BookExpo: Day Two Wednesday - Stifling a Yawn

A good show day and, while I left as the cleaning staff arrived, a long day but mostly a day of boredom. The same conversations about the same problems spoken by the same people.

At one session I went to neighbor of the blog Bruce Lubin admitted that "digital is a pain in the ass" and to 'publishers of a certain age' there's a tendency to have some twenty year old take on the digital stuff. But, he cautioned 'you are doing yourselves a disservice by not taking on this responsibility yourself'. It seems to me an obvious truism but sadly a reflection of the continued hesitancy of the industry to embrace the new digital world. That anyone would have to say this in 2011 and for it to be internalized by 'publishers of a certain age' is regrettable.

During the day, I ventured into the bowels of Javits where something called Blog World was holding exhibits. While small, the vibe here seemed much more dynamic. Some companies seemed to have their entire staff on their booths and for all the black jeans and other requisite accoutrements of trendy new media I got the strong sense that I could expect this exhibit space to grow in size while I am less sure of the space upstairs where all the brand name publishers are exhibiting. Time will tell.

Yesterday I covered the comments from DRMAbuse but today's pithy comments come from The Reading Ape who numbers his/her observations:

2. Imprints from the Middle East had some seriously huge and beautiful booths. Though, much like a mall in Dubai, they were huge, beautiful, and empty.

4. There was one guy sitting the lounge outside the registration area with a weird hat advertising his book PROVING GOD. He sat there alone and made no move to pitch anyone his book or move about at all. I guess they don't make evangelicals like they used to.

12. The L. Ron Hubbard landing craft was a bit smaller this year, though it was more informative. Did you know you can get Dianetics in over 37 Earth languages?

17. A truckload of digital publishing businesses who all provide weirdly vague services. Can't help but think this is a kind of carpetbagging before the war is over.

Passing by the Dubai 'exhibit' two blonds (booth candy) conversing about what they planned to wear that evening but otherwise the booth was completely empty.

NY Times columnist Julie Bosman on the digital offerings at the Bookfair:

For three days the attendees wander the exhibit halls, mingling, promoting books, listening to speakers and collectively musing over the state of the industry over the past year. They have a lot to discuss. E-books have exploded, surpassing print sales for some new releases. The struggles for many brick-and-mortar bookstores have deepened as their customers began downloading books onto their e-readers from home rather than heading to stores.

Easily eliciting the most chatter was Amazon’s announcement on Sunday that it had hired one of the industry’s best-known veterans, the publisher turned agent Laurence J. Kirshbaum, to head a new imprint for Amazon that will publish general-interest titles. On Wednesday Amazon said it had acquired a book by the thriller writer Barry Eisler, who had announced this year, with much fanfare, that he was abandoning a six-figure contract with his publisher out of dissatisfaction with the traditional book industry.

Largely without insight but Jason Pinter's comments in the HuffPo mixed reality with entertainment:

She was an aspiring author, having completed a historical romance novel that she'd been working on for several years. She described it as "The Help, only better," and had come to BEA in hopes of enticing one of the hundreds of publishers in attendance to take a chance on her manuscript. "Everyone who's read it loves it," she said, adding that she refused to leave the conference without finding a home for her book. She was the kind of person, she told me, who wouldn't take no for an answer. For a brief moment, my unfortunate cynicism kicked into gear. As a former editor, I've been pitched by aspiring authors so many times at BEA and in other locations that I, for an instant, forgot what it felt like to be an author desperately hoping that my manuscript would find a home. I immediately felt wretched for this knee-jerk reaction, but one thing that reaction did is illuminate my feelings about BEA, and allow me to understand why it is so vital to the publishing industry.

It can be summed up in one word: Hope.

This woman's dreams, in a way, represented the dreams of every publishing professional packed into the steamy, Internet-unfriendly Javits Center. Every one of the 30,000 attendees entered BEA with dreams--and at BEA they all seem so tantalizingly possible. Amidst all the doom and gloom recently penned about the publishing industry, whether the opinions are actually informed or merely Chicken Little crowing at the sky (hello, Garrison Keillor and the New York Observer!), BEA exemplifies the passion and enthusiasm that is the backbone of the publishing industry. And that passion, in the face of all the changes, upheaval and negativity, is still wonderfully alive and kicking.

Tweets:

@Lmarknyt the lines for mindykaling and jimmyfallon at #BEA11 were too long... but i did get a free galley by an obscure croatian poet

@emilyw00 Kay: textbooks moving increasingly toward testing and diagnostics, Norton will have to decide what to develop or acquire there.

@IrisBlasi: Overheard @ Google: "Publishers are like venture capitalists for authors."

@nikki_blogworld Views from the Show Floor: Between the awesome sessions at BlogWorld today, I got a change to ... http://bit.ly/lVMtIg

Towards the end of the day, twitter abounded with the news that the "Kobo party rocks" but since I wasn't invited that's the last time I mention Kobo (ever).

More:
Day 1: Tuesday
Set-up Monday

BookExpo: Day One Tuesday

Publishers have been known to be a bitchy lot but this year most of the bitching on day one seemed to be focused on the intermittent and or ineffectual wireless access on site at Javits. Perhaps the LA Times' Jacket Copy blog put it best: With so many writers, the 3G clogs like the 405 -

With New York's Javits Center filled with most everyone in publishing -- the staffs of major houses, representatives from bookstores across the country, authors, self-publishing houses, Scientologists (L. Ron Hubbard was an author), academic publishers, even media types like me -- capturing a 3G signal long enough to get a blog post online has been a challenge. We're all writers, after all.

Typical of conferences going back as far as I can remember is the requisite: What is The Future of [fill in the blank] and unsurprisingly it was eBooks this year and the seminar was written up nicely by Ed Champion:

“Publishing does not know how to market ebooks yet,” said Schnittman. “You’re looking at bestsellers tracking with bestsellers. Everything that we’re marketing in the stores is selling just as well.” I became skeptical of Schnittman when he started clenching his left hand, a gesture reminding me of some dodgy villain from a melodrama. Schnittman liked to talk quite a bit.

“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” continued Schnittman. “We’ve never marketed backlist before.”

These rather assumptive generalizations had me wondering if Schnittman had ever settled his precious hands onto the raw joys of genre or contemplated the way in which an author winning an award often results in backlist titles being repackaged. And what about presses like the University of Chicago Press, finding new life for Anthony Powell and Richard Stark?

...

When Turvey asked why all the book recommendation engines sucked, he allowed Schnittman to fall into his Socratic trap. (The unvoiced assumption: what is a bookseller but the ultimate book recommendation engine?)

“I think people do use it,” huffed Schnittman, when Turvey brought up the failed Genius feature in iTunes. “You use it with a caveat that it sucks.”

Then he got a little defensive. “You in the world of algorithms, you’ll figure out something theoretically better and better.” He then suggested that “the tail was wagging the dog,” before attempting to retract this because he had “used it yesterday. Nobody quote me on that one.”

I kept wondering why this apparent professional was more concerned with l’esprit de l’escalier rather than legitimate ideas. But at least he wasn’t as bad as Close, who again declared her willingness to argue in lieu of a legitimate argument: “I would argue we have always cared deeply about our consumers.” But for Close, that care has more to do with “buzz meters” and point-of-sale data.

Does the emperor have any clothes? Much more of the above from his post.

Over at Paid Content Laura Hazard Owen commented on the same session:

Though none of the panelists, publishers all, were ready to say they don’t care about consumers—Random House Digital President Amanda Close immediately responded that “we have always cared deeply about our consumers”—they admitted that they’re facing stiff challenges in getting readers to discover new e-books.

If you've been frustrated in trying to get hold of show dailies for shows like BookExpo, Frankfurt and LBF perhaps the Digital version of the BEA Show Daily that uses the Exact Editions system is for you.

And on the heals of yesterday's announcement from Kobo about their new touch screen eReader that continued to generate a lot of commentary, B&N announced a new version of their Nook. Whereas the Kobo seemed to generate digital oh's and arh's all day, the Nook seemed to generate not a lot. Having said that some non-industry commentators such as Mashable seemed to view the growing B&N eReader story as evidence of the imminent demise of the Kindle. Which of course is laughable.

Noted twitter comments from the day included:

@emilyw00 Sitting here staring at my useless netbook wishing I could grab the wifi and smack it around a little

@emilyw00 China mobile is key, mobile is in every far removed corner of the country, in areas where no other tech has penetrated.

@emilyw00 Chinese domestic authors getting much bigger advances than foreign authors get, even $1 million, very competitive

@jane_l RT @ebooknewser's account of the BN reveal of its touchscreen device. http://ow.ly/51GMY It's $10 more than the @kobo

@eoinpurcell My thoughts on where Trade publishing and the value chain is right now >> No New Normal - The Value Web: http://t.co/aU41c4T

@jilltomich Stats in digital content / ebook use m.bookbusinessmag.com/16324/show/577…

@SchwartzWriter BEA Video Interviews: Oren Teicher, CEO, American Booksellers Association | http://bit.ly/mGboG1

More:
DAY 2 - Wednesday
Setup Monday

Bookexpo Set-up Monday

BookExpo hadn't even started before news that Larry Kirshbaum, was taking up a role with Amazon as their head of publishing dropped like the proverbial pin. Will B&N, which is rapidly growing their eBook and publishing business, adopt a similar approach? Meanwhile Kobo announced a new reader this afternoon which got many excited enough to start pre-ordering new equipment (more from LATimes)

At the IDPF conference there was much anticipation over the launch of ePub 3.0 which is nicely written up by Good eReader:

Primarily, this version of EPUB was formed from the working groups of the IDPF with the cooperation of over twenty companies who have come on board to implement it to their devices, and iBooks already support a subset of EPUB 3 right out of the gate while Adobe Digital Editions has forward plans. Additionally, one of the requirements from the IDPF was that EPUB 2 files still work on any device that uses EPUB 3, voiding any fears of obsoleteness and erasing participants’ concerns about needing to reformat EPUB 2 files to the new version.

The biggest crowd response came from the news that audio and video playback are synchronized with the text in real time through Media Overlays, as well as the fact that there is a pronunciation lexicon support . The new format will also mean greater global use, as the vertical language format for Japanese, as well as the right-to-left requirements from several languages will be workable; however, the real excitement there was that the entire book doesn’t have to be formatted for the one language, making it possible now to have a text with different language standards in it.

And they have some interviews in the rest of the article.

At the same conference Hannah Johnson wrote up the session: Publishers Debate Future of Enhanced E-books (PubP):

While the future of enhanced e-books and apps remains hazy, it’s clear that publishers are thinking a lot about how to monetize their content. They are making big investments (including the development enhanced e-books and apps) in order to find a solution. Nash is focused on building value through a community of writers and readers. Raccah at Sourcebooks has been successful building enhanced e-books and apps. This is just more evidence that the future of publishing isn’t a one-size-fits-all scenario.

At the ABA sponsored Publishing University Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit and Michael Healy, executive director of the Book Rights Registry reprised their London BookFair roles as moderators of the big debate: Authors and readers are all that matter. Publishers will soon be irrelevant. Here written up by Publisher's Weekly's Danny Snow:

Nash closed in favor of publishers, citing 18 million creative writers today who want to reach the 65 million consumers who spend five hours a week reading. He concluded that publishers are the essential link between readers and writers, especially independent publishers.

Not surprisingly, in the post-debate balloting (with a larger portion of the audience participating), the publishers in the audience voted for themselves again -- but in smaller proportion: 68 voted for publishers; 33 voted against publishers; 9 were undecided

Finally Library Journal held a Day of Dialog and here are some selected tweets (#LJdod11) where Karin Slaughter seems to have made an impact:

@acornsandnuts: I don't want, as a librarian, to have to be the gatekeeper for quality. Publishers (& editors!) have such a important role to play

@HuisceBeatha: If you cut library funding, you decrease access to books, "the great leveller" in a democracy, says Slaughter

@DonLinn: Library tweets are making a compelling case for libraries as a benefit to publishers...not just to the community

@AudioGo: Books are power. Library is way of giving access to everybody , great equalizer-Slaughter

@acornsandnuts: I don't think our patrons care about advocacy in large enough #s to have it matter. Note what came up earlier re: the NYC libs.

@glecharles: Are publishers paying attention to library social media efforts? Critical discoverability point; how to support, partner?

@surlyspice: notes Karin Slaughter is just as adorable as she was last year, only now she is helping to save libraries all across the country.

@glecharles: Karen Slaughter notes history of book banning, forced illiteracy to control people. Ebooks + digital divide a similar angle?

MORE:

DAY 2 - Wednesday
DAY 1: Tuesday

Nook Color: Perfect for Magazines

From the NYTimes,

Recent best-seller lists for magazines on the Nook Color bear this out. Magazine top sellers include US Weekly, Shape, Women’s Health and Every Day with Rachael Ray. Men’s magazines like Maxim and Men’s Health rounded out the top 20 late last week, but they were the outliers.

On the surface, the reason for the strong performance of female-oriented publications on the Nook is relatively straightforward. Generically speaking, the iPad and other tablets are men’s toys, while the Nook Color and other e-readers are more popular with women. According to data from Forrester Research, 56 percent of tablet owners are male, while 55 percent of e-reader owners are female. Women also buy more books than men do — by a ratio of about 3 to 1, according to a survey last year by Bowker, a research firm for publishers — and are therefore more likely to buy devices that are made primarily for reading books.

...

Not only have the terms of selling magazines on the Nook Color been comparatively easy to negotiate, but the process of creating electronic versions of magazines is also far easier and less expensive than it is to create an iPad edition. Publishers need only send a PDF of their latest issue, and Barnes & Noble takes care of the rest.

“As soon as a magazine is ready to send its pages to the printer, they send them to us,” said Jonathan Shar, Barnes & Noble’s digital newsstand manager. “It’s very efficient, and that’s part of our strategy. We knew that was important to publishers.”