BookExpo: cover to cover

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Visions of publishing's future — whimsical visions, nightmare visions — loomed over BookExpo America (BEA), the book industry's vast annual get-together here last weekend. And John Updike, the country's grand old man of letters, wasn't happy with that future.

At an authors' breakfast on Saturday morning, which also featured an eloquent Barack Obama and a wacky Amy Sedaris, Updike took Kevin Kelly to task for his recent New York Times Sunday magazine article, "Scan This Book!"

In the article, Kelly enthused about the possibilities of a literary techno-utopia where the complete texts of all books would be available online, liberated from any copyright constraints.

"Once digitized," Kelly wrote, "books can be unraveled into single pages or reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves."

Kelly was clearly excited about this "text-as-playlist" possibility, and he seemed unworried by how authors, deprived of income from their no-longer-copyrighted books, will keep from starving.

"As I read it," Updike said, "this is a pretty grisly scenario." He counted himself as one of the "surly hermits refusing to come out and play in the digital sunshine."

Google already has the technology for this future up and running. Two representatives from the search-engine giant trundled up and down the corridors of the Washington Convention Center, displaying their wares on an imitation ice-cream cart topped by a colorful umbrella.

It was an impressive display — I was able to find Henry James' 1903 novel "The Ambassadors" in its famous New York Edition in about 30 seconds. Google, admittedly, had the title as "The Ambassador" (singular), but for someone who can't afford the New York Edition (average price: $5,500), it was fun just seeing its small shapely pages and stately font on a laptop screen. (Note: titles have to be in public domain to be available on Google, which means there's nothing much from after 1920.)

On more of a Rube Goldberg note, Man Booker Prize-winner Margaret Atwood ("The Blind Assassin") enthusiastically displayed her "Long Pen{trade}," described in its presskit as a "robotic-armed, long-distance autographing device."

It allowed her, while downstairs at the Doubleday booth, to scrawl her signature on a bit pad with a magnetic pen. The signature then made its digital way up three floors to a robotic pen which was lowered onto a carefully placed open book in the Convention Center's cybercafé.

There was, via a video monitor, the usual author and reader exchange as Atwood wrote out personalized inscriptions ("Are we spelling Susan in any radical way?"). The pen, she said, was her idea: "But I don't know how it works." She was pleased to point out that her handwriting was as messy in its cyberversion as in real life.

Fewer books published

Closer to Earth, senior analyst/editor Michael Norris from Simba Information (a subdivision of Bowker, publisher of "Books in Print") gave an overview of activity in the publishing industry last year. The total number of titles published dropped from 190,000 in 2004 to 172,000 in 2005 — a drop that probably reflects the fact that even though the number of titles hit a peak in 2004, the revenue from all those books dropped. Income growth is stagnant or in single digits.

"The only thing that's keeping the publishing industry growing is a slight increase in population," Norris said. The huge rise in secondhand book sales (4 million titles are available on eBay at any given moment, Norris pointed out) may be contributing to the stagnation, along with competition from other media.

Publishers are reacting to the situation by pushing authors as "brands." In children's books, for instance, there's a trend toward pressuring authors to put out series rather than introducing fresh characters and settings in each new book.

Using unusual, nonbookstore venues is proving a successful marketing ploy too. Two examples: selling Michael Ward's children's book "Mike and the Bike" in bicycle shops, and printing gardening manuals on waterproof paper so they can be sold in gardening shops exposed to the elements.

The "best prospects" for the near future, Norris said, were children's books, cookbooks, Hispanic/Spanish language books, graphic novels, mysteries, "chicklit" (whether romance or erotica) and books on politics and current events.

Books about computers, trade reference books, travel books and, surprisingly, traditional mass-market historical romance (ye olde drugstore paperback) are having a tougher time of it. The Internet has had a particularly big effect on where people go to find reference and travel information.

That's not to say that book publishing is dwindling away to nothing. A billboard posted by the Book TV C-SPAN 2 bus gave a helpful overview of book activities in the U.S. in 2005: 2.3 billion books sold, $25 billion in earnings, 25,000 bookstores in the U.S., 118,000 libraries.

A fall-season preview

And in the venues where most readers will see it — bookstores, whether physical or digital — the 2006 fall season looks downright daunting in its profusion of promising titles.

The shelves will be crowded with new fiction by Atwood, her fellow Canadian Alice Munro, recent prizewinners Edward P. Jones ("The Known World"), Charles Frazier ("Cold Mountain"), Alice McDermott ("Charming Billy"), Cormac McCarthy ("All the Pretty Horses"), along with new titles by William Boyd, John le Carré, John Grisham, Kate Atkinson, Richard Ford, Ward Just and too many others to name here. There are memoirs coming out from Gore Vidal, Jonathan Franzen and Italian Nobel laureate Dario Fo.

Seattle-area authors with new books out range from literary fiction writer Laura Kalpakian to mystery author Robert Dugoni to fantasy author Terry Brooks, with one newcomer, Ryan Boudinot, bringing out a promising-sounding debut collection of stories. Its title: "The Littlest Hitler."

There are niche cultural histories coming up on the uses of wood, birth practices and numerous other topics, plus a host of books on the Hurricane Katrina mess and the usual abundance of titles on what's wrong with the Far Right, the Far Left and various points in between.

On the history front, Hampton Sides will get under the skin of Kit Carson and his role in the wars between the U.S. and the Navajo Nation in the 1840s, in "Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West."

At a Doubleday lunch, Sides noted that Carson, the subject of pulp novels known as "blood-and-thunders," never gave publishers the right to use his name, never earned a penny from them and wasn't even able to read them — because he was illiterate.

The classics will be in good shape, thanks in part to Everyman Library's celebration of its 100th anniversary. The main event will be the publication of all of Joan Didion's nonfiction, except for her prize-winning "The Year of Magical Thinking," in one very thick volume.

Biographies of two very different cartoonists are coming our way: Linda H. Davis' "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life," about the legendary New Yorker contributor who specialized in ghoul humor, and Neal Gabler's "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination."

At the Knopf dinner at the Corcoran Gallery Friday night, Gabler discussed his Disney biography, then chatted about the research he did for his earlier biography of Walter Winchell. Winchell, it turned out, married his second wife without quite divorcing his first. A cheery, energetic Gabler regaled his listeners with descriptions of the detective work he had to do to track down any information on Wife No. 1.

At the same dinner I sat next to National Book Award nominee Mary Gaitskill ("Veronica"), and we puzzled over the stranglehold that "theory" has on college campuses. Gaitskill admitted she might have some "ideas" about fiction which could, with effort, be shaped into "theory." But what did that have to do with the pleasures and transgressions of literature? We dropped "theory" and moved on to discussing our favorite books by Jean Rhys ("Good Morning, Midnight") and Nicholson Baker (his controversial "The Fermata").

Speaking of controversy, the first afternoon of BEA was full of it when a panel discussed The New York Times Book Review's survey determining the best American novel of the last 25 years. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" won — but panelists Thomas Mallon and Cynthia Ozick weren't too pleased about it. Mallon felt Morrison had written better books; Ozick felt that "Beloved" was of historical and political interest, but fell short on the literary side.

The list, frankly, read as though novelists and critics alike had been reading in lockstep along a designated rut. Where were Steven Millhauser, Nicholson Baker, Annie Proulx, T.R. Pearson, Eric Kraft or any number of other wonderful, utterly original writers who have emerged since 1980? Even Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, seemed surprised by the results of the survey, which was sent out to 200 literary folks, a third of whom declined to participate in such an impossible task.

"Who knew," he asked, "that these baby-boomer judges were so respectful of writers born in the 1930s?"

One can only wonder whether Generations X, Y and Z will be so "respectful" of their baby-boomer elders when it comes time to select the best American novel published between 2005 and 2030.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com