The declining state of traditional book publishing could be read very clearly at the recent Book Expo 2009 tradeshow in New York. If anything, the show exposed how an elite industry is having trouble coming to terms with an information-based culture, full of self-publishers with digital devices that know no barriers to entry.
The annual Book Expo is where publishers typically come out in force to tout new titles and cozy up to customers, including the nation’s librarians. But since the last Expo in New York in 2007, the number of attendees this year dropped by 11 percent to about 12,000, not counting exhibitors.
A few telling nuggets from this year’s event:
-Major publishing houses, such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, cut so far back on floor space that they held meetings in windowless basement rooms.
-The Associated Press described this year’s Expo as “a low-budget, low-celebrity convention, with fewer parties and fewer advanced copies of books than in the past, and a sense that the best way to meet expectations was to lower them.”
-Instead of continuing as a three-day weekend show, next year’s Expo is likely to be scaled down, maybe held mid-week over two days, and maybe open to the public. In detailing the despair evident at this year’s Expo, New York Magazine’s Boris Kachka suggested that opening next year’s event to the public would turn the Expo into “a nerdier Auto Show or a less nerdy Comic-Con.”
(Never mind that comic-book publishers - large, small and independent - have taken advantage of the interactivity to showcase new titles and products while allowing fans to meet the industry’s top artists, writers and creators.)
In fairness, Expo organizers did try different strategies this year, such as promoting the new, iPod-inspired e-reader, Cool-Er, and handing out 1,000 copies of Joshua Ferris’ second novel, “The Unnamed.”
But writing in their blogs, even exhibitors at the show questioned its future.
Clearly, digitals formats have turned traditional publishing on its ear - in effect toppling the Ivory Tower where publishers once lived. Now it’s as if the industry is becoming unmasked.
We always knew it was smug. But we could at least hope for a level of respect, or even a desire to understand the real customer, which is the everyday reader.
What would happen if the public were invited in, say to stand in line for free copies of Ferris’ novel?
Publishers would come face to face with the customers they are trying to know better. They might also learn a few things about what average readers think, what they want and how they intend to consume books in the future.
There is an old saying in business, something along the lines that if you don’t eat your lunch, someone else will eat it for you.
The threat to publishers is not whether the public will come to next year’s convention. The threat is that the tables will turn, and elitism will take such a turn that the book-buying public will one day say to publishers, “Let them eat cake.”
ABOUT THE WRITER
Diane Evans is a former Knight Ridder columnist and is now president of DelMio.com, a new interactive online magazine on books for writers and readers.
