At BookExpo America, the Future is Digital

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter! Facebook, Facebook, Facebook! The increasingly unavoidable social networking sites created the biggest digital buzz at this year's BEA. And small wonder: Word of mouth has long been the holy grail of book marketing, and now it's digitally enhanced.

"Sell my Google stock is what you're saying," joked the moderator of one of the plethora of social networking presentations.

"I'm not part of this! I don't tweet!" shouted memoirist, late-night TV host and self-described "vulgar lounge entertainer" Craig Ferguson at Saturday's book and author breakfast. Brief pause. "Although before the book is out, I'll be tweetin' every day! Tweet, tweet, tweet!"

Social networking was so hot it overshadowed not just Google but last year's buzz winner, Amazon's Kindle.

In an aisle dubbed the "New Media Zone," Bob Carlton of LibreDigital, which helps publishers manage and market digital content, used a laptop to display a word cloud for "e-book" that he created at a recent digital publishing conference. The fact that "Kindle" was the biggest word in the cloud, he said, is because people in the industry tend to think of e-books as "a technical challenge."

Wrong.

The point is, digitization creates "this incredible opportunity between readers and writers," Carlton said. We're entering a golden age in which the genius of "Gutenberg and Zuckerberg" -- the latter would be Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook -- are being combined. Friends will hand-sell books to each other online! Meanwhile, the gloomy cloud of what Carlton called "FUD," or "fear, uncertainty and doom," that has pervaded the publishing industry is starting to lift.

It's not lifting for brick-and-mortar booksellers, though.

A few yards away in the New Media Zone, Bill Reed, the co-owner of Misty Valley Books in Chester, Vt., was taking the latest Kindle for a spin. Lynne Reed, his wife and bookstore partner, stood nearby and contemplated the future.

"I think the publishing industry will have to change, but it's still a viable industry," she said. "Whereas bookselling -- nah. In 20 years, there won't be bookstores. Science fiction is coming true. You'll go into a house and you won't see any books."

Store or no store, though, Reed plans to live out her old age surrounded by the real things.

Ah, but even futurologist Mike Shatzkin doesn't predict the total demise of the physical book.

"I mean, I don't know how many billions of them we have on the planet; we're not going to suddenly burn them all," Shatzkin said. As for manufacturing new ones, well, the traditional press run may be facing extinction, but with print-on-demand technology, "pretty much as long as anybody wants a book they'll be able to have a book."

And hey, you could walk over a few aisles at the Javits Center and see the wonderfully named Espresso Book Machine spitting books out before your eyes. Here came one by Plato. Here came the CliffsNotes for Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth." Later in the convention, the machine was scheduled to spit out copies of "Book: The Sequel," a slim volume that the Perseus Book Group was creating and publishing in 48 hours -- in just about every format you can think of -- just to show it could be done.

"Book: The Sequel" consists of creative first sentences to the imagined sequels to (mostly) classic texts. The content was crowd-sourced, meaning anyone could submit a sentence, and whittled down to 240 sentences as the conference began.

At the Perseus booth, marketing chief Rick Joyce read a few favorites out loud, including one from an adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities" in the style of that great Yankee wordsmith, Yogi Berra.

"It was 50 percent the best of times, 50 percent the worst of times, and 50 percent regular times," Joyce read -- a line that might serve as an optimist's view of book publishing today.