There is no better illustration of the dichotomy of BEA than the line of people anxious to see The Shat versus the line of people anxious to Leonard Nimoy. In The Shat line, folks were giddy and silly, the Nimoy folks were more relaxed, eager, but not OMG eager. Meanwhile, the Bugliosi line crossed The Shat line, and you could almost see the Bugliosi folks look down their noses at The Shatroids. Too bad. I wanted to stand in both lines, and in the Ernest Borgnine line as well. Not for the books so much as for the chance to shake their hands. In the end, I settled on Bugliosi because the line was shorter and I had to be somewhere.

By the way, What Happened was, in fact, in evidence in the Perseus area. No free copies and no McClellan, of course. But if you wanted to pick it up and glance through it, there is was.

My own small publisher sees an uncertain but not dire future. The conventional wisdom is the genre fiction is at least somewhat recession-proof, but no one knows if that will hold up this time around. My publisher, however, says that last year was better than the previous, and this one is looking better still. The big players, with their models of only marketing books that will sell anyway and ignoring their midlists, seem to be suffering more. Maybe if they spent less money on thirty-foot James Patterson and Ted Turner banners and more on their lesser known authors they'd do better. But don't try to tell them that. The sky may be falling, but heaven forbid they try something different.

The problem with the publishing industry is that there are more titles being published than ever before, and there are fewer book readers (per capita) than ever before. So the big published are all chasing after the elusive 10 or so titles a year that sell hundreds of thousands of copies... The Book Expo (assuming it's similar to the one in DC a few years back) reflects this. Publishers are looking for the next big hit... literature is just an afterthought.

but I think it is evolving nicely ...

I know that in addition to reading the Sunday New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, I am often informed of "worthwhile" titles advertised and/or reviewed on various sites including this one ... TruthDig and book events at the TPM cafe and the like ... and Amazon has been -- TRULY -- invaluable at recommending authors and titles I might well have missed entirely. (Being committed to recycling, I buy virtually everything used, either locally or through Alibris, though maybe once a year there's a "can't wait" book)

I grew up in THE READING-EST FAMILY -- both my parents literally read (and synopsized, etc.) properties for television and the movies -- and trips to bookstores to browse for hours were a large part of my childhood and adolescence.

I haven't seen much marketing for Kindle outside of Amazon but I think it may ultimately be a godsend ... rather like music downloads, after that bumpy patch. In my fifties now, looking forward to retirement in a decade or so, when I can read more, I can see how the cut-rate prices and adjustable (BIG PRINT) screen of the kindle could better fit into my budget. I've also been surprised to find myself with many bookcases full of books I doubt I will ever want to read again ... a few sheves of sentimental touchstone volumes dating back to childhood, but freedom from the responsibility to properly care for and dispose of books seems mighty attractive. I loathe the trips down memory lane and the indecisiveness I feel as I sort books to be donated ... to the thrift store, to the charity rummage sale, to the library book sale, to the used book store for credit ...

I will never be an early adopter, but I suspect that much of future of publishing will be on-line... my local independent bookstore just makes me sad these days -- books are so expensive and inventory has shrunk so -- It's a beautiful old building but it also has terrible prices and awful parking ... My local Barnes and Noble has great parking, much better inventory, and is pretty much soul-less as far as I've ever experienced ... So much JUNK much of which then turns up a year or two later at the thrift store....

Although I read almost no fiction these days (2-3 books per year) and haven't for decades, curiosity about the world is what keeps me reading and buying books... how-to, history, archeology, politics, sociology ... so much interesting stuff to know more about.

I sometimes wonder if the "reading crisis" is a crisis of curiosity ... though god knows "creativity" seems have fallen into the same ditch.

Ditto to susan_sunflower. I read about eighty books last year (mostly as research for writing one of my own), but only two or three of them were fiction. My library of approximately 500 books is easily 95-99% non-fiction, and if you click on Amazon's mixed list of bestsellers, no fiction work pops up before seventh or so place in the top ten. It may be not that the entire industry is suffering, but that the high-profile world of fiction novelists is suffering and skewing the perception of the whole industry.

Tell me more about Anathem!