they say, is history, though still very much in the making.”

We visited his website (www.autography.us.com) and though the service is still, as Waters says, “in the making,” in theory at least he seems to have thought of every question that might be raised by author, publisher or customer. For example:

• “Our vision is live streaming video over the Internet coupled with autographed eBooks. We can even let the author create a scheduled of which cities he’ll be ‘visiting’ during his ‘tour’. We are now having our software upgraded so that readers can export the signature page (with a thumbnail of the book’s cover) out to their social media (Facebook, etc) to further promote the book/author to their friends.”
• “Personalization can take place at the time of purchase or any time afterwards, including after secondary (used) sales.”
• “Authors can give away signed sample chapters to introduce themselves to new readers who later purchase the full volume at their convenience. The now full copy ebook retains the author’s salutation (replacing the sample chapters) without the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM) software.”

Waters points out that “Autography’s patent-pending technology doesn’t just cover eBooks. We’re redefinining the digital media experience for a wide range of entertainment. Digital comic books, movie and music cover art, video games, and athlete or celebrity promotional cards are quickly and easily personalized for consumers.”

For further information contact the company’s representative Bob Diforio at bob@d4eo.com

With Autography the road to Virtual has taken another big step. Look for more and more applications in the coming years.

Richard Curtis

With attendance at Book Expo America sagging, we proposed last May to replace the annual publishing industry convocation with a virtual one.  “Technology and bandwidth have advanced to the point where it is entirely feasible to mount a virtual trade conference,” we wrote, “one that would be fully participatory for traditional and e-book publishers, booksellers, librarians, educators, literary agents, authors, book-related exhibitors and their technology counterparts – plus the most important attendee of them all, readers; all from the comfort of their homes, offices or commute.” (See A Book Conference You Can Attend in Your Bathrobe )

Two recent news items may bring us closer to the day you’ll be able to participate in a book fair without setting foot outside your bedroom.

The first is an item in Publishers Weekly reporting that Reed Exhibitions, which bills itself as the world’s leading events organizer, is looking to putting BEA under the aegis of the American Library Association and possibly moving the event out of New York. “If a deal is reached,”writes PW’s Jim Milliott, “Reed is believed to favor locating BEA and the ALA annual meeting in 2012 in Chicago, creating in effect two shows under one roof. It wasn’t clear if the shows would move around the country.”

But now we learn that the mother of all book industry events, the Frankfurt Book Fair, is struggling too. Though it still attracts some 300,000 visitors annually, the 2010 edition scheduled for October will have five percent fewer exhibitors than 2009.  Furthermore, this year the Buchmesse will “focus on the digital sector,” according to an AFP news item. “With smartphones and electronic books all the rage,’reading is undergoing a revolution’ the fair’s director Juergen Boos told reporters.”

So? What about taking these book fairs virtual? Here’s how we imagined it:

While the main event itself could be of short duration, it could easily morph into a 24/7/365 marketplace centered around books and authors, publishers, booksellers, bloggers AND readers; a kind of “Second Life” for the book publishing industry. It could be a combination website, bazaar, and social gaming environment where real business is done, books are bought and sold, but with a high fun quotient limited only by the technical skills of art departments, web designers and graphic artists, and the boundless imagination of the publishing industry.

We think it’s going to happen.  How about you?

Richard Curtis

You know the cliché that goes “If they can put men on the moon they should be able to (fill in the blank)?  Well, I have one for you. If they can put men on the moon they should be able to make a conference name tag that works.  But if wardrobe malfunctions at the recent Book Expo America are any indication, we are as far from producing a sensible name tag as we are from establishing a colony on Neptune.

The book conference’s name tags, suspended around the neck by a lanyard, were certainly large enough – about 4 inches square – and the typeface a highly legible 18-point sans serif bold.  The problem was that the tags tended to twist on their lanyards, displaying their blank reverse sides and forcing the viewer to resort to a variety of unsatisfying strategies to identify the wearer.  Such as…

• hoping an errant breeze will spin the tag back to obverse
• hoping a third party will address the person by name
• presenting your card and praying the presentation will be reciprocated
• asking the person’s name and learning that he or she is the head of a major publisher
• asking the person’s name and learning he or she is someone you recently dined with…or slept with

The solution is obvious: print names on both sides of the tag.  But it’s clearly more obvious to me than to the Expo’s planners and it’s not a laughing matter. In this age of social networking, the failure to know whom you’re talking to is not just embarrassing, it could mean lost business.

But I’m not through.

Lanyards are poor devices for displaying identification. Name tags depending from them hang down to the nether regions, requiring one to gaze awkwardly at the bearer’s belly. Short of pretending to tie one’s shoelaces to effect a surreptitious glance at the name tag, it means another business opportunity missed.

It does not require an advanced engineering degree to perceive that the best location for name tags is the chest, but even that solution is fraught with issues.  Many people like to show off their attire and resent having their fashion statements compromised by a name tag. Some of us worry that the tags’ pins will leave unsightly and irreparable holes in dresses, blouses or jackets.

That problem led to the creation of paper “Hello My Name Is” tags with peel-off backings, which are great unless the adhesive is so strong that it leaves a rectangular patch on one’s clothing, or so weak as to cause the tag to curl up or simply fall to the floor.  It can be jolly fun to attend a conference and count the number of paper name tags adhering to attendees’ shoes. I once observed a significant publishing executive walking about with someone else’s name tag stuck to his behind like a Kick Me sign.

But I’m still not through.

If you attend a party or conference that uses paper name tags you owe it to fellow attendees to print largely and neatly.  All too many people write their names in tiny script or illegible scribbles, forcing  one to gape boorishly at a woman’s embonpoint when he’s simply trying to get a good gander at her name.  Honestly, lady, I’m not staring at your bosom. I’m just trying to read your damn name tag.

And talking of boors, are there any more pretentious than those who feel they’re so notable they do not need to wear a name tag at all?

So yes, if they can send men to the moon, can they not produce a sensible name tag? I hope so, and maybe they could have it ready for next year’s BEA?

(Hello. My Name Is) Richard Curtis

Last year’s BEA was diminished by a combination of the poor economy and turmoil in the book industry. This year’s version will be somewhat smaller and shorter, but there will be more focus on new media and a much higher profile by e-book publishers and retailers.

What’s new and different at BEA 2010? The Expo’s home page says: “Let’s start with three event-packed days and a new mid-week schedule. BEA will showcase more than 500 authors, hundreds of new titles and 1,500 exhibitors (check out Exhibitor Show Specials!) all on one show floor—along with the IDPF Digital Book Zone (learn about the eBook and eReading Revolution!). See and meet authors discussing their books and sharing their back stories during special events and on the all-new Midtown Stage which joins the Uptown and Downtown Stages. Learn and network during the ‘Big Ideas at BEA’ Conference and the ABA Day of Education (open to all BEA attendees). And if you’re in the business of buying and selling rights, be sure to learn more about the International Rights & Business Center”

Here’s the home page Book Expo America, the schedule of events Book Expo Schedule at a Glance and info on Let’s Get Digital!

RC

Publishers Weekly reports that his year’s Book Expo America looked and felt smaller than any in recent memory. Was it a predictable dip caused by the economy? Or the first shovelful of soil dug in the graveyard, as book industry prophet Mike Shatzkin recently speculated?

Notable in their scarcity were advance reading copies of forthcoming books being pushed by exhibiting publishers. Traditionally, experienced convention-crawlers line up at the gates early in the morning and, like Black Friday shoppers, the moment the green light is flashed they charge to booths with swagbags agape, scooping up any and every bound galley they can get their hands on whether they’re seriously interested in the titles or not. This year, however, there were far fewer ARCs on display, as PW’s Lynn Andriani reported, and trophy-hunters had to be satisfied with downloadable simulacra. But one of these has seized our attention and given it a good shake. “Traffic moved freely at the HarperCollins booth,” writes Andriani, “where the publisher was giving out Symtio cards carrying digital versions of its galleys.”

You might want to commit the word “Symtio” to your memory, as I suspect you will be hearing a lot about it in the near future. Craig Morgan Teicher, another PW reporter, explains it:

The concept: stores stock and sell Symtio cards, which are good for downloads of particular e-books or audiobooks from the Symtio site. Consumers can access the site only by entering the code from the card bought at a store, but once they’re logged on, they can buy more books, and the purchases are credited back to the store where the card was bought, meaning retailers can make more sales following the sale of a single Symtio card.

Symtio was created by Verne Kenny for Zondervan, a religious imprint of HarperCollins. More than two dozen publishers and hundreds of retail locations signed up after market tests indicated strong support for the concept. We support it too: in theory it provides a critically important bridge between brick and mortar bookstores and the digital sphere.

The company’s website details the operation:

Symtio is the easiest way to buy digital media in a retail store. Digital books, both eBook and audiobook, are released the same day as print books and available for immediate download. That means you’ll always be able to get the latest releases no matter how you choose to read them. Plus, we keep track of your purchases in a media footlocker. If your computer crashes or you accidentally delete your downloads, we’ve got backups that you can re-download at no extra cost.

Among the benefits users get when they create an account:

• A “Media footlocker” where you can store your Symtio purchases.”Think of it as backup protection—your purchases are safe if your computer crashes or your hard drive fails.”
• Re-download—”You can come back to symtio.com at any time and re-download your digital purchases.
• Order history—The service keeps track of your purchases and provides you with historical data such as date, time, cost and number of times you’ve downloaded your purchases.
• Product Gift Cards – “Giving a Symtio digital product card says you’ve thought about your gift, much as when you used to give bound books or music. While Symtio products have the feel and convenience of a gift card, the difference is that you’ve hand picked and purchased a specific product with the recipient in mind.”
• DRM-free – To download an e-book, you select your device from a drop-down menu, then choose the appropriate file format. For audio you can use any MP3 player or supported media program to download digital products.

Of particular interest was the procedure for downloading e-books. Though not wireless, it is largely device-agnostic, and that includes (choirs of angels raise their voices) Macs.

Once a Symtio eBook is downloaded to your computer, transfer it to your digital media reader such as a Sony Personal Reader, PDA or personal computer as you would any other file. Or, if you prefer, you can read Symtio eBooks right on your Windows or Macintosh computer as long as you have a program that reads the format you purchased.

Supported hardware includes:

* Windows computer
* Macintosh computer
* Sony Reader Digital Book (PRS-505 and PRS-700)
* Amazon Kindle
* Palm based PDA or Smart Phone
* Windows Mobile based PDA or Smart Phone
* Symbian Smart Phone (Nokia and others)

Supported software includes:

* Adobe Digital Editions (.epub)
* Adobe Reader (.pdf)
* Mobipocket (.prc)
* Microsoft Reader (.lit)

Will consumers go for it? According to PW, they have done so in spades: Symtio sold “thousands of products in the first 10 weeks,” Kenny told PW. “Not only were people finding the bestsellers but they were browsing to find the backlist.”

“Retailers are obviously concerned about the loss of traffic to online stores,” Kenny, noted in the grandest understatement to come out of this year’s BEA. “I thought, what could the consumer do inside a retail setting to buy digital content. Out of that grew the idea of Symtio.”

You can visit the firm’s website and read up on the Symtio cards FAQ. The site also has a store locator. We entered our zip code a few others at random and for now the bookstores are pretty much all dedicated to Christian literature. But it’s hard to believe the product will expand not just to other HarperCollins imprints but to other publishers as well.

And why limit the products to books and the stores to bookstores? Let your imagination soar. Mine is working overtime.

Richard Curtis

When you admire a guru, you have to take the bad prophecies with the good. Mike Shatzkin, who is giving a significant presentation at the commencement of Book Expo America, is certainly our favorite guru. But damn!, his gloomy prognostication about the future of the convention is hard to live with, even though deep down we suspect it’s true.

There are two classes of people in publishing: those who remember the American Booksellers Association (ABA) convention – BEA’s predecessor – and those who don’t. The latter roughly parallel those who don’t remember typewriters, black and white televisions, or automobiles with clutches. If these artifacts of 20th century civilization draw a blank stare, it will be equally hard to imagine what publishing must have been like when booksellers were important.

Before getting to his doomsday prognostication, Shatzkin takes us down memory lane to recall what BEA used to be. This is not merely idle reminiscence but, rather, Shatzkin setting us up to understand what the the convention has become and why it may no longer be a viable destination for a publishing industry that is exploding like a fragmentation grenade.

When I was a pup, the ABA was definitely an order-writing show. The number of independent bookstores who bought a big chunk of any trade list properly presented to them was in the thousands. (Now: what would you say? the dozens? wouldn’t hundreds be an exaggeration?) Only a few of the biggest publishers had sales forces large enough and disciplined enough to really cover them all, so most exhibitors encountered retailers who would do immediate business. Everybody had some sort of show “special” to encourage ordering. I think for many years it was “blue badges” that signified booksellers: you kept an eagle-eye out for them as the traffic streamed by and you knew exactly what and how you were going to pitch them.

Each night at the main convention hotels, several publishers — and all the mass-market publishers — ran “hospitality suites” offering liquid refreshment and munchies very deep into the evening. You’d make the rounds of those after you had gone to whatever events, dinners, and parties had taken place in other locations. I always found the time in the hospitality suites to be a highlight of the convention.

The halcyon days of the 1970s and 80s gave way to a more corporate environment when Reed Exhibitions, which bills itself as the world’s leading organizer of trade and consumer events, acquired a controlling share of the show, changing its name to Book Expo America. “Reed Exhibitions excels in creating high profile, highly targeted business and consumer exhibitions and events to establish and maintain business relations, and generate new business,” says the organization’s website.

Interestingly, Reed’s takeover paralleled the rash of trade book publisher mergers and acquisitions that, like a collapsing star, imploded the industry from hundreds of vibrant companies to fewer than a dozen behemoths in the space of a decade. 1996, the very year Reed acquired controlling interest in ABA, was the same one in which the mass market paperback business underwent a convulsive contraction that transformed the format into the Fifteen Top Blockbuster airport model that characterizes mass paper today. (I’ve written about this at length in a two part article, “The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback”: Part 1, Part 2.)

Thus, while Big Publishing seemed to be soaring in the late 90s it was actually peaking, and the shift made itself manifest in the book fair. “The long expansion of the US book trade, which had continued pretty much unabated from World War II until the mid-1990s, stopped and started to reverse in the Internet age,” writes Shatzkin. “Even worse for the industry trade show, consolidation of both big publishers and retailers accelerated. That meant fewer publisher customers to buy the booth space, and fewer retailers walking the aisles to make the booth space valuable.”

And now, a little over a decade later, the collapsing star of Big Publishing generates more heat ($24 billion annually) than light, and that’s reflected in the dimming of the celebration called Book Expo America. “The BEA of today isn’t the ABA of old,” laments Shatzkin. “The booksellers are just about gone. The late-night hospitality suites don’t exist anymore. And hardly any publisher goes to the show expecting to write orders. It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart [Book Expo Canada shuttered permanently early this year] it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that.”

Also shpracht Shatzkin. You can read it all in his blog, How many more times for BEA?

But wait – there’s a PS. BEA’s show director Lance Fensterman reports that the convention’s attendance is down 14% over the last one held in New York City, 2007, and exhibitor personnel registrations are down 10% to 15%. Overall exhibition square footage is down 21%. It looks like the Guru of Gloom is right again, dammit.

Richard Curtis

After Perseus Books creates and publishes a book from scratch at May’s Book Expo America using the Espresso print on demand machine, you may be convinced that the only thing instanter than books is Nescafé.

The publishing company will take a pre-written 10,000 word book and “edit, design, produce, sell, publicize/promote and publish live before fairgoers’ eyes,” according to Publishers Lunch and a Perseus release.

Though the project has some of the daredevil quality of a circus stunt (and there is no safety net if something goes wrong), the goal is to demonstrate that a combination of spanking-new digital tech and age-old editorial savvy can produce a work that exemplifies the future of publishing.

Where will the text for this book come from? It will, in Publishers Lunch parlance, be “crowdsourced”. Perseus is conducting a competition to “write the first sentence for a yet-to-be-written sequel to any book ever published,” with submissions via a website set up for that purpose. Copies will be run off on the Espresso at a launch party at Perseus’s booth on the Saturday afternoon of the BEA clusterfuss.

“By the end of the day Friday.” Lunch reports, “they’ll have a bound manuscript for reviewers and an e-galley as well.” Then…

“First thing Saturday they will design a web site and Facebook page, write a readers group guide, commence publicity and promotion, record the audio version, offer foreign rights, design and select a jacket, solicit accounts live and more. Booth visitors can watch the process unfold on wall-mounted screens and weigh in at specific stages, including an editorial meeting, and a jacket design meeting.”

E-Reads recently blogged about the Espresso, which one observer described as “an ATM for books”, and our production manager actually attended a demonstration.

“What we saw was a prototype the size of a squat refrigerator, with metal hydraulics pushing the paper around, whooshing and whirring as it shaved off the edges and glued the spine. Final shipping iterations of the Espresso 2 will use electric motors and reduce the noise. For now, the prototype’s pistons were all perfectly visible behind clear acrylic panels on the machine’s sides to demonstrate the mechanics. An inkjet printer on the top printed a color cover, a fast copier on the back printed out the interior pages, both of which get taken up inside and formed into a paperback while you watch. Then after a few minutes, out pops a little book from the dispenser, hot off the press (and a teensy-bit sticky until it dries).”

We’ll be in the throng at the Perseus booth, cheering Espresso – and the future of book publishing – on.

RC