John Updike would not be pleased. A year ago he elicited a standing ovation in a banquet hall full of booksellers when he exhorted them to “defend your lonely forts” against a digital future of free book downloads and snippets of text. But this year, at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual convention that ended on June 3, the promoters of technology were everywhere.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, talked about the possibility of giving away online his next book — which he fittingly intends to title Free — to readers who were willing to read it with advertisements interspersed throughout its pages. (He still intends to sell the book traditionally to readers who’d rather get their text without the ads).
Google and Microsoft both had large presences at the expo at the Jacob K Javits Convention Centre in New York, where about 35,000 publishers, booksellers, authors, agents and librarians attended the four-day carnival of promotion for the all-important fall lineup of titles. A panel sponsored by MySpace.com, the social networking site, drew a standing-room-only crowd, as did another discussion on the influence of literary blogs. Vendors offering to digitise books proliferated.
There were also the usual flashy parties, giveaways and autograph signings at the convention, which is not open to the public. But in what has become another rite of the BookExpo in recent years, the industry continued to grapple with its evolving techno-future with a mixture of enthusiasm, anxiety and a whiff of desperation.
“I think there is going to be a lot of Sturm und Drang before we figure this out,” said Eamon Dolan, editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin.
Many of the independent booksellers, who have been buffeted by technological change for years, seemed quite philosophical about the need to move forward. Clark Kepler, president of Kepler’s Books and Magazines, an independent store in Menlo Park, California, visited a booth for a company that scans books and digitises them, a technology that, on the face of it, would seem incompatible with a physical bookstore’s mission.
“In terms of the traditional bookstore, it would not be good for us,” acknowledged Kepler, whose store closed its doors nearly two years ago because of financial problems set off in part by fierce competition from online retailers like Amazon.com. He was able to reopen shortly after when venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and other community members invested in the store. “But it is good for all of us as readers and seekers of knowledge to have that information available, so as a bookseller I need to rethink my position instead of saying, I wish the world would stand still,” he said.
Former editorial director of Random House and the creator of the Anchor Books paperback imprint, and Dane Neller, founders of OnDemandBooks.com, demonstrated their Espresso Book Machine, which can print a small paperback book on site in less than five minutes.
Chris Morrow, whose parents founded Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Centre, Vermont, three decades ago, said he would be installing one of the machines. He said he planned to print local histories and Northshire-brand titles from the public domain, like Middlemarch or Moby-Dick.
“There are lots of challenges in bricks-and-mortar book selling, and I see this as a way of expanding our business,” Morrow said.

NYT